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Forums - Gaming - Atari 2600 as a lesson to game designers ... and a foreshadowing of the Wii

Ail on 07 April 2009
RolStoppable said:
Ail said:
RolStoppable said:

The majority of Wii owners owned a console before. At the very most 20 % of Wii owners didn't own a console before. This logically means that a lot of PS2 owners now have a Wii and that number is increasing. Most of Nintendo's growth this generation (so far) comes at the expense of Sony which isn't surprising since the PS2 had the biggest marketshare by far, so by default most people who owned a console before the Wii, were PS2 owners.

The NES beat the competition (home computers of that era) due to accessible games and ease of use. The Wii is doing much the same this generation.

Where did you get those stats from ?

That does not seem to match Blue Ocean or the people that you usually see purchasing Wiis...( I might give you the households purchasing Wii used to have another console in the last 20 years , but 80% of Wii owners having a console last gen I somehow don't believe it...).

Wii Fit has sold to over 20% of the Wii user base for example, do you really believe most of the people purchasing Wii Fit had a console last gen ?

 

PS : I'm not the one claiming Nintendo is expanding the market like crazy, they are, and you seem to say no they are not and the majority of Wii owners had a console last gen ( 80%to quote you)

IIRC at E3 2007 Nintendo themselves said that only about 10 % of Wii owners didn't own a console before. This percentage most likely has increased since then, but still isn't all that significant. These console ownerships likely include lapsed gamers who skipped a generation or two though.

Regarding Wii Fit, a lot of core gamers (i.e. people who played games last generation) have purchased it and another factor is that the usage of a Wii isn't restricted to a single person in a household, thus making it possible that the owner of the Wii is a core gamer, but the owner of Wii Fit isn't. Or a husband who is a longtime gamer had to purchase Wii Fit for his wife for example. The point is that by far not every Wii Fit was sold to someone who never owned a console before, therefore the sales of Wii Fit can't be used to measure the amount of new gamers because there's too much overlap.

Most of the time Nintendo talks about market expansion, they are talking just about their growing revenue figures and rarely provide actual figures for how many people are new to gaming. Probably to leave Sony in the wrong security that the pool of PS2 owners who hasn't bought a current gen console yet, remains for the most part untouched. The Wii definitely is getting new people on board, but it's not as significant as it is sometimes made out to be.

So what you're saying is that Blue Ocean is just a marketing thingy and in practice it's same ole same ole lol ?

AT E3 2007 Wii Fit wasn't released yet and the number of Wii sold was quite small so what credit can we give to numbers you quote dating from back there were less than 10 million of Wii on the market ?( numbers which don't refer ownership of a console in the previous gen but ownership of a console at any point). And of course the people that bought a Wii the first 6 months were more hardcore, heck those guys had to go through waiting list and stuff..

Besides if you compare this gen to last a lot more consoles have been sold at the same point in the gen. This would mean if the market didn't grow that people that bought a console last gen bought one a lot more earlier this gen while consoles are more expensives and a very significant number of people at that, I doubt it...

So far roughly 86 million consoles have been sold, at about the same point last gen there were about 55-60 million consoles sold....

Sorry but that does not add up at all..

That or if Wii hasn't expanded the market significantly, the PS3 and the 360 have and I don't think anyone would believe that ( and to account for the difference pretty much every PS360 owners would have to be new to consoles lol).

 

 

 



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !

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Mr Khan on 07 April 2009

Really not what i expected when i clicked on the title, given the oft-used analogy of how Wii will engineer a second crash like the 2600 did

 

It was actually quite inciteful. Nice.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

bardicverse on 07 April 2009

As one of the "older" guys here, I'll explain from my own experience, as I've been around since the 2600

- 2600 One joystick, one button. Easy to pickup for anyone in the family (My mom was a pro at Centipede and Breakout)

- NES - No joystick, crosspad and 2 buttons. Only my dad would play with me here and there, the rest of the family not so much

SNES - Crosspad and 6 buttons. I was the only one in the family who played it

PS1 - Looked at the button layout, triangles, squares, circles, etc. Too much to absorb in a context that didn't make sense. ABXY made a lot more sense than a bunch of shapes, almost no one played in my family more than once.

N64 - Analog stick back, trigger underneath, lots of buttons. Only I played in the family.

PS2 - Sony still was going with the shapes buttons, still not working out so well.

GC - Comfy controller, but still too much going on for the older Atari players in the family to grasp well.

XB - Similar situation to the GC

XB360 - Similar to the GC/XB

PS3 - Sony still using the alien coding of shapes for buttons

Wii - 2 main buttons conveniently located on the controller, motion sensing, point and click. Easy enough for the older gamers to comprehend and get into. Nunchuck in separate hand for movement. Family started playing games again.

The basic moral of the story here is that its not the game that makes the big difference, its the ease of the controls and the short learning curve to get into the game. Sure, longer single player stories like Zelda and Metroid might not be enjoyed together with the family, but any multiplayer game can be enjoyed together, casual or "core" alike.



Ascended_Saiyan3 on 07 April 2009
burgerstein said:
^ Can I have some of whatever you're smoking?

Sure!  It's calling accuracy.  I have plenty, so take all you can stand.  THEN, take some more.

 



BTFeather55 on 07 April 2009

Yeah, I can see similarities between the 2600 and the Wii (and maybe the NES too). Atari 2600 packaged Video Olympics (virtually a pong collection, the Wii Sports of its time ) and Combat with the VCS. However, none of those were really my favorite systems of all time because I've always done almost everything I've ever done by myself.

I've really only liked the consoles that provided the best single-player experiences and never really enjoyed communal type games.

