Avinash_Tyagi said:
^Yes I want to hear why
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It comes down to two questions: art and money.
We can drop art as a point of conversation because neither of us is really qualified to talk about video game production in terms of art, and business will trump art in every sense in every case. So we're going to talk business.
The question, then, becomes this: why would it be feasible to continue to produce 3-D games even if 2-D games are universally more popular? We are going to ignore that they continued to produce 2-D games even while 3-D games were considerably more popular, because there were mitigating circumstances surrounding that decision (like the technology for 3-D games being unavailable in the handheld space).
So here is the assumptions we're going to make, based on yoru scenarios: Nintendo has produced new 2-D Marios, Metroids, and Zeldas, and while the 3-D counterparts continue to sell well, the 2-D versions sell better. The whys andh ows don't matter. This is the reality under which we operate. But it still is the case that Nintendo would be better served by continuing to make 3-D games. Why?
The first question is one of cost, because, and this is goign to seem unusual to you, but it is true: 2-D assets become astronomically more expensive as resolution increases, and it's these 2-D assets (like textures) that make so much of 3-D assets more expensive to create. Do you know why NSMBWii uses 3-D models for the characters? The first reason is that they're much, much cheaper than drawing hundreds of different hi-res frames of animation (which would have to look good from a distance and during close-ups at the end of a level, with individual frames skyrocketing the price of the animations), but the second reason is even simpler: rendering 2-D sprites is immensely resource-intensive in comparison to lower-res textures on 3-D models. If you want an example of this, try playing Odin Sphere on the PS2, which can only be faulted in that it was way, waaaay too much for the system to handle, choking the whole thing down to 5 or 10 frames per second from time to time.
Anyway. 2-D assets are not that cheap. Next generation it's going to get worse, because when the next Nintendo system goes HD it's going to have the same expectations for art resolution as the other two systems, and ... well, that difference in resolution is actually why Vanillaware put Muramasa out on the Wii nstead of the HD twins. 2-D art costs are just goign to get higher and higher, and the best they can do in terms of cutting costs will be putting 3-D models in a 2-D field, and that's not going to be any cheaper than jsut doing a 3-D game in terms of art assets, assuming a comparable scale.
Do you know why Mario Galaxy is so much bigger than New Super Mario Bros. Wii? Truth is, it isn't! They have a comparable amount of content in them, in spite of the fact that Super Mario Galaxy is (much, much) longer. Why? Because in a 2-D game, art asset creation is both more expensive and also experienced for a much smaller amount of time than in 3-D. This is one of the big reasons that SEGA doesn't make 3-D Sonic games all about the speed sections: since their pacing is very similar to the 2-D games, they're much more expensive than other 3-D games to make for the same amount of playtime/content created for the player. A game with 2-D gameplay is going to need much, much more content to be as long as a 3-D game unless it's filled with huge, repetetive expanses of nothing, and I don't think we expect that out of Nintendo (first person to make a Wind Waker joke does so at risk of all classiness on his or her part).
In terms of creating content, 2-D and 3-D games do not have that big a cost difference right now, and the cost different is going to become more narrow in the future as 2-D assets become more and more expensive. And no, 2-D level design is not cheaper than 3-D level design, as odd as that is, because content doesn't cost money according to the space that an in-game world operates on.
But, one could argue, this doesn't matter. Even if 2-D games and 3-D games cost exactly the same (which they don't, not yet), 2-D games still sell more, therefore make more profit, therefore make 3-D games defunct.
This is sound reasoning, but it's also not good business sense.
The thing is that Nintendo has several factors they have to consider here in terms of resource allocation.
Firstly, 3-D games and 2-D games serve different audiences. People who buy 3-D Marios and people who buy 2-D Marios are not necessarily the same people, and even though there is a certain amount of overlap, there are also a certain number of people who buy one sort and not the other. In order to serve the biggest audience possible - and increase future profitability through market penetration in anticipation of possible consumer trends - they have to continue to serve both audience, because the whims of thep ublic could swing either way at alomst any time.
But there's more than that, too.
Even if 2-D games were jsut immensely more profitable than 3-D games, enough so to justify abandoning 3-D players altogether, nintendo would need to continue to make 3-D games so that their internal development teams would continue to be productive and produce content that keeps them relevant. Teams that don't make anything cost a tremendous amount of money with no return, so they either have to be working or they have to be fired. Nintendo does not want to shrink. It wants to keep making as many games as possible, so it cann continue to make as much money as possible.
It's not as simpel as moving 3-D producers over to new 2-D projects, either, because producers of 3-D games have specific skillsets that make them more suited to work in that particular field and dimension, and trying to retrain them would be less resource-equivalent than jsut hiring new people who already have 2-D skillsets. You still have the problem of a massive employee turnover rate, which is very bad for the company for many reasons, up to and including the fact that it looks less attractive to potential employees.
But let's assume that doesn't matter. Let's assume that 3-D game designers can be transferred over perfectly, no questions asked, and that they can make all the 2-D games it takes. They still wouldn't want to do that.
The problem with make as many 2-D games as Nintendo currently makes 2-D + 3-D games is that the 2-D consuming audience, while enormous, can still only consume so much, and it becomes a quesiton of diminishing returns. Too many games released too often in a series would mean that interest in the series eventually burns out, and Nintendo won't let that happen. So they either create dozens of new intellectual properties (very expensive, and runs the risk of feeling same-y with the limitations imposed by having to operate in 2-D alone) or they jsut produce a lot fewer games - which, again, results in the problem of the employee turnover rates skyrocketing. By serving only one specific band of consumer, they run th risk of tiring them out on Nintendo products. Stagnation is potentially the greatest enemy Nintendo faces, and it's that danger, exactly, which the Wii is attacking.
There. That should be enough: there are plenty of reasons to continue serving the interests of multiple groups, regardless of one resulting in higher profit margins. if they moved away from serving one, the change would be gradual, taking not generations of console but decades. It's not feasible financially, at least not with my understanding of how one has to market one's work and how one has to mind consumer interest.
I suppose that's all. Some of this migiht not ring true, but I think I made my point.
