How the game industry lost its way (and how Nintendo could save it — again)
Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 5:10pm by Jack
This is a post that, just six months ago, I wouldn’t have been caught dead writing. It wouldn’t have made any sense. Even I, a big time supporter of Nintendo, would have been confused as to why the writer (me) would say such unfounded and easily disputable things.
That’s because this is a post about how the video game industry has been hijacked by a boys club that results in an exponentially smaller fan base generation after generation. It’s a post about how inviting people of all types to the table results in better games for all sects of the population; and how it became socially unacceptable for “non traditional” gamers to play console video games.
A post over at GigaOM today inspired me to write this post up and ignore those little gremlins that discouraged me from making my controversial point. The point? That the video games industry has lost its way; is dying a slow death; and it’s Nintendo that’s going to save it. It’s been said before, sure, but today it’s more true than ever.
Part 1: The software and Rad Racer
The GigaOM column today was pretty insightful. It basically laid out many of the points that had been bouncing around my head for the past six months and organized them into easy to understand chunks of information. I was having trouble coming up with a way to get similar thoughts I was having about the games industry on paper, but this column had one sentence near the end that really got the gears spinning — finally.
GigaOM:
So in the short term, nothing will change for most of them; occasional tent pole hits like Halo 3 will soothe their cloistered delusions. They’ll keep ignoring non-traditional gamers, Web 2.0, and the user-created revolution, assuming like Hollywood that their core product has enough global appeal to get them through the latest media revolution.
And that will be their final disastrous turn. Because unlike the real Hollywood, there are only so many Lost Boys in the world willing to pay attention to them for so long.
All the signs today are betraying an industry that is in trouble and in dire need of something, anything to give it a shot in the arm. One could argue that the PS2, with hundreds of millions of units sold, was the pinnacle of the Playstation brand and all that title represented. The PS2 had sustainability. When people talked about PS2 software they didn’t talk in terms of “just wait, the big games are coming out in the fall” or “just wait until Final Fantasy comes out, THEN stuff will start to sell” because that’s not a sustainable business model. Games just came out for the PS2 and they did so in spades.
What the industry represents today is a paycheck to paycheck mentality. The next best games are always just over the horizon. The best games are promises, not concrete titles. They are screenshots and buzzwords, neither or which can actually be applied to the game when it finally boots up in your console at home. There’s a reason why the cliche paycheck to paycheck is a negative one — because it means you’re in trouble. Miss a paycheck, and you miss a meal, or worse. With the “next gen” consoles today, if they miss a big title, like say Metal Gear Solid 4 (or if it goes multiplatform), then they have also lost something. An edge, money, exclusivity, whatever. Regardless publishers start to look elsewhere, and the audience — fickle as ever — shrinks a little bit more.
As I strained to find a great way to describe the industry today, I started to think of an old classic that seemed almost too good a fit to be true.
Does anyone remember Rad Racer for the NES?
If you weren’t very good at it, do you remember running out of time, and hoping — praying — that your car would coast into the next checkpoint and give you a fresh clock? It is to these coasting runs — the hallmark of inexperienced Rad Racer players — that I compare to the tent pole argument presented above in the GigaOM piece. Console owners today have cars out of time that are coasting from major release to major release (Halo, Assassin’s Creed, Metal Gear Solid 4) hoping that the games will justify the buy in. It’s a bleeding money approach that sees fewer buyers than the generation before it. Gears of War sold 5 or so million copies in a few weeks. From the sounds of things, that’s what success is today. From the review scores, that’s what passes as perfection (but that’s another post for another day). Five million copies for a system that’s sold maybe 11, compared to a previous generation that saw 110 million PS2 consoles sold. 110 million is almost a third of the U.S. population. What’s 5 million compared to that? Substantially less, to say the least. If you want to get respected by more than the niche audience that now commands the direction of gaming, then you have to sell more than 11 million consoles. That’s bush league numbers, and anyone who argues those kinds of numbers are a success is probably working in marketing (directly (paid) or indirectly (fanboy), as we see on a majority of gaming blogs’ forums).
And no one’s really getting it yet. When Nintendo started to take off with the Wii, what did we get to counter it? LittleBigPlanet and Sony Second Life Home.
