Hope everyone here enjoyed their Father's Day!
Khuutra said:
*Upstream chart*
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Even if this were correct, we've already established that the style which is most responsible for the mega-hits in this category is not feasible for Zelda. Moreover, this segment is an incorrect understanding of the terminology. There is a clear distinction between an arcade-style game, and a game which incorporates arcade-style gaming. You’ll notice, for instance, that platformers and action-adventure games are on that same list, yet those two still can incorporate arcade-style gaming.
There is no contradiction in this. You’re using a chart whose purpose was to roughly illustrate the separate and distinct concept of Upstream And Downstream, and attempting to apply it to the type of values that games can have. It’s a case of a square peg meeting a round hole. Just like Flight Simulator is listed in that category but is clearly not a TV-style game (or arcade-style), Wii Sports is a non-fiction game, but one which incorporates arcade-style gaming.
Khuutra said:
67% of households notably does not translate into 67% of consumers, and America is arguably the biggest video game-consuming country in the world per capita. You can only argue that the mainstream plays games by narrowing the criteria for that statement by a huge degree; you'll note that the EU has over 3 times as many people as the States, but a roughly equal absolute number of players. Clearly, the mainstream when taken in a broader context does not play video games.
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Would it help if I showed you that 59% of Americans over the age of 2 play games then? Regarding Europe, in the top five European countries, roughly a third of people there are regular gamers. One-in-three people regularly engaging in an activity clearly makes that activity mainstream: it is comparable to the percentage of Americans that follow basketball (college AND pro); it’s more than follow golf, auto racing, or hockey. And, of course, figures in the third major gaming region, Japan, show that in 2004 (i.e. the Year Of The DS) a third of the population there also gamed regularly.* Unless the claim is made that an activity needs a majority to be “mainstream,” (thereby disqualifying basketball, auto racing, and golf) you must concede that gaming is mainstream.
Taken in the broader context, the mainstream does regularly play video games.
*Dollars to dimes that figure has since risen.
Khuutra said:
And I'll point out that reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly good logical proposition; "two pills will reduce pain" cannot logically be carried out into a certain number of pills reducing pain altogether, so your rejection of that logic does not hold. More, your proposition concerning the series's roots translating absolutely into sales only works if the roots restore absolute appeal. The point of that whole diatribe I wrote was in reference to the fact that the absolute appeal of 2D Mario has either declined or has to be viewed from a specific and narrowed perspective in order to be stagnant, much less on the rise.
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We’re approaching the heart of the matter now, but first another ancillary issue: reductio ad absurdum is only a valid logical tool when the logical extension proves that the idea is self-contradictory, i.e. proof-by-contradiction. (http://www.iep.utm.edu/reductio/) That hasn’t happened here.
The new 2D Marios’ absolute sales are higher than most of the older, better-selling Marios. Those games returned to the arcade-style gaming of the older, better-selling Marios. The absolute appeal of 2D Mario therefore must have risen: how could greater absolute sales translate into a decline in absolute appeal? That would require people to continue to purchase a title that does not appeal to them!
Since 2D Mario’s absolute appeal has demonstrably not declined, that leaves the proposition that “2D Mario . . . has to be viewed from a specific and narrowed perspective in order to be stagnant, much less on the rise.” To the best of my knowledge, Malstrom never once said that modern 2D Mario is a bigger social phenomenon than older 2D Mario, or that it even approaches the level of the older 2D Mario games.
What he has said about Mario phenomena is the following:
“Super Mario Brothers was a game that was a massive phenomenon. Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World are much better games with much better gameplay. They sold very well too. But they did not match the phenomenon as the original Super Mario Brothers.
“You could say that Mario 64 was a phenomenon, something I wouldn’t disagree with. But it certainly wasn’t on the same level of intensity and excitement as previous Mario games. Super Mario Sunshine was definitely no phenomenon. Super Mario Galaxy wasn’t really a phenomenon either. Galaxy 2? Nah.
“Mario 5 definitely was some sort of phenomenon.”
Where in these statements can one find the proposition that, in order to be a phenomenon, the new games must even begin to approach the relative appeal that the older games did? I confess that I can not. If it was there, the concession to Super Mario64 in particular would be a non-sequitir.
Malstrom has never claimed that the New Super Mario Bros. games are "a phenomenon in line with every other game in its series.” Malstrom does not claim that they are anywhere near as big a phenomena as the original 2D Marios. Malstrom does not claim that they are bigger phenomena than the original 2D Marios. In fact, he explicitly said that while New Super Mario Bros. Wii “will outsell Mario 3, I could say the phenomenon of Mario 3 was stronger (because the market was very different back then with much less population)”!
I agree that the Malstrom being attacked here is wrong, but it's a Strawmalstrom!
