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[blu]

Looks like I was right; now companies will use the failure of fucking /light gun games/ to say that core gaming is dead on the Wii. Any fucking excuse, I tell you.

It's not just a matter of core gamers not understanding the market Nintendo captured with the Wii, btw. And it's not about that market having "less diverse taste".

The expanded audience are the ones playing games that hardcore gamers ignore; they play browser games, puzzle games, the Sims, simulations, new variations of online multiplayer RPGs, etc. However, and I still believe this is being proven out, the expanded audience that the Wii has captured has a quality that is very hard for core and x-treme gamers to understand: they're a tough sell.

Core gamers are an EASY SELL. They play ANYTHING. They're taken in by graphics and pageantry, and by technological gimmickry. (Hint for people who ain't got it yet: the Wii Remote is not a gimmick. The Wii Balance Board is not a gimmick. Games predicated on repackaging the same shit with fresh shaders and a few meaningless variations in stale formulas are gimmicks.)

The people who Nintendo has reached out to this generation are the people who have been turned off at the sight of what gamers consider fuckin' grawsome: "boring" racing sims, hyper violent first person "murder simulators" and gangster games, because from their perspective, those things aren't clever, and there's no draw to wasting time playing them when they can get all the nice cut scenes watching a movie about WWII or gangland violence.

These same people will play Bejeweled for hundreds of hours and put more time into it than most core gamers will ever spend on a single $60, five hour campaign first-person shooter.

The truth is, most game companies don't know or if they did once know, have forgotten how to make games outside of an increasingly narrow range. It's easier to retreat back and sell the hardcore more of same game they've been buying over and over for the last ten years with better graphics each time and a new online gametype mutation. Core gamers say they want "innovation", 'cause even they're bored (yet they still keep buying the games!), but real innovation is uncomfortable and does away with the cues they've become addicted to.

None of this is to say that the expanded audience or the Wii audience knows best; there is no one "best". There are aspects of core games that people outside the dedicated gamers also do not get because they're unfamiliar with them. This is why bridge games exist on the Wii, such as Mario Kart. A lot of people who've never played a driving game have quite gotten into it thanks to MK Wii.

However, the official Inconvenient Truth of current gaming is that the Wii phenomenon has shed some light on bad trends in the game industry, and the industry - and gamers - are doing everything they can to ignore it and rig a sunshade up. The Wii has made an end-run around the current industry into new territory. There's no reason companies like Capcom can't capitalize on that, but they either don't understand how to, or don't really want to.

It's easier to blame failure on /light gun games/. El Oh El.

your post is delightfully intelligent, dear sir. allow me to add my 0.02 to the bolded part of the subject.

the industry has grown accustomed to exploiting the "core gamer" self-image of prepubescent kids (god bless big-mouthed sega guys who don't think twice before speaking their mind).

allow me the following re-enactment:

CEO: gentlemen, what do we make today - $60 'hard-core' titles that little jimmy would buy with lunch money (nag his parents into buying to him, as he's underage for our titles anyway) or $30 'casual' games that are played by all age groups (well, little jimmies aside)?

manager bob: but sir! we cannot afford to not make hard-core games! only the margins of those games can meet our habitual development budgets (and frankly, we've already done a bazillion+1 FPSs, you can't honestly expect us to sit and invent catchy new gameplay concepts now!), and after all, only the little jimmies are a safe market!

CEO: yes, bob, but the times have changed, and need i remind you of our financial situation - the first moment we mis-step *knocks on the wooden table before him* with our long-going 'nuke dukem' franchise we're dead?

manager bob, with a suspiciously overconfident tone: yes, sir, i'm aware of the potential consequences. but sir, we're so darn good at it, what can go wrong? (fucking idiot, this CEO, does he not know what has cost me to climb to a manager of a 100-strong dev studio working on $20M-a-piece jobs? who does he think he is, to even assume he can reduce me to a manager of some measly 30-strong team to work on casual *eeew* games!)

ps: the above conversation is entirely fictional.

 

[Eteric Rice]

Unfortunately for them, that doesn't fix their problem. In any industry, if you do not adapt, you die. My advice to third parties is to shut the hell up and start making some premium, tier one games by their top teams for the Wii or pray that your HD versions sell well enough to float your company. Because right now they've lost three years worth of potential sales due to ignorance and stupidity and are only damaging their brands in the minds of the Wii consumers.

With the way the economy is today and the fact that it seems every year studios are closing down, getting absorbed or laying people off, you'd think they'd want to try and do their best to make quality games. By the end of this generation we're going to see a lot more companies disappear or get bought out and it really makes the general future for most third parties very bleak.

It's to late now, the genres have unfortunately been established where they are now. Even if they wanted to turn things around, they really couldn't.

Hopefully next generation things are different. I suspect they won't be though, unless Nintendo makes a relatively powerful system with a decent online system.