LittleBigPlanet: great idea, great looking, great concept. But a game like LittleBigPlanet in the hands of Sony is kind of like me drinking an extremely expensive bottle of wine. Sure, I get some enjoyment out of it, and I know it’s fine wine, but I really don’t get it, do I? Sony hasn’t shown it knows what the hell it’s doing this generation, so who’s the genius that started saying LittleBigPlanet was going to be the savior of the PS3? As I said, the game looks great, and the potential for greatness is there, but it’s all wasted on a system as close-minded as the PS3. You might as well give a three-year-old the keys to a Ferrari Enzo. And a bottle of Scotch. And a blindfold. Near a cliff.
People also fell over backward for Home as well, which left me scratching my head a bit. Again, who’s the genius who said that Sony automatically knows what to do with a social community like Home? For a company that can’t even manage what kind of image it wants to put forth with its new console, managing an online community seems like a bit of a stretch.
What Home looked like to me was a company that knew there was something to be had with social networking, and that knew it had to do something — anything — to differentiate itself from the Xbox 360. So it bolted on the flavor of the month. Trouble is, the audience for the PS3 isn’t into social networking. Not really. They’re into niche products that appeal to, as GigOM put it, Hollywood for Lost Boys. How long will the luster of Home take to fade once people start realizing you can’t f*ck, kill or maim the other inhabitants? “Just talking and a Wii Bowling knock off?! But I want to kill something!” Or how long before the advertisements and endorsements and “sponsored events” choke the life out of it? Home might have had a chance elsewhere, but not on a niche piece of hardware like the PS3. Wrong console with the wrong audience. Even those level-headed PS3 owners, I imagine, wil soon be chased out of their Home thanks to the vocal minority of the same bigoted personality types that spoiled Xbox Live’s voice chat feature with sophomoric hate speech.
Now, some of you may still be excited about the idea of Home. To you I say go for it. Try it out. Tell me how you feel after a month of the worst of what the community has to offer. Am I being cynical? Sure I am, but there’s a reason for it. These are the people the industry now caters to, and why I have placed my bet with Nintendo this round.
More GigaOM:
After speaking at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, venture capitalist and tech visionary Joi Ito described an industry steadfastly ignorant of the changing world outside, “making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.”
So in the short term, nothing will change for most of them; occasional tent pole hits like Halo 3 will soothe their cloistered delusions. They’ll keep ignoring non-traditional gamers, Web 2.0, and the user-created revolution, assuming like Hollywood that their core product has enough global appeal to get them through the latest media revolution.
And that will be their final disastrous turn. Because unlike the real Hollywood, there are only so many Lost Boys in the world willing to pay attention to them for so long.
You are seeing this play out in real time. The software has failed the gaming community at large, and over the years the community’s ranks have dwindled. The same people are buying the same kinds of games over and over, and have turned something I enjoyed for almost the first 20 years of my life into a one trick pony. I see Nintendo expanding the software industry with the DS and the Wii in real time, and have therefore decided to support them. Perhaps a bit too blindly at times, but then again you don’t get progress if you refuse to venture out from the middle from time to time.
And this is Infendo, the best Nintendo blog this side of the ‘verse, after all.
Coming soon… part 2: The irrelevant video games media.
June 4th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
amazing,article i completely agree, brilliant read, well done, thanks for the insight.
June 4th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
My GOD!! Finally someone with ballz to mention whats been in everyone’s mind! Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the gaming industry is dying or not, because it’s easy, as a long time gamer, to get into the Halos, the Final Fantasy’s, the big hit titles. But then I realize, that everything sorta dies down a lot in between those titles. So hardcore gamers automatically blot out any title that isn’t AAA, we’ve been trained by the gaming industry to wait for the big hits. At least thats what I’m thinking. I’m sure there’s many awesome games that aren’t Halo, or Gears of War, or Final Fantasy, but are most likely just as good, or even better.
June 4th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Bravo! Great statements and examples. The best infendo post EVER.
Can´t wait for part two!
June 4th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Wow. I couldn’t say it. But thank goodness someone finally did say it.
June 4th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Great read. Right on. I am also awaiting Part 2.
June 4th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Amazing! Thank you…I’m awaiting part two…………………………………………………………………………………………………..is it done yet?
June 4th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I have never heard anything so true about the videogame industry. Thank you so much, Jack.
June 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Wow, this is a great read. Nothing more true could be said. Props to the author and the Big N.
