Eteric Rice said:
I agree.
I think this focus on visuals started because of competition. I don't think it was always that way, though. I know in Japan, the Famicom retailed for $63, and look at all the games and genres it spawned. It wasn't until the competition came about that Nintendo actually made the SNES.
And what happened when they made it? They touted the 16-bit graphics. I bet a good 80% of the advertising for the 16-bit consoles touted it's visuals. Heck, even some of the NES commercials.
From what someone in another thread told me, Japanese arcades still mostly run in 480p. It would also explain why Japan isn't bothered by the Wii's SD when Japan has the highest HD penetration in the world. Maybe their advertising didn't focus so much on visuals early on, so they don't care?
I dunno, but I think there's probably something to this theory.
Well, yes, but what I found somewhat crazy (although it is rooted in a well-founded theory, as I shall explain in a moment) about the idea was that, not only was there a focus on competition at some point (which led to a focus on the most demanding customers, that's to say avid/hardcore gamers), but that, somehow, avid gamers fell for it. And when I say "fell for it", I mean it.
Maybe we, the people who liked the SNES and Genesis (and the systems that followed), would have liked a true alternative (not an incremental upgrade) just as much, if not more than what we actually got. Maybe... we didn't really
want or
need all those upgrades, but since we already liked games, and there was no surprising alternative (everybody had the same approach), we accepted the upgrades without even
starting to think about questioning those upgrades.
I mean, if you think about it for a minute, a good chunk of us discovered games during the NES era, back in the 80s, when we were kids/teens, which means two things: first, that games were still fresh for us, so we were ready to accept any kind of upgrade without getting bored, even if it meant getting nothing revolutionary; second, that we were easily impressed. Who wasn't impressed by all these new colourful 16-bit graphics at the time? I know I was (not completely, but still).
So, what was that thing I previously alluded to that makes me think that my idea, or, say, my hunch was actually more reasonable than it seemed at first? Well, the notion that consumers don't know what they want. In business, guys like Christensen (the author of the books on disruption that Nintendo used to make the Wii and the DS) have come to the conclusion that the customers, in most cases, don't know what they want. In fact, it's even worse: not only can't they formulate in an articulate way what they really need or want, they might even reject it when it's first introduced to them. That's what happened with the NES in the US, after all: Arakawa had some kids play Super Mario Bros., and they said it was horrible. Not okay, not so-so... HORRIBLE. Can you picture that? Super Mario Bros. + kids = horrible? It's really incredible, when you think about it.
So in the end, it goes back to what I said in the second paragraph: we never got an alternative to the 16-bit war. We've never known anything other than upgrades, upgrades and upgrades (which, by the way, doesn't exclude innovation on the developers' side, but it might ditch revolutionary concepts in favour of refined experiences), so getting our heads around the idea of anything substantially different and surprising than what seemed logical was almost impossible. It's as if I tried to guess anything about next-gen other than refined motion controls, better graphics and/or better online. It's almost impossible to imagine! It's the companies' jobs to find how to surprise us, after all, isn't it?
We've come to accept sheer technological progress or linear evolution because systems like the NES made us passionate gamers, and it's easy to accept the logical evolutions of something you're passionate about. I put forward the idea that maybe, just maybe, that's not what we
truly wanted.
I'm sorry, maybe you find it ridiculous, insulting even, or that I'm overthinking it, but I think that's just me, it's as if I had opened the door to a whole world of questions about the video game industry and my hobby. I'm sort of confused right now. It's 2:00 AM here, which doesn't help.
Creepy.
[EDIT] Thinking about it a bit more, I think I've finally understood the concept of "falling for marketing", and it's a vicious circle: the company
thinks it knows what the consumers want, so they do it, maybe in the most sincere way, and the consumers accept it, because they can't imagine an alternative, which creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. The consumers accept it, so the companies think their marketing was right, so they continue. And then, some day, consumers and companies alike wake up: the ones finally get bored of the same old shit, and the others realize that what they thought to be right was wrong. Does that mean that companies themselves can fall for their own marketing and regret it later?