Ail said: You have selective memory. The year of the crash was the year the following games were released : - Mario Bros ( excuse the chuckle when I see a Wii Fan calling the first Mario console game shovelware :P) - Pole Position - Mrs PacMan. - Battlezone. Hardly only shovelware... PS : It's foolish to believe GTA4 only came out because of Carnival Games. As the recent EA bid for TakeTwo showed as well as the 50 million$ loan from Microsoft, plenty of companies are interested in the success of the game and would have done what needed to be done so that the game came out anyway...

 You are kidding me with that list right?  Selective memory huh?

Only two of those games came out in 83.  Mario Bros and Battlezone.

Ms. Pac-Man came out in 1981.

Pole Position came out in 1982. 

Ail, your politically correct post is nothing but the typically "Nintendo is destroying gaming" argument just because the HD consoles failed.

And comparing this situation with the videogame crash of 1983 just proves my point. You read an article on the net and make àbusrds parallels.

You're nothing but a hardcore gamer. They think that the world revolves around them and in the end, the rest of the world doesn't cares.

Several factors caused the crash in the 1980s, and the "flood of bad games" did not cause the crash simply because the games were bad ...

To put this in a modern perspective, imagine that there were no advertisements, gaming magazines, game websites, or pretty much any (easy) way to get information on what games were good and what games were bad. Now, on the day Grand Theft Auto 4 was released the following games were released:

Grand Theft Vehicle
GTA 4
Grand Larceny Auto
Auto Theft 4
Super Theft Auto
Super Theft Auto

All of the boxes look (pretty much) identical, and all you were told by your friend was the title "Grand Theft Auto 4" which you're not sure if that is correct.

If Nintendo innovating is wrong, I don't wanna be- *SHUTUP*

Ail said: greenmedic88 said: misterd said: I really have to wonder what people this is the actual percentage of "WiiFitties" among Wii owners. What's the current attach rate in Japan? I don't feel like crunching the numbers although it should be interesting to see how they compare with the US numbers. Until we have some figures to work with, not too much point in second guessing. Amazon has stopped taking pre-sell orders currently (listed as "sold out"), if that's any indicator.  I ordered two copies for myself and I'm not even singing in the Nintendo choir. I do hope there will be future games from Nintendo that use the balance board which will give us foot/hand controlled games beyond DDR Wii edition. If not, it was an interesting idea at least. Maybe more Wii Yoga would help me feel better about it.   VGChartz lists the Japan Wii attach rate at 3.39 compared to 6.02 in the US and 4.08 in Other... The Japanese market is really slowly dying...

What i find funny, is people noticing the same things as Nintendo did, the same things that caused Wii to be born. And the bolded part is one of them. The japanese market is/was in decline. Even if Wii didn't exist, the market would be dying. What Wii is doing, is blow some new steam to otherwise declining market. Sure you can blame Wii Fit as much as you want, but the reality is, that without Wii Fit and the likes, you actually would see the crash. And about the NA videogame crash, others have pointed out why things are different this time. Anyway, even if they wouldn't, the crash would have been started on PS2, because of its large amount of shovelware and the delay before the effect is noticeable. One thing to notice about the crash, is that the high profile games that time, were shovelware. As HS said, there wasn't media to tell the gamer what game is shovelware and what isn't. Birth of Nintendo Power and the likes, was "damage control" which would promote the quality games and to tell you what games suck.

Very true.

The '83 crash was due in part to the low quality but high profile games like the 2600 Pac-Man port and 2600 E.T. (having owned and played both, I can attest to their abysmal quality). The decision by Atari to release both of those games as they were, was largely motivated by greed and arrogance. Rushed to make holiday sales and vastly overproduced under the assumption that even those who didn't own a 2600 would buy one to play these high profile games.

There was also an overabundance of game consoles at the time as well, splitting the market up despite Atari's dominance with the 2600.

Personally, I don't think that a glut of mediocre or ever poor games will cause a repeat of '83. You may end up alienating casual players new to the industry who make the unfortunate mistake of buying too many of these games that don't deserve their entertainment dollars, but the core audience will always know better. There is too much information out there to continually sneak poor quality products to the public and expect them to sell.

Until major publishers start releasing high budget, high profile games that completely fail to meet critical and commercial success, the industry will continue to do just fine.

My only reservation is the rate at which the industry is expanding; it can't continue like this indefinitely unless you believe that eventually video games will surpass movies and TV as the primary form of mass consumer AV entertainment.

As for Japan... The Wii really is the only thing keeping that market alive as anything other than a niche form of entertainment. It seems the core gamer in Japan is becoming an endangered species.