I actually think they're the least likely to go out of the dedicated hardware market: prefer to explore other solutions in parallel rather than give up, don't believe in streaming until the technology is perfect in terms of latency, seems to always find ways to stay relatively financially viable to support them having their own hardware.
That's pretty different from Microsoft and Sony.
but the dedicated market has always been alive, despite them not dominating the space every generation, that still gives them motivation to keep trying, what happens when the dedicated market is gone?
As for gaming devices first parties make profit by providing pseudo-infrastructure (software, distribution..etc.) and getting some margins from third parties in return. Until decade ago all Nintendo had do compete with was Sony, Sega & MS. Now their biggest competitor is Apple and Google (all those money Japanese and Western third party makes on mobile, certain percentage go to those two "infrastructure" corporations). And honestly no company can compete against those two at today's circumstance..
Something is totally off about this weeks ranking. Sony sells 16k PS4 and not a single SKU of software sells more than 3.372 units? There isn't even a bundle at the moment in Japan to explain this. Everybody just buying a really expensive BD-player?? Not GTA5, not Dragon Quest Heroes, not Bloodborne. Tropico 5 as best-selling PS4-software in the second half of the Golden Week? Super-strange.
Not right now, but it is bringing an untapped niche for it. The snowball effect will come, sooner or later. The size of it is anyone guess. But Sony will to capitalize on it (with price drop, bundles, etc) or leaving things as is?
Something is totally off about this weeks ranking. Sony sells 16k PS4 and not a single SKU of software sells more than 3.372 units? There isn't even a bundle at the moment in Japan to explain this. Everybody just buying a really expensive BD-player??
but the dedicated market has always been alive, despite them not dominating the space every generation, that still gives them motivation to keep trying, what happens when the dedicated market is gone?
I don't think it will ever go. Shrink more and more, sure, and it may not even really be viable anymore in Japan after a while, but it won't be like arcades or Android TVs. There will always be a userbase for it, be it fans, or people interested by a reasonably priced solution not needing upgrades and with good exclusives (and ports).
While of course a lot of people buy digital, I find it hard to believe that digital vs. physical adoption-rate suddenly jumps high enough to satisfy 16.000 new PS4-owners while leaving retail-SKUs below ~3000 units. If such a ratio is possible, why are we still looking at retail-only numbers?
While of course a lot of people buy digital, I find it hard to believe that digital vs. physical adoption-rate suddenly jumps high enough to satisfy 16.000 new PS4-owners while leaving retail-SKUs below ~3000 units. If such a ratio is possible, why are we still looking at retail-only numbers?
While of course a lot of people buy digital, I find it hard to believe that digital vs. physical adoption-rate suddenly jumps high enough to satisfy 16.000 new PS4-owners while leaving retail-SKUs below ~3000 units. If such a ratio is possible, why are we still looking at retail-only numbers?
That doesn't make much sense to me considering how limited the LE bundle was... unless the source think they expect to sell double the original just because there are two SKUs.
That doesn't make much sense to me considering how limited the LE bundle was... unless the source think they expect to sell double the original just because there are two SKUs.
After bundle run out Nintendo increased the shipment, and the guy was bitching about that too IIRC (stores tend to order higher number of units because they expect to get fewer units anyway).
Actually that's exactly how Monster Hunter 3's price went downhill in a few days (Capcom revealed different version of LE to stores little by little, leading every store to overstock copies).
Something is totally off about this weeks ranking. Sony sells 16k PS4 and not a single SKU of software sells more than 3.372 units? There isn't even a bundle at the moment in Japan to explain this. Everybody just buying a really expensive BD-player?? Not GTA5, not Dragon Quest Heroes, not Bloodborne. Tropico 5 as best-selling PS4-software in the second half of the Golden Week? Super-strange.
Others have already given reasons, but if you look at the Dengeki rankings from two weeks ago, PS4 games in the Top 20 sold 15,389 units, while the total PS4 retail software sales for that week was 51,981.
Something is totally off about this weeks ranking. Sony sells 16k PS4 and not a single SKU of software sells more than 3.372 units? There isn't even a bundle at the moment in Japan to explain this. Everybody just buying a really expensive BD-player?? Not GTA5, not Dragon Quest Heroes, not Bloodborne. Tropico 5 as best-selling PS4-software in the second half of the Golden Week? Super-strange.