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June 5th, 2007 at 12:42 am
I believe the gaming industry took the wrong turn a few years ago, and it started with Lara Croft and Tomb Raider and keps working today in the form of Madden, Fifa and NEED FOR SPEED games by EA. All these game sold millions even with little cosmetic changes every year, and set the example for the rest to follow:
“Don’t make new stuff! take yesteryear backups and change some of the stuff but not much, or it will turn into something else, people don’t want a new experience, they want a continuation of last years already almost perfect product”. Nintendo allowed Hudson to do it also with Mario Party just a couple weeks ago. If people keep buying these stuff they won’t really devote the time they first spent of making number 1
June 5th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Brilliant read - great job =]
June 5th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Hmm…. this puts into words what I have been feeling for a while now and is the main reason I am now a retro gamer.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Just another example of someone who gets it.
You can counter the caution of Nintendo’s online strategy, but if they can make it so we as normal people avoid the fuckwards, all the better. I enjoy everything Nintendo, as little stuff as I buy, but would I own a PS3 I would be doubting by purchase every time I boot up.
That’s why I just got myself a PS2 for a few bucks. A little present while waiting for more Wii games.
June 5th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Great post, Jack.
Rokerovakero - I don’t think Jack’s point was that all franchises are bad, just the ones on which a system hinges its success; Even hinging a console on Mario games isn’t a foolproof success, as Nintendo discovered with the Gamecube. As far as Mario Party goes, I don’t think it’s a big enough project to really warrant getting upset over sequels being similar.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Is this a business blog or a games blog? Well?
It is true that appealing to mass market = lots of money. Duh.
Who cares (and who doesn’t already know)? I just want to play great games and as long as there are so many developers/etc all trying to outdo each other with the “best gamer ever” (Spore, Mass Effect, Galaxy, Prime, Too Human etc etc) it is a win win situation for gamers (ie: us).
I do NOT want to see these games go away and they won’t either. The non-gamers section of the market will grow a lot, as it must do (helped by clever developers). This will in turn increase the ‘Hardcore’ market as the newcomers look for progressively meatier experiences.
I see it analogous to the music industry where ‘newcomers’ (kids, teenagers etc) start off listening to American Idol/Fall Out Boy (and so on) and then progress to more ‘developed’ music.
That’s not to say the simple stuff can’t be enjoyable either. A nice example would the Beatles’ transformation from I Want To Hold Your Hand to Strawberry Fields Forever (etc).
/pretentious-ramblings
Ps: Why the PS3, as an example, isn’t trying very hard to appeal to the mass market yet? Well, the answer is the PS2, by far the most mass market console of last generation with the Eyetoy, Singstar, Buzz Guitar Hero etc and selling second only to Wii (
). Sony are still aiming the PS3 squarely at the hardcore with its current price (if only they had the games).
In conclusion Nintendo’s genius design of Wii and it’s interface as well as their whole strategy ensures that will appeal to the public like no console before but,
thank god they still want to make classics too…
June 5th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Nice post man!!
*clap clap clap*
June 5th, 2007 at 10:00 am
If you look at the Xbox 360 and the PS3’s game library there are vitually no innovative games. Basically every game is set in its established genre with updated graphics. Other than Viva Pinata I can’t think of an Xbox game that anyone paid attention to that didn’t involve guns. Think of how many NES and Super NES games that didn’t feature guns… Most of them actually. It looks as if these days hardcore gamers need their guns, like a baby needs a pacifier. If it weren’t for Nintendo would we have anything to play that didn’t involve shooting something?
June 5th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Now, now, johnny. Are you being teh kiddie?
Good point about the guns. Seems like they’re a necessity today or the game doesn’t get made.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:50 am
There is another aspect to it as well. Not everyone wants to get deeper and deeper with their gaming. My sister is a prime example of this. She played a lot of NES and when the Super came out she ran from it because the additional buttons intimidated her. She is not stupid, she has a degree in micro-biology, but six buttons was intimidating for a girl who just wanted to run, jump and throw fire balls.
The industry needs to stop discarding things in the same way it needs new types of games. The goal should be as much variety as possible. Why did side-scrollers go the way of the do-do. I like 3D games, I want them around too, but I also like side-scrollers and certain games have not transitioned well ( I am looking at you Sonic). Also new genre’s need to be created not everyone wants to play a sport or shoot something. I think Trauma Center is a great example of what the industry needs in terms of genre. So if you can not make as pretty a 3D game on the Wii make an awesome looking side-scroller. It does not even have to use motion, just a simple two button control scheme that my sister would play. Paper Mario comes close, but switching characters and flipping the world muddy up the mix for people who just want to jump on stuff.
