How the game industry lost its way (and how Nintendo could save it — again)

225_consoleswii12.jpgThis 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.