Others have already given reasons, but if you look at the Dengeki rankings from two weeks ago, PS4 games in the Top 20 sold 15,389 units, while the total PS4 retail software sales for that week was 51,981.
After bundle run out Nintendo increased the shipment, and the guy was bitching about that too IIRC (stores tend to order higher number of units because they expect to get fewer units anyway).
Actually that's exactly how Monster Hunter 3's price went downhill in a few days (Capcom revealed different version of LE to stores little by little, leading every store to overstock copies).
Wait, now I'm confused. The reference to MH3 was one that there was an over-abundance of LEs (both in magnitude and variety) but in this case there is a distinct lack of supply given some demand (otherwise they wouldn't have run out of stock).
I guess I do not quite understand where this conclusion was drawn from given the currently available information I have at hand, or I am misreading/understanding something.
Since the Konami thread is a mess, I'll just post here instead.
While the writing has been on the wall for around half a decade now, the first half of this year has scrawled it across the Shibuya 109.
Competing with AAA in the West is incredibly difficult and tremendously expensive. Consoles are dead locally.
Handhelds still have sales, but they're notably polarized toward the winners and the overall market is shrinking. There are far less million sellers than before even if the biggest games are selling a tremendous number of copies.
Mobile is growing at a tremendous rate, and even with polarization, there's still healthy growth on "lower" end of the top 100. More importantly, traditional publishers are starting to report healthy mobile results and are able to repeatedly generate hits by their own standards.
We've seen Japanese publishers pretty much go into one of two camps. They're either moving almost entirely into mobile + digital with perhaps a few remaining retail titles (see Sega, Konami, Capcom), or they're building a major mobile/digital arm while maintaining a solid if somewhat more conservative retail arm (see Square Enix and Namco). This is a core part of the business for basically everyone.
We're also seeing the number of console platforms reduce in response to this. Sony is unlikely to announce a successor to the Vita given we've yet to hear a single rumbling, Nintendo's NX continues to sound like what's essentially a singular platform with SKUs for both handhelds and televisions, and Microsoft has went from a niche to a non-entity.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
We can wait and see how Smash, MP10 sell the next couple years.
You don't take Amazon as a reference for the market but then you use COMG. That's very contradictory.
Also you can check by yourself just staying 15 min in a Bic Camera, or another shop and see which bundle are people buying. I saw a few times people buying the Wii Sports Club bundle
Hey Hiska, I've got to wonder, if people are seriously buying the Wii Sports Club bundle over the MK8 one, do you think a Nintendo Land one might be more attractive (aka cheaper price w/ Nintendo Land)? It's not like Nintendo Land is selling much anymore separately, and they're willing to bundle it in the US and all.
I feel hiska is a little overestimating Splatoon potential
I mean, 2 weeks before its release it has 42pt on comgnet, not so much for his prediction about 100k on first week
anyway it will be interesting to see how it will perform, actually western games are more popular than the previous generation, but also the target which Splatoon is aimed to is not properly the audience which buys western titles
You really haven't been tracking its momentum is the problem. Xeno X had high preorders from the start but slowed. Splatoon so far seems to be the opposite. Ok preorders at the beginning, but it's been increasing rapidly in the past couple of weeks (went from like 23 -> 42 in the past 2 weeks or so). Given we have 2 more weeks until its release, it could go up quite a bit if that continues. Going up 4 points on a weekday is pretty abnormal, right? But like Zhuge said, it's still just comgnet.
All things considered, weren't we expecting an even larger drop for Vita this year? At least Smokey was. Honestly, apart from God Eater 2 Burst & SAO: Lost Song, there hasn't been a big release right? I honestly think Minecraft Vita is keeping the Vita #s where they are.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market.
I still think there is a bubble to pop in terms of pricing though. Mobile pricing is caustic to the industry in most cases imo (aka exploiting whales + annoying people to the point of paying w/in apps). I think the $60 game price model was archaic, but we completely swung to the other end of the pricing spectrum. F2P is fine and all, but mobile still seemingly has very little place for anything with an up-front cost from what I can tell, and that's ridiculous. Android is even worse in that regard. If there are some examples of more reasonable F2P models, I'd love to hear them, but at best they seem to play with your patience and force you to play less frequently if you don't want to pay.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
What if the bubble I am waiting to pop isn't the mobile one, its the AAA-burgeoning budget bubble for the consoles in the West that I am waiting to pop.
