DonFerrari said:
Videogames by your metrics is also niche. Not a problem to all other players. -- Sure people have thought of several things with market appeal and didn't turn out. Still I would rather trust company analysis on the money they invest than your OPINION. -- Nope that doesn't say anything. There are people that put 1M on a car over a 10k car does that point out that any other market is bad? Hobby cost is quite different justification than something a person consider a need -- The not all genre may just be lack of imagination on your part. When touchscreen phone came out people didn't see any use for it over a qwerty one. There may be implementations on other genres that will show you just couldn't see it being done. 30 years ago did you see gaming becoming what it is today? -- You were the one that brought motion gaming to the table. It just goes against your point, it took 30 years for it to bloom. The fact that no company could make it sustainable is another problem, but by your analysis of taking 30 years and still being niche (even if you sounded more on failure) would make it impossible to have a big boom, you would be wrong. And PS4 and Switch still have motion control enabled games. -- Yes I used, I had the urge to buy it. Did you use a TV to use it as a table console or the idea was to use on the go? It even had batteries. But if you want to make it a table console no problem. NES and SNES sold over 40M so less than 1 M for a table console from Nintendo was still embarrassing. Want to try again? |
Video games are not niche. They're the biggest entertainment industry on the planet and have showed steady growth for decades now. What do you call a small segment that takes up about 0.001% of that, and hasn't shown much growth at all in 30 years?
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Thank fuck you're not taking a random stranger's opinion at face value. Please, by all means, do not trust my opinion. The anaylsts at facebook get paid good money to make their estimates, and they should know what they're doing. That still doesn't mean they weren't wrong about VR. Again, they projected selling billions of dollars in headsets by 2020. So far this year they might, if they're lucky have 1/10th of that number. Do you see anything happening in the next year and a bit that is going to see Oculus's sales shoot up by 1000%? If not, then guess who you're not trusting about VR. The owners of Oculus. Oops.
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... no one considers the 1M sports car to be anything other than a niche car market, and certainly not mainstream. What a terrible example. No one needs a smart phone. The might need a phone, but they don't need to be able the play Angry Birds on the subway.
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I might be lacking imagination, but I also understand the fundamental laziness of the average gamer, and how little effort they're willing to put in to set up their living room to use some Implementations that, while neat and enhancing, just isn't so much better to be worth the effort. The fact that you expect me to "imagine the possibilities of VR" or expect me to cling on the idea that "there could be some game changing VR experience that will make playing X title so much better, you won't be able to play X title without it after you try it" just tells me that a lot of your positivity for VR comes in the form of hope.
Also, when the touchscreen phone came out, people were hesitant to switch because of the positive feedback of pushing buttons over tapping a screen. Phone makers spent millions creating clickable touchscreens and vibrating touchscreens and all kinds of other stuff to try and solve that problem, and to be frank, they're still trying to solve it. People have appeared to have gotten over it in general, but then again Blackberry started making phones with tactile keyboards again, so who knows? Maybe pure touchscreen phones will be taking a bit of a nosedive in sales until the tactile feedback issue is addressed properly.
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Motion gaming might have taken 30 years to bloom, but it took 5 to wilt back to where it came - a small niche market. The fact that no company could make it sustainable (even Nintendo) goes to show what limited appeal it truly had. The wii was novel, the Kinect was novel, but when that novelty wore off, people wanted to go back to regular controllers. Gamers appear to be a rather fickle audience. They're more than happy to try new things, but they're far more hesitant to invest in it, and even less likely to keep wanting to use it after a reasonable period of time. Do you want another example? Guitar Hero/Rock band. Care to make an argument that Guitar Hero isn't catering to a niche market in 2018? Guitar Hero 3 sold 15 million copies at $99 a pop. The latest one? 3 million. Better game, better controllers, more songs, better experience. 1/5th the sales.
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So now a handheld is any console that doesn't use a TV? That's a very interesting definition. I'd work on that one if I were you. Are you trying to make the argument that I do not think that Virtual Boy was an embarrassment for Nintendo, even though I've said that many times already in this thread?