 

[Calcaneus]

Man, strawman casuals and hardcores are being built up left and right in this thread.

 

[SlipperySlope]

Dead Space Extraction is a good game.

House of the Dead: Overkill is a good game.

Madworld is a good game.

None of them sold well.

Maybe these guys who with upper management positions for successful multi-million dollar companies like Capcom know what they're talking about a bit more than a bunch of fans on a message board?

Its not like this is some guy who works for a scrub 3rd party or indie developer. He works for Capcom, one of the most consistently successful 3rd parties in the world, and one that stepped into this new generation with both a desire to support the Wii and the best 360/PS3 cross platform model of anyone in the industry already in mind.

They generally seem to have a clue.

What you listed was two light gun games and one niche title. None of these titles would have sold for shit on any of the consoles. There's a reason these titles failed. And it's not because of Wii's audience.

I mean really, Capcom's idea of support was two light gun games? Seriously? I haven't spent any decent amount of time with a light gun game since Duck Hunt.


Edit - It's like they don't even know the Nunchuk exists.

 

[Flachmatuch]

Agreed

Wall Street is very well paid but started crying for a bailout. Herd mentality can really hurt businesses who lack foresight. I often feel the gaming business has great developers who really don't understand the business of gaming.

I'm not entirely sure that Wall Street lacked foresight, considering how most of the biggest bandits got out of the mess they made and who eventually paid for their "mistakes" :-/ But yeah, the "they know what they're doing" stuff is mostly completely idiotic - markets are supposed to be there at least partly because this approach turned out to be such bullshit over history.

Also, funny stuff blu :-D

 

[Hero]

It's to late now, the genres have unfortunately been established where they are now. Even if they wanted to turn things around, they really couldn't.

Hopefully next generation things are different. I suspect they won't be though, unless Nintendo makes a relatively powerful system with a decent online system.

I believe that the current generation of consoles will last a bit longer than it has in the past just because the amount of money Sony and Microsoft invested in their HD systems and Nintendo is content with being on top. If third parties started making games two years ago after seeing the first year of Wii they'd be close to if not having released "AAA" titles already. But maybe if they started today, they'd be able to release it before the end of the cycle.

Alas, c'est la vie.

I also want to take the time to point out an interview with Iwata back in 2004:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/505/505234p1.html

Some particularly insightful quotes:

"Some time in the future we may be able to combine the technologies of Game Boy and GameCube in a unit that will be small and light with a long enough battery life and a low enough price for the market," Iwata said. "We [will] need to find a reasonable balance between the high-functionality and the other requisite features in a portable system.

"Timing is very important. Even if there are new technologies that will make portable games more fun to play, if the price is too high or the other requisites are not met, we say it is premature."

"Our competitors are always saying that Nintendo is just for children. To counter that, what we really need to do is explain to customers and potential customers [that we do not just make games for kids]," says Iwata.

"I think that the shift from Game Boy Advance to Game Boy Advance SP has attracted more and more young adults to play with the Game Boy product line.

"To answer your question, in the short term, there is some impact [from Nintendo's inability to reach older audiences]; but in the long term, I think it is most important for Nintendo to reach the widest variety of customers. That is our main emphasis right now, and it will be in the future as well."

"Nintendo is working on its next-generation system. Allow me to call it GCNext or GCN. The abilities of GCNext will be different from what you have seen from consoles in the past. What Nintendo is currently discussing is not about state-of-the-art technology for enhancing processing power. But what I, Miyamoto, and Mr. Takeda [engineering leader Genyo Takeda] are discussing is what should be done to entertain people in a new way; and in order to achieve this, what functionality must be added to our current technology.

"Please understand, I am not saying that technology is unimportant. I understand that technology is important. But if we are just focusing on technology and investing in an IT manufacturing plant to come up with higher performance processing [chips], we will not succeed."

Looking back at these now, it's like he was predicting the future.

 

[Naked Prime]

"The producer has to take those good games and think about how to deliver it to as many users as possible. Certainly to get good reviews is part of his job. However, the producer has to make sure the game sells ...............Great directors may exist in great numbers, however, if you don't have a good producer it won't lead to sales"

Keiji Inafune


Making a great game is not enough to equal sales anymore. By now all developers and/or publishers are well aware of that. But when the ball gets dropped someone has to try and put blame somewhere other than themselves. With the amount of promotion that many of these Wii games received, they would have most likely not sold well on PS3 or 360 either. But its easier to say that "core gamers don't do Wii", than "we failed to capture the interest of the non-core audience on Wii". If any game only sells to the core audience, the sales are not going to be stellar (save sports)

 

[oracrest]

 

[polyh3dron]

Capcom and Sega should hire some of the posters here as advertisers. That would right this ship.

