RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:
The audience that wants games of very simple complexity, that are easy to pick and play ... are property of Apple and Android now. How that came to be is pretty much not even worth debating because what's done is done and nothing can change it now. Even Miyamoto acknowledges in their most recent Q&A that smartphones are hurting their business.
People may not be buying a Wii U, but the 3DS is still selling reasonably well (at 30+ million it's the largest selling game platform thus far) ... but even there games like Brian Training and Nintendogs are gaining no traction and while Tomodachi Collection is a modest success it's no where near the level of success of previous Touch Generation type titles. The audience has moved on.
It's no different from the death of the "point and click camera". Those were everywhere 10 years ago, nightclubs, vacationers, teenagers ... if you wanted to take photos you had to have one of those cameras. Nowadays it's very rare than anyone buys one of those. Everyone just uses their smartphone for taking "point and click" photos as those do a good enough job for most people. And then you have sales of high end DSLR cameras for enthusiasts and budding enthusiasts that want better quality photos, and says of DSLRs are booming actually. So you have a high end market and the cell phone market, but the "middle market" which was the old point and click has become extinct.
Remind you of any other industry ... ?
Or MP3 players ... no one buys an MP3 player anymore, because why buy that when your cell phone can play MP3s too and do a hundred other things? Even the iPod touch doesn't sell that great anymore, people have that functionality covered through their iPhone/Android phone nowadays.
There is no value proposition to someone who only wants to play games about as complex as Wii Sports or Nintendogs or Brain Training to have to spend $150-$300 on a seperate piece of hardware just to play that when their cell phone does that already, at cheaper software prices to boot.
Just like the MP3 player and the point and click camera, there's no value proposition there whatsoever.
Microsoft and Sony really just took what Nintendo was doing and adapted it to the teenager market (which Sega actually laid the foundation for). Nothing more, nothing less, the Playstation 4 is jut the natural evolution of the Super Nintendo and NES. It's time to get over the "console war" bullsh*t and recoginize the industry at large is at much greater threat than those petty pissing matches. Even nowadays the corporate bickering has pretty much subsided, MS' Harrison acknowledges that Nintendo has the best developers in the business, Sony's Yoshida is very complimentary of Nintendo and even shares a lot of the same philosophies. If these guys can look past it, fans need to as well.
|
Your point about cameras and music players is moot, because video games have the unique trait that not all content plays on all machines. I don't put much stock in what Miyamoto says, because it's clear that he wants to live in a world where he only makes the games that he wants.
You didn't answer my question about hardcore gamers.
|
It's not a moot point because the casual audience doesn't really care that much about any specific titles, they just want enough selection/variety for them to have fun. They are not fussy like "hardcore" gamers who will freak out not only if they don't get just the right, exact lineup of games they want, but freak out over details like how cell shaded Zelda is or whether Raiden or Snake is the main character in the 50th Metal Gear game. They just want something "fun" for the 10 minutes of spare time they may have on any given day to play a game inbetween Instagraming, Twittering, Facebooking, sexting (lol), and the billion other things they can do on their phone to pass time.
Just because you kissed a girl at a nightclub, doesn't mean she pledged her undying love to you or even wants to date you. That's all Nintendo got with the Wii and casuals ... a hook up, maybe a one night stand at best, but they weren't married to Nintendo, and they never wanted to be married. The casual audience is the hot, vapid girl at the bar, she doesn't care if one guy walks because another three guys are waiting to hit on her. And Nintendo was never "boyfriend" material for her, just a fun distraction for a while.
Sorry I lost track about the hardcore gamer bit? Nintendo actually always has been a 'hardcore' gaming company to be honest. Even the original Donkey Kong is a frustratingly difficult game, Nintendo's always been a hardcore game company, they just opted to wrap their games in a faux Disney-style packaging with warm colors and friendly characters (most of the time).
In the 90s at the height of the SNES-Genesis war for example Hiroshi Yamauchi so incensed that Arakawa had allowed Sega to paint Nintendo as a company for "kids only" that he threatened to fire him (his own son in law, lol! hugely taboo in Japanese business culture) unless he shaped up in a public interview. It was after that time that Nintendo greenlit projects like Killer Instinct, uncensored Mortal Kombat 2, and launched the "Play It Loud" ad campaign to directly respond to Sega.