I stand more on the idea that mobile is a winners-win-big gamefield with a lot of derivative competition on the mid-low-end but not bereft of modicum successes (like Terabattle), that taps the lucrative and ever-populated casual market. I don't see how that sort of bubble could really burst, what would, in my opinion, be more likely is the "Zynga bubble" bursting which is a localized bubble on a company to company basis as they fail to recapture the audience after their "mobile hit" wears out its welcome. But since the mobile market is so saturated with competitors, so to speak, there will always be someone or some new game to take the limelight and the hoards of money. I would say, therefore, not that there is a bubble burst to worry about but more of a scenario of throwing all your eggs into the mobile basket... and then achieving Zynga status.
I think the safest approach is one of diversity.
Obviously Nintendo's NX plans. Which will save us all!
I don't think it will ever go. Shrink more and more, sure, and it may not even really be viable anymore in Japan after a while, but it won't be like arcades or Android TVs. There will always be a userbase for it, be it fans, or people interested by a reasonably priced solution not needing upgrades and with good exclusives (and ports).
yeah it all depends where it bottoms out, i think the whole dedicated market isn't in any danger for awhile, but it is mainly japan and nintendo by proxy that is in the most danger.
Since the Konami thread is a mess, I'll just post here instead.
While the writing has been on the wall for around half a decade now, the first half of this year has scrawled it across the Shibuya 109.
Competing with AAA in the West is incredibly difficult and tremendously expensive. Consoles are dead locally.
Handhelds still have sales, but they're notably polarized toward the winners and the overall market is shrinking. There are far less million sellers than before even if the biggest games are selling a tremendous number of copies.
Mobile is growing at a tremendous rate, and even with polarization, there's still healthy growth on "lower" end of the top 100. More importantly, traditional publishers are starting to report healthy mobile results and are able to repeatedly generate hits by their own standards.
We've seen Japanese publishers pretty much go into one of two camps. They're either moving almost entirely into mobile + digital with perhaps a few remaining retail titles (see Sega, Konami, Capcom), or they're building a major mobile/digital arm while maintaining a solid if somewhat more conservative retail arm (see Square Enix and Namco). This is a core part of the business for basically everyone.
We're also seeing the number of console platforms reduce in response to this. Sony is unlikely to announce a successor to the Vita given we've yet to hear a single rumbling, Nintendo's NX continues to sound like what's essentially a singular platform with SKUs for both handhelds and televisions, and Microsoft has went from a niche to a non-entity.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
Since the Konami thread is a mess, I'll just post here instead.
While the writing has been on the wall for around half a decade now, the first half of this year has scrawled it across the Shibuya 109.
Competing with AAA in the West is incredibly difficult and tremendously expensive. Consoles are dead locally.
Handhelds still have sales, but they're notably polarized toward the winners and the overall market is shrinking. There are far less million sellers than before even if the biggest games are selling a tremendous number of copies.
Mobile is growing at a tremendous rate, and even with polarization, there's still healthy growth on "lower" end of the top 100. More importantly, traditional publishers are starting to report healthy mobile results and are able to repeatedly generate hits by their own standards.
We've seen Japanese publishers pretty much go into one of two camps. They're either moving almost entirely into mobile + digital with perhaps a few remaining retail titles (see Sega, Konami, Capcom), or they're building a major mobile/digital arm while maintaining a solid if somewhat more conservative retail arm (see Square Enix and Namco). This is a core part of the business for basically everyone.
We're also seeing the number of console platforms reduce in response to this. Sony is unlikely to announce a successor to the Vita given we've yet to hear a single rumbling, Nintendo's NX continues to sound like what's essentially a singular platform with SKUs for both handhelds and televisions, and Microsoft has went from a niche to a non-entity.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
I think this is a pretty accurate portrayal of the situation. I also think that Sega and Konami are absolutely right to get blasted though. I've posted my thoughts on it but neither seem to be well run as they are not leveraging their IP well, they are narrowing scope versus diversifying and they have been bleeding talent and consumer good-will. Not healthy. I think the ones taking a more measured look at mobile as something to leverage but not to the point of destroying their own legacy are looking much better.