So these types of machines bother me because they could make great single player games into the types of games that developers don't often bother with (much as happened to the Golden Age of PC  Adventure Games) instead of the dominant types of games they've been in the SNES, PS1, and PS2 days.

 



Heavens to Murgatoids.

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Ail on 08 April 2009
RolStoppable said:
Ail said:
RolStoppable said:

IIRC at E3 2007 Nintendo themselves said that only about 10 % of Wii owners didn't own a console before. This percentage most likely has increased since then, but still isn't all that significant. These console ownerships likely include lapsed gamers who skipped a generation or two though.

Regarding Wii Fit, a lot of core gamers (i.e. people who played games last generation) have purchased it and another factor is that the usage of a Wii isn't restricted to a single person in a household, thus making it possible that the owner of the Wii is a core gamer, but the owner of Wii Fit isn't. Or a husband who is a longtime gamer had to purchase Wii Fit for his wife for example. The point is that by far not every Wii Fit was sold to someone who never owned a console before, therefore the sales of Wii Fit can't be used to measure the amount of new gamers because there's too much overlap.

Most of the time Nintendo talks about market expansion, they are talking just about their growing revenue figures and rarely provide actual figures for how many people are new to gaming. Probably to leave Sony in the wrong security that the pool of PS2 owners who hasn't bought a current gen console yet, remains for the most part untouched. The Wii definitely is getting new people on board, but it's not as significant as it is sometimes made out to be.

So what you're saying is that Blue Ocean is just a marketing thingy and in practice it's same ole same ole lol ?

AT E3 2007 Wii Fit wasn't released yet and the number of Wii sold was quite small so what credit can we give to numbers you quote dating from back there were less than 10 million of Wii on the market ?( numbers which don't refer ownership of a console in the previous gen but ownership of a console at any point). And of course the people that bought a Wii the first 6 months were more hardcore, heck those guys had to go through waiting list and stuff..

Besides if you compare this gen to last a lot more consoles have been sold at the same point in the gen. This would mean if the market didn't grow that people that bought a console last gen bought one a lot more earlier this gen while consoles are more expensives and a very significant number of people at that, I doubt it...

So far roughly 86 million consoles have been sold, at about the same point last gen there were about 55-60 million consoles sold....

Sorry but that does not add up at all..

That or if Wii hasn't expanded the market significantly, the PS3 and the 360 have and I don't think anyone would believe that ( and to account for the difference pretty much every PS360 owners would have to be new to consoles lol).

No, that's not what I am saying. Blue Ocean is real and bringing new and lapsed gamers into the market, but my point is that of the growth Nintendo had with Wii over the Gamecube, most of it so far comes at the expense of Sony, because the Wii is gobbling up the former PS2 userbase which is also upgrading faster in general than people did in previous generations.

 

And how you reconcile your argumentation with the latest Nielsen survey about console useage which shows that clearly Wii users have a different behavior with their console than PS2 users did ?

If they were mostly the same you would expect a similar behavior...



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !

masschamber on 08 April 2009
Ail said:
That's not an analogy I would actually try to make seeing how the success of the Atari2600 heralded the video game crash of the 80s.....

 

 

the 2600 didn't herald the crash, the problem was the next generation of consoles.  The 2600 was 6 years old when the industry crashed, and the crash occured on the backs of things like the colecovision and atari 5200,

the 2600 and intellivision actually managed to weather the crash and live on until the late 80's/ early 90's

anyway well though out write up there, plus racing the beam, mercy is that true about programming the 2600 you basically have to write your program to feed the next pixel into the TIA just as the television reaches it



I HAVE A DOUBLE DRAGON CAB IN MY KITCHEN!!!!!!

NOW A PUNISHER CAB!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ail on 08 April 2009
masschamber said:
Ail said:
That's not an analogy I would actually try to make seeing how the success of the Atari2600 heralded the video game crash of the 80s.....

 

 

the 2600 didn't herald the crash, the problem was the next generation of consoles.  The 2600 was 6 years old when the industry crashed, and the crash occured on the backs of things like the colecovision and atari 5200,

the 2600 and intellivision actually managed to weather the crash and live on until the late 80's/ early 90's

anyway well though out write up there, plus racing the beam, mercy is that true about programming the 2600 you basically have to write your program to feed the next pixel into the TIA just as the television reaches it

I thought the crash really started the holydays ET was released for the 2600....

 



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !

amp316 on 09 April 2009

What is this word "fun" that Nolan Busnell speaks of? Is this the same thing that those Nintendo people talk about? What is it?

I am a robot with no feelings and only go by the seeing is believing approach. I don't do emotions.



Proud member of the SONIC SUPPORT SQUAD

Tag "Sorry man. Someone pissed in my Wheaties."

"There are like ten games a year that sell over a million units."  High Voltage CEO -  Eric Nofsinger

BTFeather55 on 09 April 2009
Ail said:
masschamber said:
Ail said:
That's not an analogy I would actually try to make seeing how the success of the Atari2600 heralded the video game crash of the 80s.....

 

 

the 2600 didn't herald the crash, the problem was the next generation of consoles.  The 2600 was 6 years old when the industry crashed, and the crash occured on the backs of things like the colecovision and atari 5200,

the 2600 and intellivision actually managed to weather the crash and live on until the late 80's/ early 90's

anyway well though out write up there, plus racing the beam, mercy is that true about programming the 2600 you basically have to write your program to feed the next pixel into the TIA just as the television reaches it

I thought the crash really started the holydays ET was released for the 2600....

 

 

 I think so too, strangely enough I think that was the holiday season when I received the most ever games for Christmas from my parents and grandparents.  I remember getting ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, multiple games from Imagic and for my Coleco, and it seems like by the next Summer you couldn't find games in stores.



Heavens to Murgatoids.