First day sold in japan, Folks Soul bombs hard...

[Bodhesatva]

rocketpig said:

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 The former two are ten years old, and the latter one is three years old, and was already graphically outdated the day it was released.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.

But Counter Strike wasn't. Nor was Team Fortress. Star Craft was semi-state of the art -- they left off a lot of bells and whistles so that more people would be able to play right off the bat (Blizzard never pushes graphical boundries for this precise reason). 

Regardless, this wouldn't change my point; even if they were state of the art when they were released -- and again, most weren't -- people kept playing them for 3,5,7,10 years after they no longer were, which suggests it was the gameplay that mattered in the first place, not the graphics. 

It's simple logic, really: casual gamers care about fun. That's clear, with cooking mama style games selling so well to them. Professional gamers care about skill oriented games -- it really doesn't matter much how it looks, as long as skill plays an important factor.

Otherwise, I agree with you. It... sounds like you're criticizing, but you're really not, I guess. Japan will still see a lot of great games, but I do agree it's possible that a lot less of those games will have giant, ten million dollar graphics engines. If I were to detect anything in your tone, it sounds like you think this is a bad thing, and that advancing graphics has some inherent worth; if that's true, I disagree.