It's hard to exactly say where mobile will go though. It could continue to be fad driven in which case mobile devs will be vulnerable to extreme boom-bust cycles or brands (not games) will stabilize at the top and it will become a mostly winner take all system. I think most people claiming it's a bubble look at it like that. Japan seems to have the best chance at stabilizing into a more level field but it's easy to be pessimistic about it and certainly those possible scenarios (I'm the 1% or everybody wins) should not be the cornerstone of your business to the rejection of other markets.
It'll also be interesting to see how much interest things like AR and VR will steal and if they force yet another sudden pivot for companies looking for gold rushes and quick money. In the end, the big winners are the ones that will create the markets, not follow into them.
Looks like for Famitsu and Dengeki Minecraft is the top selling Vita game. Media Create in the only hold out due to getting more recent numbers.
Media Create + Digital:
God Eater 2 - ~426,731 (Hiska's MC 2014 tease plus best release)
Minecraft - 412,525
Freedom Wars - 326,562
God Eater 2: RB - 323,333
Persona 4 Golden - 312,333 (Includes best release)
Dengeki + Digital
Minecraft - 424,120
God Eater 2 - 403,348 (Includes best release)
God Eater 2: RB - 336,479
Freedom Wars - 334,336
Final Fantay X HD - 303,988 (Includes stand alone sku)
Famitsu + Digital
Minecraft - 412,875
God Eater 2 - 396,042 (Includes best release)
Freedom Wars - 333,907
God Eater 2: RB- 319,796
Persona 4 Golden - 296,145 (Includes best release)
Media Create and Dengeki numbers are ones I compiled so feel free to tell me if I made a mistake.
I still think there is a bubble to pop in terms of pricing though. Mobile pricing is caustic to the industry in most cases imo (aka exploiting whales + annoying people to the point of paying w/in apps). I think the $60 game price model was archaic, but we completely swung to the other end of the pricing spectrum. F2P is fine and all, but mobile still seemingly has very little place for anything with an up-front cost from what I can tell, and that's ridiculous. Android is even worse in that regard. If there are some examples of more reasonable F2P models, I'd love to hear them, but at best they seem to play with your patience and force you to play less frequently if you don't want to pay.
This is generally the model Korean f2p games have been operating on for around 20 or so years now.
In the Western PC space though (and increasingly Asia), you see games that focus on getting less per user, and instead on monetizing a higher percentage of users through high engagement levels.
What I mean by that is that instead of getting 2-3% of players to monetize, with maybe 5-10% of those being very big spenders, they try to get 20-30% of their audience to monetize. The way they do this is by removing things like stamina bars and instead focus on making a game that people want to play hundreds or thousands of hours of, and then giving them high value items that seem like really obvious things to buy.
Team Fortress 2, Hearthstone, and Dota are all good examples of this.
In Hearthstone, tons of people buy the Adventures for $25 a pop, and if you spend around $500, you can have basically every card in the game. This obviously goes up over time as new cards are added, but the concept that it's possible to buy everything holds true, and you can easily play for free for as long as you want. This means that people who play the game for six months are likely to show up and buy the previously mentioned adventure since they know it's a good value and they can spend their earned gold on more efficient card packs instead.
By comparison, Clash of Clans hopes to get people who spend $5000-$10,000 a month. However, the actual incremental value of spending money is pretty low, so very few people do it, since they don't get especially attached to a game they can only play for a few minutes at a time anyway.
Now, Hearthstone I detailed in particular because it's actually having pretty good success on mobile, which is unusual for that type of game. The reason we see Clash of Clans' monetization type as the norm is that mobile games try to monetize people who play only a few minutes at a time anyway since that's how they interact with mobile games regardless of what the title is.
In Japan, there is also a title that behaves similarly - White Cat Project (Shiro Neko Project) - in that it's a four player co-op action RPG with no stamina bar, and it frequently makes tremendous amounts of money (#3 or something even higher chart position). It's a really interesting case study in making a more core oriented game for high engagement players and having huge success. IGA was actually bemoaning to Polygon that he had a game like that in development at Konami that got canned before White Cat Project came out. It does still have the same gatcha random draw mechanics as other f2p game though, as does Hearthstone in the form of card packs.
I don't think you're likely to ever see games with an up front cost come back however, even if we see engagement monetization become a well respected business model on the platform.
