| Bodhesatva said: Okay, I can agree with this more then. Absolutely, the guys making high end graphics engines may leave the Japanese market. I do expect loads of clever and intelligent people to make games for these systems, but the 10 million+ costs associated with high end graphical development may be a thing of the past there. Personally, that wouldn't bother me at all, as my favorite games are Half Life mods, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft, which are currently (along with Unreal Tournament) the premier professional gaming venues in the world. The former two are ten years old, and the latter one is three years old, and was already graphically outdated the day it was released. It's really a pretty small niche that you're targeting here, Rocket. Clearly, casuals don't care much about super-advanced graphical engines. And I can tell you from experience -- and from the clear evidence -- that super hardcore, professional gamers don't care very much, either. It's those in between that seems to want graphical progression so badly. |
Clever and intelligent people will keep making games for the Japanese, that much is certain. But IMO, those games will have a tighter budget than they did half a decade ago because they might not sell anywhere else. I'm not knocking the quality of the games, I'm questioning how publishers are going to react to these trends we're seeing.
And I realize that professional gamers aren't all about the visual bells and whistles, I spent much of 1999-2003 playing PC competitely and I played WoW for over a year. It takes too much time to build up a community large enough to run competitions to have a graphically modern game be so popular. But that doesn't mean that those games weren't technically outstanding when they released (with the exception being WoW and that's due to the developmental schedule of an MMO, not its team's technical ability). Half-Life 1/2, SC, UT, etc. were all state-of-the-art when they released.
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