It says anti embrace, not embrace LOL

and bull $hit article

Maelstrom is just as prone to opinion. I like Maelstrom articles when they deal with Blue Ocean strategy. During these sessions he is typicly on the ball. The thing is UGC has nothing to do with Blue Ocean and often good UGC games tend to bring massive profits over a long term period(Half Life, LBP, Face Book, Blogs, web page articles). Maelstrom clearly doesn't like the idea UGC in general and is expressing his opinion. I would suggest ignore him if it doesn't deal with Blue Ocean.

Good UGC on a console requires all the support that communities generate on the PC. Web pages, custom upload apps.... Wii Music as listed above just lacked all of that and so failed at what it was supposed to do. Nintendo failed at communicating the people because it didn't understand UGC. UGC is about public/shared expression. by making UGC of WiiMusic difficult to share(only your WiiMusic FC) it failed. If WM however uploaded to a webpage or allowed it to be saved as a flash to an SDCard at least it could have done a better job.

In the end Maelstrom is falling into the same trap as those prone to fear change in regards to UGC.

Wii Sports Resort has way more content and offers much more to the core player than Wii Sports did though.

Doesn't that sort of disprove that theory?

Yes they bet on the wrong horse with Wii Music, but really that was a year ago almost now. Get over it already.

Do I agree with him? Eh. Look at the sales of the HD consoles compared to the Wii. Yet we still hear about how Wii is doomed, and they'll thrive. If Nintendo has really expanded the market (They must've, seeing as how both MS and Sony are now following Nintendo's lead) then the old rules of what sells in games no longer applies.

And I don't believe Nintendo has become arrogant. They've handled their success quite well I must say. Even when others have tried to knock them down with petty insults. And Nintendo has said, and I agree with, that games like Wii Music are faster to make. So it's not that they've abandoned core games, it just takes longer to complete them. While in the same time frame, three 'Wii' branded games can be released while something like Zelda could still be in development.

User communites in the past have provided reason enough to buy games, but the last ones I can really think of were in the late 1990s where content was easy enough to make that a couple of college students could produce a worthwhile map; and everyone could create a custom character model if they wanted. User created content for consoles is a different beast that it was for the PC a decade ago, and few games have had decent tools to create content or a nice way to ensure that users mostly deal with the best user generated content.

Now, I think most consumers see user generated and downloadable content in the same light ... this add on content is a nice feature, but the game has to justify a purchase with the content that is on the disc.

Lol, it was a great read though =).

it's easy to understand though; all entertainment is based on content, that's the nature of the industry.

If music was based on user-generated content, I don't think song sales would exist at this point. if you had to build your own action flick then... yea.

Basically user-gernated content is still part of the entertainment business but the thing is now the consumer is the developer, which brings in to question who are they developing for. Nintendo and the guys at Molecule seem to think people will enjoy making stuff for themselves.

I don't know I like action flicks but I'm sure I'd like anything Steven Spielberg did over any cookie cutter presentation that I could shop together.

But hey if professionals want to put themselves out of a job then go ahead. =)

User generated content is what the dsi is doing:

Flipnote studio and March of the minis. Both dsi.

"No matter what I say about user generated content, people believe that I am against editors and map generators!" SM

Flipnote studio is free, that's Malstrom's point. Why should consumers have to pay to make their own content?

Nobody is saying MODS and map/level creators shouldn't be in games.

I don't know which is worse, the fact that Malstrom is critiquing Nintendo or that he's making a complete ass of himself.
User created content is a godsend and a slew of games with mods and tracks/levels/skins what have you, have had their value and appeal greatly increase.
Its win-win, the developers only provide the tools and as a result get content added to their game without any extra cost and broaden the appeal of their title in the process.

Besides, some of the greatest additions to the greatest games have been user created, Diablo II version 1.11 patch (that was later made official because it was damn good), Counterstrike and Fall From Heaven 1 and 2 (Civilization IV) are some examples. Things such as this would have never existed without the possibility of user created content.

Maybe Malstrom is sensing that most people are tired of his drivel and aren't on their knees worshiping him anymore and that's why he says these things. But if he wants an addition to his one trick circus he could have at least made a good one imo.

The funny thing is a lot of you guys are criticising him even though you didn't really get what he was trying to say.

He is not talking about user generated content but what he calls "ANTI-content". Whenever the game doesn't entertain you by itself but relies on you to create fun he talks about "anti-content."

Wii Music had a lot of "anti-content" because people wanted to play instruments in a realistic manner. According to Malstrom (I haven't played the game myself) the game rather focused on creating your own songs / videos / whatever, though. That means you had to create the content by yourself which the consumer usually doesn't like.

Little Big Planet is probably NOT such an example: The game's only purpose is to give you tools to create levels. The game is fun because you can create the levels not because you can play them (of course playing a level can also be fun but that's not the game's focus) and thus it offers a lot of content. If the focus was "PLAY great levels!" instead of "CREATE great levels" this would be an example of anti-content.

I disagree with him on Flip Book Studio, though. The entire context of the game is to let you create things, not to watch them and thus it offers a lot of content.

In case you're still confused remember: Value depends on the amount of content related to the "purpose" or "job" of a game! If your game's job is to let you create levels than a big level editor is great, if your game's job is to lt you PLAY levels then a big level editor with nothing else just sucks.

Edit: Take "Do-it-yourself" cocktails for instance. You buy a do-it-yourself cocktail set to MIX cocktails. The value of the set comes from offering you the opportunity to mix those cocktails. If you want to DRINK a cocktail at a bar you'd be pretty angry if the barkeeper gave you some fruit juices and ice and told you "do it yourself!" but in the first context that's exactly what you want.

That means user generated content can work but only if the user sees value in actually creating the content instead of consuming it. Most people buy games to consume content and if they realise the game is only fun when they create content they feel cheated and the game loses its value. If creating content is what you are looking for you will probably feel cheated if the creation-part is bad (the whole purpose of a "create your own cocktails"-set would be gone if there were just 3 complete cocktails inside).

So what Malstrom criticises is that in his eyes Nintendo tells people "creating is fun!" and then says "well, people didn't understand it" while in reality people did understand but just didn't want to create. They rather wanted to consume. Now his fear is that Nintendo could become "arrogant", could release more "anti-content" games and continue to tell people they are just too dumb to understand (which was always a big complaint for him regarding Sony and Microsoft) and consequently lose customers. Of course that's debatable but I'm sure a lot of people didn't even read what he wrote.