What if the bubble I am waiting to pop isn't the mobile one, its the AAA-burgeoning budget bubble for the consoles in the West that I am waiting to pop.
I like to compare AAA gaming to Hollywood blockbusters. There aren't a lot of them anymore, and they're increasingly safe, derivative, and lacking in variety, but audiences still seem to eat up the biggest ones in huge numbers.
It's very much a winner takes all market. That said, Warner is seeing some really notable success this year with "smaller" ($40+ million-ish hahahaha) games by virtue of being one of the only publishers releasing major titles in the entire first half of the year, so that will probably attract some more attention on the slightly smaller (but still gargantuan) scale.
I stand more on the idea that mobile is a winners-win-big gamefield with a lot of derivative competition on the mid-low-end but not bereft of modicum successes (like Terabattle), that taps the lucrative and ever-populated casual market. I don't see how that sort of bubble could really burst, what would, in my opinion, be more likely is the "Zynga bubble" bursting which is a localized bubble on a company to company basis as they fail to recapture the audience after their "mobile hit" wears out its welcome. But since the mobile market is so saturated with competitors, so to speak, there will always be someone or some new game to take the limelight and the hoards of money. I would say, therefore, not that there is a bubble burst to worry about but more of a scenario of throwing all your eggs into the mobile basket... and then achieving Zynga status.
Yes, mobile is definitely a polarized market and we certainly do see companies who don't understand their own success fail.
The main difference between mobile and dedicated devices in Japan is that mobile is growing, so there's still growth on the lower end, whereas in Japan there's just an increasingly small pie from which you hope to carve perpetually larger slices to avoid falling in the loser's pool. Otherwise we'd still see increasing investment the same way we did with the amount of money being spent on the twins in the West.
Diversification is generally the best approach for any company sufficiently big and sufficiently talented enough to handle two or more different markets. This is why we see both Capcom and Sega try to handle growing both digital and mobile at the same time while Konami is going entirely mobile, since they lack the remaining talent set to compete in digital or retail in a significant way.
Since the Konami thread is a mess, I'll just post here instead.
While the writing has been on the wall for around half a decade now, the first half of this year has scrawled it across the Shibuya 109.
Competing with AAA in the West is incredibly difficult and tremendously expensive. Consoles are dead locally.
Handhelds still have sales, but they're notably polarized toward the winners and the overall market is shrinking. There are far less million sellers than before even if the biggest games are selling a tremendous number of copies.
Mobile is growing at a tremendous rate, and even with polarization, there's still healthy growth on "lower" end of the top 100. More importantly, traditional publishers are starting to report healthy mobile results and are able to repeatedly generate hits by their own standards.
We've seen Japanese publishers pretty much go into one of two camps. They're either moving almost entirely into mobile + digital with perhaps a few remaining retail titles (see Sega, Konami, Capcom), or they're building a major mobile/digital arm while maintaining a solid if somewhat more conservative retail arm (see Square Enix and Namco). This is a core part of the business for basically everyone.
We're also seeing the number of console platforms reduce in response to this. Sony is unlikely to announce a successor to the Vita given we've yet to hear a single rumbling, Nintendo's NX continues to sound like what's essentially a singular platform with SKUs for both handhelds and televisions, and Microsoft has went from a niche to a non-entity.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
F2P is still(for now) the biggest on PC (revenue wise) and has a fair few entries that aren't blatantly exploitative (particularly among the top earners). Which isn't to say there aren't plentiful bad examples - but the fact that that market had nearly a decade longer to mature than mobile shows.
I'm not convinced if mobile is likely to mature in the same direction though - the basic nature of how most people play mobile games seems to be completely at odds with that. That being said, mobile is growing at rates that nothing else is, hence it's the most attractive train to jump on at the moment.
Nirolak said:
What I mean by that is that instead of getting 2-3% of players to monetize, with maybe 5-10% of those being very big spenders, they try to get 20-30% of their audience to monetize
That's going into extremes though - while 2-3% conversion rates are often considered on the "failing" side (unless your audience is spectacularly large), 30% is on the other extreme that hardly anyone expects to hit (yea WoT did it, but they are exceptional in more ways than one).
Of course since Famitsu are the only ones releasing actual digital numbers. Feel free to disregard everything except Famitsu then if you'd like. I just find it interesting using Famitsu digital numbers along with the other trackers considering they are the only digital sales we get. Obviously since all the numbers we get are merely estimates and not 100 percent accurate none of the numbers I posted are set in stone.
