Support NeoGAF

[The Crimson Beast]

The issue is time. Most people have jobs and other things that need their attention before they can sit down and enjoy a game. I make an effort and come to neogaf, watch streamers etc. during my downtime at work so I know about non mainstream games. Other people don't make that effort so they just buy call of duty to play with their friends. This doesn't mean innovation is not welcome or that Cod is the best game of all time.

 

[Alex_Mexico]

The most "samey" ones (Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess) are the best selling ones.

You're half wrong.

TP, which is very samey and by-the-numbers Zelda game that's almost a remake of OoT, is one of the best selling games of the franchise if not THE best one (being out on Nintendo's most successful console certainly helped) but by far the worst selling 3D Zeldas are the weirdest ones: MM, WW and SS (even this one which also came out on Wii).

TP was samey, sold buttloads. SS wasn't, it sold a "modest" (for Zelda standards) number only.

Hell, for some godforsaken reason the OoT 3D remake sold more on 3DS than A Link Between Worlds!

 

[Videoneon]

Let's face it:

Us gamers are not that different from most other people and many of us are

-creatures of habit

-prone to capital r Reaction

This is basically like a wild variation on the classic "gamers are progressive nerds who fight back against the ostracizing of their youth" meme

 

[akachan ningen]

You're half wrong.

TP, which is very samey and by-the-numbers Zelda game that's almost a remake of OoT, is one of the best selling games of the franchise if not THE best one (being out on Nintendo's most successful console certainly helped) but by far the worst selling 3D Zeldas are the weirdest ones: MM, WW and SS (even this one which also came out on Wii).

TP was samey, sold buttloads. SS wasn't, it sold a "modest" (for Zelda standards) number only.

Hell, for some godforsaken reason the OoT 3D remake sold more on 3DS than A Link Between Worlds!

You're confusing correlation and causation.

It's more likely that tp outsold ss because tp came out at the peak of the wii's popularity while ss came out near the end of the cycle. But we can't know for sure either way.

 

[Mandoric]

The issue is time. Most people have jobs and other things that need their attention before they can sit down and enjoy a game. I make an effort and come to neogaf, watch streamers etc. during my downtime at work so I know about non mainstream games. Other people don't make that effort so they just buy call of duty to play with their friends. This doesn't mean innovation is not welcome or that Cod is the best game of all time.

I think games and gamers are especially prone to "but there's no time!"; no one balks at occasionally walking into a movie or a concert for two hours, or settling back with a bottle of wine and losing the world until tomorrow morning, but for games in particular 30 minutes is seen as an unmanageably long commitment for a lot of people.

 

[Elaugaufein]

I have little love for innovation for its own sake wedged into $product ( in the exploration / research sense, it makes sense to look into all possibilities). Random new thing is not necessarily good for all situations. But I appreciate well done innovation when its applied appropriately (the Wii for all its flawed opened up some really interesting ideas and the Kinect has expanded on that).

 

[The Crimson Beast]

I think games and gamers are especially prone to "but there's no time!"; no one balks at occasionally walking into a movie or a concert for two hours, or settling back with a bottle of wine and losing the world until tomorrow morning, but for games in particular 30 minutes is seen as an unmanageably long commitment for a lot of people.

movies and concerts are social things though. Gaming is considered alone time. You can't really hold a conversation with somebody in the room while you are the only one staring at the screen.

 

[Laughing Banana]

I kinda dislike how the word "innovation" now seems to take precedence over "good game" in the heads of many right now. Or how the supposed lack of the former means a definitive proof that a game lacks the legitimacy to be called as the latter.

Especially since the word itself seems to be used nowadays to simply complement act of pretetentiousness and just lost all its meaning :/

 

[Kozak]

What rubbish.

Just because FIFA and COD are seemingly the same game every year doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

There are heaps of minor innovations.

Gamers love innovation. Everybody loves innovation.

 

[Mandoric]

movies and concerts are social things though. Gaming is considered alone time. You can't really hold a conversation with somebody in the room while you are the only one staring at the screen.

That's true, but it also scales to "don't bother Dad when the game's on, or Mom during her soaps" examples. I'd almost be inclined to chalk it up to gamers instinctually gamifying real life, and treating all interruptions as failed timed quests while their own entertainment can be retried indefinitely.

What rubbish.

Just because FIFA and COD are seemingly the same game every year doesn't mean they aren't innovating.

There are heaps of minor innovations.

Gamers love innovation. Everybody loves innovation.

 

[AgeEighty]

Your point about wholly innovative games being less well received than their older brethren isn't much of an observation because new games obviously haven't had a chance to build a fanbase yet and they usually don't have the kind of marketing push that the really big titles rely on. And when a new title really is thought of as innovative, and gets some publicity, it can do quite well (Antichamber, Journey, and so on). It's also important to not conflate "innovative" with "new". New ideas aren't always innovative, and most of them should be expected to fail to perform.

Well, I never did say that I was talking about "new" games. And I'm also not talking about the immediate post-release reaction to innovative games; I'm talking about their long-term sales performance. Many of these games fail to ever sell very well, even after months of positive buzz.

Look at Okami: it failed to sell on two different platforms set years apart, and while we don't know sales on PS3, it's possible it's actually failed to sell three different times across seven years. (The increasingly steep PSN Flash Sale discounts certainly provide a clue.) I'd say that's plenty of time for it to "build a fanbase". And yet every LTTP thread for the game is still full of people saying "I always meant to play that, but..."

Gaming history is littered with such examples. Journey is, I think, an exception to the rule. There are always a few.

And I don't think you can blame marketing all that much, at least within the sphere of enthusiast gamers. There's not a whole lot we don't hear about in some fashion, because we're actively monitoring the gaming industry vs. relying on having information pushed to us.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

B]And yet every LTTP thread for the game is still full of people saying "I always meant to play that, but..."
[/B]

But what? They were all too busy playing "non-innovative" games like FIFA and CoD? Or perhaps they wanted to play other innovative games...