No way, they have great ideas that they post on a message board, but if they actually worked for Capcom those ideas would all of a sudden not be as good. An original real RE type game on the Wii would do just as bad as these rail shooter test games would. If these forum posters actually existed in the real world like I do, they would know that.

[/sarcasm]

 

[linkboy]

No way, they have great ideas that they post on a message board, but if they actually worked for Capcom those ideas would not be as good. An original real RE type game on the Wii would do just as bad as these rail shooter test games would.

If Capcom had put out a real RE game after RE4: Wii Edition, it would have sold, now, not so.

 

[Night_Trekker]

It seems like a repeat of Gamecube with all the third party support dying! Except in this case Wii owns the world, so instead of abandoning the Nintendo console outright.. they're all just abandoning real games in favor of cheaply developed crap they can sell to a large mainstream audience based on concept alone.

Solution: develop great games you can sell to a large mainstream audience based on concept alone. Wii Sports didn't even star an iconic Nintendo mascot and it sold the Wii.

Or you could whine that your sequel to a farmed-out, cheaply slapped-together rail shooter using old assets from other games didn't set the world on fire.

Hey, Capcom guys. I love Umbrella Chronicles! But I wouldn't pay $50 for it, and in fact I didn't (which was a good call). I won't pay $50 for the sequel either, now that I have some idea what I'm likely to get for my money. I'll wait for a price drop.

 

[JWong]

If Capcom had put out a real RE game after RE4: Wii Edition, it would have sold, now, not so.

Highly doubt it would outsell RE5 numbers.

 

[Slavik81]

If Capcom had put out a real RE game after RE4: Wii Edition, it would have sold, now, not so.

If they put out Resident Evil 6 for the Wii, I think it would still sell.

 

[andymcc]

picture

correct me if i am wrong, but didn't the monster hunter titles on psp sell oodles more than the wii one?

 

[Master Z]

What would be the point. It makes more sense to just make RE6 and then port it to the Wii.

No. It makes more sense to make an exclusive RE game for the Wii using an upgraded version of the RE4 engine. It's cost effective and it's more likely that core gamers would buy a new RE game over an inferior port taking into consideration that there's a signifigant amount of core gamers who own a HD console and a Wii. They could make it so that it ties into RE6. It could be like Code Veronica in the sense that it would be a kick-ass un-numbered RE game.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

I've always been kind of confused why they didn't just make Degeneration for Wii and just use the RE4 engine

Leon even wears the same clothes. You could re-use SO many assets.

 

[hteng]

so what the hell are people doing with their Wiis ? i mean for such a huge install base that's kinda weird.

 

[Flachmatuch]

Highly doubt it would outsell RE5 numbers.

Obviously, but that'd be a retarded benchmark, the goal is mostly to make money as effectively and safely as with other possible games.

correct me if i am wrong, but didn't the monster hunter titles on psp sell oodles more than the wii one?

Yep, but you need to compare with the PS2 games which sold about the same.

 

[linkboy]

Highly doubt it would outsell RE5 numbers.

No, but it would have outsold their light gun games, which is the main point, thus making this thread non-existent.

 

[Boombloxer]

OK I read this and all your other posts in this thread and then checked your post history and realizied that you are a f***ing idiot especially when it comes to sales age (which you jump into once in a blue moon to spout bullshit).

Do you even know what core means? You know what, I think its best you drag your ass back to OT or something. Man, GAF made me realize how ignorant people really are.

:lol

Thanks for the laughs, but I give two shits about your opinion.

No way, they have great ideas that they post on a message board, but if they actually worked for Capcom those ideas would not be as good. An original real RE type game on the Wii would do just as bad as these rail shooter test games would. If these forum posters actually existed in the real world like I do, they would know that.

In a year when we're having this discussion again, I expect to see the exact same rationale for why the Wii has no slew of epic titles.

 

[polyh3dron]

guys guys, my post was meant to match the sarcastic tone of the post i was quoting, guess i didn't make it obvious enough, my bad. I thought the last line there made it obvious.

Of course a real RE game would have done better. That guy who said that they should hire some GAFers said it in jest, making light of them, but IMO they could do a better job than the people they have now.

 

[GaimeGuy]

correct me if i am wrong, but didn't the monster hunter titles on psp sell oodles more than the wii one?

Yes, but the PSP monster hunter titles are kind of reimaginated versions of the PS2 Monster Hunter titles. Think of it as kind of like the types of tweaks made from GTA3 to create GTA: LCS for the PSP, but basically a tweaked game instead of an all new title (ie: Imagine if you made the same game, but more suited for portables, with shorter missions and a slightly less involved story mode).

The Wii Monster Hunter 3 is the best selling console Monster Hunter so far.

 

[A Link to the Past]

Maybe they could just give things people want? Wii fans don't want lesser experiences.