While people in this thread are generally far more reasonable than those in the Konami thread, I think anyone waiting for a bubble to pop has missed what's actually a complete and fundamental disruption of the market. It's not the end of consoles in Japan, but it is their shift to being the secondary market for gaming, and it's not changing for the foreseeable future.
I imagine a lot of people are waiting not for the bubble to pop but for mobile games to mature? Personally I am not against mobile games, I am just against most of the mobile games available right now as they don't provide the kind of entertainment I am interested in.
I'm pretty sure we'll see stamina bars gradually fade out over time. In Monster Strike, not only is the timer at 3min/1stamina (I believed it single-handedly caused PAD to change from a 10min timer to 5min) but you spend no stamina whatsoever if you join a friend's co-op session. Dragon Poker also does the free stamina for co-op play thing plus they straight up give you a free stamina refresh each day, guaranteeing everybody a solid 1-2 hours of play every day.
Thanks for the super detailed reply! I had forgotten about Hearthstone. That's one of the few F2P games I actually understand and respect.
What exactly is wrong with up front costs btw with software? I understand "free" is always really catchy, but what other products you get for free in the world? I feel the web started this "free" trend and mobile followed it. The idea that you now can get large apps like Microsoft Office for free on mobile is kind of absurd imo. As a software dev myself I find it makes no sense. I put in a bunch of work into something, and yet I can't actually charge any consumers for it (at least businesses generally pay up). Investing in a large game that keeps people engaged for 100s and 1000s of hours is really hard and it's possible for the player to never pay a dime even if they loved the game. I used to play the Korean MMO Maplestory and while I played it quite a bit, I didn't pay a dime to the developers. Sometimes a 1-time transaction is just nice to have =/.
I just feel like there's a middle ground that's mostly been lost between the mobile/web market and the ridiculous AAA budgets in the console realm (PC might be the one exception here) =/.
About the affect on Western market. It´s quite possible that in some years it will be standard to wirelessly put the image of your smartphone on a TV and use some peripherals to control your games, when Fifa and Madden get to an acceptable level on smartphones, there´ll likely be shed some bitter tears for anyone that relies too much on 3rd party royalties and isn´t Apple or Google. Going forward having a strong portfolio of IPs will be even more important for the current 1st party companies.
Yes, mobile is definitely a polarized market and we certainly do see companies who don't understand their own success fail.
The main difference between mobile and dedicated devices in Japan is that mobile is growing, so there's still growth on the lower end, whereas in Japan there's just an increasingly small pie from which you hope to carve perpetually larger slices to avoid falling in the loser's pool. Otherwise we'd still see increasing investment the same way we did with the amount of money being spent on the twins in the West.
If you'll humor me (and I'll talk about Nintendo as they're effectively the only hardware manufacturer moving this way at current), I think this hits on what we're (going to be) seeing from Nintendo's forward approach with regards to NX, DeNA, and (in some part) the 3DS/WiiU before all is said and done. That is, an integration of mobile with the home/handheld device that tries to stave off or counter the shrinking pie by bringing in another arm of possible market share.
Consider the current scenario, the only market in which you can make a truly breakout hit akin to the millions sold from mobile's top sellers (Japan only), is to hit it big on the 3DS with some sort of phenomenon. That's hard... and it gets harder the older the 3DS gets and the more Nintendo moves forward. Consider, also, from the opposite end of the pool what mobile is like: a field of huge opportunity but filled to the brim with competition from the lowest commons in derivative works, and entrenched mega-titles that 'hold' attention for a long time and effectively try to monopolize it. (There's also, obviously, ever present OS future-proofing issues which, as we've seen from time to time, can completely crush an indie developer. In some ways, a console/handheld title can provide insurance against this.)