Khuutra said:
The topic at hand is not what direction Nintendo should take Zelda; it is whether or not Zelda as a social phenomenon is in decline in a way that Mario is not. The absolute sales of Zelda have gone up over timee: in another year or two, Twilight Princess will surpass Ocarina of Time as the best-selling game in the series, making it an at least comparable social phenomenon by the only valid metric for measuring that - in fact, it may do so sooner than I think, since VGChartz stopped tracking sales of the Cube version long ago.
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Finally, we come to Zelda.
The statement in the first sentence has been addressed above. Regarding the stance of Twilight Princess’ absolute sales, I actually have good cause to question the accuracy of this site’s figures for that title. We know that this site can overtrack games’ legs: Resident Evil 4 leaps to mind, as the PS2 and Wii versions are (or at least were) both listed as having hundreds of thousands more in sales than Capcom ever shipped, a difference amounting to nearly 20% extra sales in the PS2's case.
Regarding Twilight Princess, the Gamecube version’s sales may be accurate: Nintendo stopped making Gamecube discs years ago, so nearly all of those copies should have sold already, and what miniscule amount remains on shelves will amount to negligible sales.
The Wii version is likely far overtracked. It is currently listed as having 5.56 million copies sold to consumers. The problem is that the last time we’d heard of the game, it had only shipped 4.52 million copies worldwide. Now, this was in 2008, but when a game continues to ship in quantities worth noting, Nintendo updates their shipment figures: Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Resort, Mario Kart Wii, Wii Play, even Link’s Crossbow Training (which has FANTASTIC legs, by the way) all regularly appear on Nintendo’s shipment figures to this day, while TP hasn’t popped its head since the end of 2008. The DS side has the same trend: games which keep shipping show up, games which don’t keep shipping…don’t. Further evidence to support my thesis is that in the three months before that last TP shipment figure, the game had shipped 4.3 million copies worldwide. In other words, only 200,000 more units were shipped in three (holiday season!) months. In the six months before THAT, Zelda shipped 3.27 million copies worldwide, i.e. an additional million copies were shipped before that penultimate figure.
The trend is obvious: Twilight Princess’ legs were dying heavily back in 2008. It is very unlikely that in the five quarters Nintendo has shipped at least a million extra copies of a game that appears to have been dying down in sales without bothering to mention it in its reports. I think it is likely that the praise for Twilight Princess’ sales is based on flawed data. Zelda likely shipped more units since the end of 2008, but it hasn’t been enough for Nintendo to bother noting it. This weaker-than-believed showing by a Zelda game which enjoyed two significant advantages over every other Zelda game (launch title, multi-platform) may help to explain why Nintendo was determined to change the Zelda formula; if Nintendo wasn’t worried about Zelda’s future, it wouldn't see the need to change it up.
Khuutra said:
Obviously arcade values (like those presented - presumably - in Skyward Sword) could make Zelda more popular. I still hold that they cannot possibly make it mainstream.
But there are many styles besides arcade and TV.
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This position has been constant since the beginning of this discussion. However, no single reason has been given in support of it.
By contrast, we now know that 1) Arcade-style gaming is behind the sales juggernaut, Wii Sports, and several other massive social phenomena, and 2) a return to arcade-style gaming has done much to reinvigorate Nintendo’s other Big NES Franchise, Mario. We also know that the return to arcade-style roots will not lead to the series becoming as massive or universally appealing as it was in its heyday, but that it does increase absolute appeal and sales. Finally, we know 3) there are other styles of gaming aside from arcade-style, and that TV-style gaming is responsible for many of the other massive social phenomena we’re experiencing in gaming. However, we have conceded that Zelda would not work as a TV-style game.
We are thus left with the conclusion Malstrom reached; a return to arcade-style gaming is likely to reinvigorate Zelda and make it a social phenomenon, albeit not necessarily one on the level of the NES games, let alone Ocarina of Time. Its appeal may grow to the point where it attracts the mainstream,* but even if that is not the case, it is likely to do its job of making Zelda into a phenomenon again. It is certainly better to try than to go with the offered alternative, which at this point seems to be accepting what are conceded to be stagnating sales, or...?
To summarize. According to the values identified by both Nintendo and Malstrom, Wii Sports incorporates arcade-style gaming: it is also a downstream market, non-fiction game, but the two are hardly mutually-exclusive terms. The mainstream population in the regions that game companies target (Japan, U.S., Western/Central Europe) games regularly, even though the majority in two of those markets do not. Malstrom has never said that the return to arcade-style gaming made NSMB a bigger phenemenon than NES Mario: he explicitly rebuked that conclusion. This defeats the objection that Mario is treated differently than Zelda. Moreover, Twilight Princess may be overtracked by this site, which raises the possibility that it is not as well-received, commercially, as believed. Malstrom never said that a return to arcade-style gaming would make a game "mainstream."** However, it has worked to recreate a social phenomenon, and is a clear alternative to Staying The Course.
*Please note that Malstrom has not used this phrase, let alone made this promise.
**I doubt it would myself.