The point is the Industry needs to stop boiling down its genre’s to the ones that are currently most popular. Be creative and make new genres and at the same time bring back some old ones. I do not want to look at a shelf and only see the latest shooter claiming to be a Halo killer a few of those can be there,but I want to have other experiences. This is why I believe that rhythm games have done so well. The DS has shown how new game types can do well and I hope the Wii will eventually grow to do the same.
June 5th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Hunter, QFT.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
johnnymilkshark: Viva Piñata is MS’ response to Animal Crossing, actually…
While I agree with Jack’s basic premise for this post, I think everyone missed the biggest problem the entertainment industry (movies, TV, books, etc… not just video games!) faces today: the increasing cost of production vs. the return on investment.
But I’ll expand on that on Jack’s second part, because he might point it out next…
June 6th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
That’s a great Rad Racer metaphor. But I wouldn’t say its the gamers who are coasting from major release to major release. More like it’s Sony and MS in that futile race …
June 9th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Mate, you have some homework to do
* “Gears of War sold 5 or so million copies in a few weeks. From the sounds of things, that’s what success is today.”
That would be a major really huge success on PlayStation 2 too. GTA-style, where every PS2 game sold around ca. 3 to 7 million units.
5 out of 11 is SO HUGE A SUCCESS, compared to maybe 7 out of 110, do the math.
* “110 million is almost a third of the U.S. population.”
Does the term worldwide mean anything to you? I know, the “world = North America” in some heads (exceptionally often found in action movies like ID4) but hey, that’s the number of worldwide sold units, and you maybe can say ca. 1/3 was sold in the US.
* “Again, who’s the genius who said that Sony automatically knows what to do with a social community like Home?”
Well, Sony is good at hinting at the future, remember the infamous “real-time” rendered videos from E3 2005? Home has inspired people, it’s a buzz - you’re right you never know what Sony will really deliver and I think Home is very very ambigious and nobody can achieve this level of social interaction out of the hat.
But look at Nintendo, where everybody is happy, if and when they get out a game that lets you play online multiplayer…?
* And what I also don’t get: What’s all the talk about “non-traditional gamers, Web 2.0, and the user-created revolution”?
Let’s break it down: non-tradition gamers are WHO? WHAT do they like? HOW MUCH do they spend? Nobody knows, it’s a buzz word right now.
Everybody who actually truly uses the term “Web 2.0″ is complety clueless to me. It’s a marketing buzz word, nothing more. It has no meaning, Web 2.0 normaly means you have a badly designed (=not stylish) website that encourages users to interact in very limited ways by using a technology called AJAX. Example in case: Flickr. I would argue that the whole bunch of Yahoo! sites combined would be more Web 2.0 than Flickr, and that since 1997!
For the last two years (or more) I keep reading about user-generated content, yes that’s the custom painted cars in Forza Motorsport 2, yes that’s the custom levels in the future Little Big Planet game, etc.etc.etc. I actually believe that’s the only point there is. Yet on the PC we have had this for a very long time already, so please: Where’s this news? And what has Nintendo up their sleeves for user-generated content: Nothing, or at least I can’t remember anything?
* Final thoughts
This all should not lessen the really big success that Nintendo has right now. I think the NDS is very interesting right now although I like to play PSP as well for another kind of games. The Wii is the less played home console that I own, with a leading PS2, then Xbox 360 and PS3 all before Wii. I throw Wii parties and for these occassions I dust off my Wii and we play some multiplayer sessions of Wii Sports or Wii Play, even Wario Ware. But do I play single player games on it? No. I even bought Zelda:TP as GameCube-version.
While I believe that habtic experience like the Wii remote is a important part of the future it’s not the only way. For example: There’s a single game that rivals all the fun that can be had with a Wii: Guitar Hero on PS2. Everybody is just crazy, and a lot of people bought PS2s just to play Buzz, SingStar, EyeToy and Guitar Hero. But what if the novelty of Wii controls wears off and people start to realize that it’s not as “creative” as Nintendo would like us to think?