This is where I think Nintendo's current plans are looking to go: put the handheld and the mobile together into a nice package that promises cross-support (and for the developer, cross-growth). In this way, a smaller title that finds modicum of success on mobile can push into the handheld or vise-versa, on the pretense of either "more robust gameplay" or "more on-the-go tie ins/piecemeal treats" respectively. As it currently stands, aside from some lapsed forced app tie-ins for the Creeds or some other games, there's never really been an ecosystem for both and they've been at odds-ends with one another aside from the occasional iOS port of an indie game. Effectively, it would be an attempt to make P&D to P&DZ a mutually beneficial existence to all those involved rather than two companies trying to eat each other's pie (there's also plenty to be said about those who do not like to deal with free-to-play Skinner trappings, and would rather pay upfront for an experience. This is something largely absent on mobile due to the ecosystem of "free or bust", I feel. And is something that can be tapped (and obviously is being tapped) on handhelds). Now obviously, the mega-mobile hits don't really benefit from this as they are raking in millions on the day. But a smaller title that has found a modicum of success can push to make a new, more robust game, that grows the audience in a way that would benefit the mobile title but also grow a base on the handheld. Back and forth. It is what sequels used to do over several years to decades in building a base, now occurring between a "robust title" and "a lite mobile offering". Feed this into the idea of a singular platform rather a handheld/console separate world, and you can tap a market that wants its games on the go or a market that wants its games on the big screen. (Also take for instance the DQ games getting ported to iOS, these could now just be ported to iOS/NX, priced equally, and everyone can get them and, effectively, play them where ever they want whether that be on their phone, on their handheld, or on their console variant of said handheld. All of them aware of one another.)
Nintendo positions their new hardware as per the usual: "Nintendo is here, come play" with a hope to build the console/handheld into a place for more robust gameplay while also give-and-take dealings with mobile to keep gamers interested and invested. As it stands, handhelds on their own just can't survive (nor can consoles in the long run) against the growing and power arm of mobile, but they certainly can carve out a strong niche (as they always have been, really) to survive in the modern market. Eventually, though, I feel the ubiquity of high-grade hardware is going to lead a lot of things into obsolescence.
All that or perhaps I am too optimistic.
Edit: Also as per the discussion in the Q&A thread from Nintendo's IM, this sort of plan also lets them approach the Western audiences with the "big titles" by providing a console form-factor than can run third-party but also high-fidelity Nintendo titles without any increased development costs from Nintendo. Everything will be built to be modular and scalable, and this also leads to the options of having handheld titles be able to try and strike out on the "home front" with fairly low cost of only really having to develop scalable textures.
"Worried" in what sense? Mobile isn't going to replace the experiences traditional consoles offer. It never will. It was never intended to. It doesn't even really try to. That isn't the argument anywhere. What the traditional console space should be worried about is relevance in resource - both in investment resource and talent resource.
Japan is a prime example of this. With traditional sales in decline, publishers are refocusing their business resources to what makes more money. So that means funds which were previously invested into making more console games are now going to mobile R&D instead. At the same time, creators who used to work in the traditional console space are finding it more lucrative to work in the mobile space instead. This means they're no longer creating content for the console space.
It's not about replacement, it's about fading to irrelevancy. Mobile games won't offer the experiences people who only like traditional console games enjoy. But such people will increasingly find less games made for them, and people who used to make games they liked might no longer be making those type of games.
"Worried" in what sense? Mobile isn't going to replace the experiences traditional consoles offer. It never will. It was never intended to. It doesn't even really try to. That isn't the argument anywhere. What the traditional console space should be worried about is relevance in resource - both in investment resource and talent resource.
It's not about replacement, it's about fading to irrelevancy.
Good post. Especially the part about content being created for mobile. Look at small shareware titles that there used to be for console, now its all on mobile and big AAA title is the focus for console and seeing higher sales than before. (Generalisation)
Although reading posts in other threads I get the sense that a lot of people agree that the mobile industry is about to do to gaming what the mobile industry did to camera industry.
It's not that drastic at all. Consoles still exist and sell for a reason. They will continue to exist and sell in the same way that high end camera market still exists, camera industry is still there, just different and different focus.
Although reading posts in other threads I get the sense that a lot of people agree that the mobile industry is about to do to gaming what the mobile industry did to camera industry.
It's not that drastic at all. Consoles still exist and sell for a reason.
It's a very good comparison. Smartphoens basically killed the lower end "casual" camera market because every phone provided cameras which were good enough for what the average person really wants out of a camera. They can't compete with real professional cameras, but that doesn't matter. There's still a market for those, but a much smaller and more focused one.
Games are the same way. It's just entertainment to most people. Time wasters. It's not going to be as drastic as cameras because there's still a lot of strong brands and money being poured into traditional gaming. But in a decade? Who knows.
