yushire said:
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The irony with this direction of the conversation, is that the Crash of '83 happened for the exact opposite reasons. The crash wasn't caused by monopolizing the industry, it was caused by flooding the industry. There were too many consoles, too many similar choices, and too little control. There was no licensing aside from rare exceptions such as ET and Pac-Man being Atari2600 exclusives. Companies would deliberately make crap software for competing platforms. That's like if Sony put Resistance: Fall of Man on the Xbox360 in a massively ruined form.
When Nintendo and Sony each, respectively, held massive dominant market share, there were no problems in the way of risking another market crash. Pretty much everyone publishing on the NES or PS2 was able to find success, and there was still some competition. The difference is now, things were and are more strictly controlled and regulated.
Had Nintendo not brought out the Wii and DS--had they just done like the other guys and made more powerful software and unleashed it onto the public--we'd be moving headlong into a new crash for completely different reasons: Right now, gaming consoles like the Playstation and Xbox lack the necessary components to expand the gaming audience. This is bad because games cost way, way, way more to produce than they did just 5 years ago. What you have is more financial losses and fewer profits because you're selling the same kind of games to the same number of people, but the games cost way more to make. If you look over financial announcements from the 2007 fiscal year--most companies did not have a profitable year. Most, like Midway for one, made more money than the previous year, but still lost millions and millions more.
If Nintendo hadn't thrown this wrench in the gears of the industry, almost no one would be reaping big rewards--especially MS and Sony who lose money on each console they produce. You'd have more and more studios--like Atari and Acclaim--running into painful financial distress or closing their doors completely (respectively). This is one of the reasons I believe more companies are moving to Wii and DS development--not just because they offer something new, but because, when you get right down to it--they cost less to develop for, and have the highest install rates. Only some key franchises are still raking in profits, industry-wide. It's pretty well known that before GTA4, Take-Two and Rockstar were not in the best shape financially. The question remains, what will they do now that their Golden Goose is already out? Despite the relative boom of the video game inustry, most companies are still losing millions and millions of dollars each year. This console transition has been one of the hardest ever--the machines are bigger, more powerful, and more complex than ever. Game production costs are now astronomical--and to make things worse, despite the horsepower improvement, overall, the industry and gamers are still playing games the same way we have for the last two generations. Sony has yet to actually design a forward-thinking controller. Aside from the Wii and DS, the advancement was purely cosmetic.