It's a very good comparison. Smartphoens basically killed the lower end "casual" camera market because every phone provided cameras which were good enough for what the average person really wants out of a camera. They can't compete with real professional cameras, but that doesn't matter. There's still a market for those, but a much smaller and more focused one.
Games are the same way. It's just entertainment to most people. Time wasters. It's not going to be as drastic as cameras because there's still a lot of strong brands and money being poured into traditional gaming. But in a decade? Who knows.
Yeh, as someone who works in the Mobile Telecommunications industry it's really amazing to see just how the landscape has changed over the past 15 years. If you told Nikon that mobile was a threat to the camera industry before 2000 they would have laughed in your face. After all the camera industry growth was doubling almost every decade and the camera companies at the time were very profitable.
But what happened, well mobile camera came along and now there were 1.75 billion camera phones sold in 2014 compared to just 100 million dedicated camera devices. We are now taking more than 1 trillion pictures per year with the overwhelming majority coming from camera phones (even though dedicated camera users usually take more photos over device lifetime).
And look at what happened to the dedicated camera industry after that, back in 2000 for example, the biggest camera brands were of course Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Polaroid, Minolta and Konica.
Now the biggest camera brands are Nokia, Samsung and Apple, all because of smartphones. In fact Minolta and Konica have now gone out of business, Kodak went bankrupt, Polaroid went bankrupt twice and Canon and Nikon have had to radically change their busines to focus on the niche professional camera market.
So really mobile has taken over camera, that was a very drastic and quick shift. With gaming mobile is taking more and more of the pie and will certainly take over traditional console revenue in the next few years.
But it's not as drastic as the camera industry crisis. But we will see Sony and Microsoft react by focusing more on core gamer but also trying to converge with mobile to provide cross platform experiences to cater to both core and casual. Developers will focus on creating big selling titles (generally) and the lower budget, quick buck games will go to mobile more.
So console is far from dying, but its changing and the industry as a whole certainly isn't as big or the same as it was 10 years ago.
To put some numbers here. Camera industry is 95% mobile, game industry is only around 40% mobile at the moment.
But it's not as drastic as the camera industry crisis. But we will see Sony and Microsoft react by focusing more on core gamer but also trying to converge with mobile to provide cross platform experiences to cater to both core and casual. Developers will focus on creating big selling titles (generally) and the lower budget, quick buck games will go to mobile more.
So console is far from dying, but its changing and the industry as a whole certainly isn't as big or the same as it was 10 years ago.
To put some numbers here. Camera industry is 95% mobile, game industry is only around 40% mobile at the moment.
My only quip would be that cameras don't really need hyper-optics or unique hardware anymore for doing what they do like they used to need, whereas control schemes are tantamount in a gaming experience. The pocket camera, especially, never offered anything that a current phone can't provide, while DSLRs are just too big and priced too high to be general consumer goods.
I mean, let's look at us here in the lab, we have a 20k$ microscope system with a very nice, powerful computer connected to it for image processing and image tracking, and our images are gathered by... a bootstrapped Ziess Optics Lumia. Why? Because it cost a fraction of the price of getting a dedicated camera without sacrificing much of anything. This same camera is used to color tracking, swapped easily around because its a simple and small phone, to do nm-scale laser imaging of photonic structures. (A curious note, a lot of the vendors for these digital high-grade cameras are suffering from this. More and more labs are no longer buying their cameras.)
This is what I was saying previously about high-caliber tech becoming so ubiquitous. I don't need a high-tech super camera anymore, I don't need to pay several thousand dollars for high-quality imaging technology... I can just buy a cheap-o phone and duct-tape it to a microscope.
Conversely, with gaming, this is a bit more as you said... different. Phones/mobile will offer a huge breadth of gaming but in a particular style as limited by the hardware. (In the camera side, there's no real hardware limits once the chipset becomes adequately powerful.) But what we could see if an emergence of SHIELD-like peripherals for phone streaming or otherwise... though I suspect that will take time and be, possibly, too large a risk to follow. That said, though, the core will become more and more focused upon because a casual player can largely find their interest satiated from mobile. (And tying back to what I said before, I think this is where Nintendo wants to put itself. Accessible to both.)
lovely topic lately, thanks everyone.my only critics to the last posts is that nobody is giving my a optimistic interpretation of future nintendo outlook
