Where is this delusion that the PS4 is suddenly going to revive the days of the PS2 coming from? The PS2 days are long dead. Even if the PS4 had all of the same factors behind the success of the PS2, which it doesn't, it's foolish to expect that Sony can simply follow that model and achieve the same success. The explosion of the casual market changed everything.
Where is this assertion that I made any suggestion that the days of the PS2 are coming back? All I said was that in order to be successful the PS4 is going to have to tap into more than the enthusiast market, and it will have to. But there's no inherent necessity to attempt to tap into all markets at once, that's how you end up with a product that appeals to none like the Wii U.
Big publishers are increasingly unable to take risks because so much money is spent on production values and producing the most impressive graphics. Last gen created a situation where developers were one bomb away from bankruptcy. How can developers possibly take risks with new I.Ps or gameplay in such an environment? None of the major gameplay innovation this gen came from the big console developers. They came from indies. How did one guy from Swedan invent the monumental achievement that is Minecraft when voxels have been around for years? The homogenization of genres and sequelitus in the are widely agreed upon problems in the industry, and they're all the result developers afraid to take risks
Big publishers have always been risk averse. They'll be risk averse on powerful hardware, they'll be risk averse on weaker hardware.
When you're one person, or a small group, working out of a garage without shareholders and quarterly earnings you don't need to be as risk averse.
Interesting way to put it. So if hardware is the "enabler," what would any good therapist recommend in a situation with a delinquent and an enabler? They wouldn't just say that by fixing the delinquent's behavior alone that the problem would be solved. They would say that the "enabler" also needs to stop enabling. It might sound outright authoritarian, but developers this past gen have proven they can't act rationally, as evidenced by the number of them that went out of business. There needs to be some signal to devs that they need to slow down insatiable need for better graphics, but there also needs to be something that pushes the industry forward and excites the masses. Holding back hardware power is an artificial restraint, but it is necessary until we can find a solution to the graphics arms race. The easiest solution is to massively expand gaming's audience, and we're not going to be able to do that with the current amount of hardcore gamers.
The "delinquent" is the consumer market that drives demand. Consumer demand shapes consumer goods. There isn't a fix, nor does there really need to be.
Everyone chases COD dollars because that's where the dollars are. Everyone pushes shiny and pretty because that's what people are buying. Set-pieces and shooters are in vogue. If and when they go out of fashion, publishers will move on and if EA and Acti-Blizz could put out games with PS2 graphics and call it a day, they would.
Meanwhile, the idea that motion controls still excites the masses really requires some sort of evidential support, considering there's sales data that suggests the opposite.
That's your own preference, and I'm sure you'll find a bunch of people here who took one look at motion controls and said they were a stupid gimmick and never actually tried them.
Of course there's still a ton of potential in motion controls. One of the widest criticisms of the Wii was that it was not accurate enough. Nintendo attempted to fix this with the Motion Plus, but they only released a handful of games for it. We never got to see what true motion controls is like, nor did we see very much how they can be combined with more hardcore genres. Zelda Skyward Sword gave us a taste, but there's still a lot of room for refinement. I would be thrilled to see what would happen if developers outside of Nintendo took the Wii remote seriously and what would come out of it.
I never said that innovation is limited to motion controls, but keep on trying to pigeon-hole me into your caricature of various Nintendo fanboys. Innovation can occur with our without motion controls, but the Wii proved that a new control scheme can encourage a boost in creativity. The Wii library might have not been your cup-of-tee, but the industry no longer needs to cater elusively to the hardcore, and it needs to take everyone's tastes into account.
Innovation for the sake of innovation is indeed a bad thing, but if you actually understood what I've been saying, you would know that's not what I'm suggesting. The industry needs to change. Optimism surrounding the recent console launches notwithstanding, the traditional console industry is in a crisis. Even people here are coming around to the fact that this will be the last console generation. We cannot continue to keep on doing what we've always been doing and ignore casual gamers.
I didn't say they were a stupid gimmick; they're certainly not to my taste, but I completely recognise that there was a large market for what they offered. "was" is the operative word. And I also recognise there are some things that they do better than traditional controls. "some" being the operative word, as they also come with their own unique and inherent limitations. I'm perfectly capable of separating my preferences from examination of the current market situation, where Just Dance is a declining franchise, where the fitness genre drops 50% year over year, where a console released that tried to concurrently appeal to both enthusiast and casual markets has failed at either.
You would be thrilled if everybody invested in motion controls and combined them more with core gaming. That's nice. Is there anything to suggest the wider marketplace is after that though? Is the casual market that's seemingly vacated the console space for their smartdevices hankering for more precise motion controls to bring them back? Is the core market that drives tie ratios up and buys annualized franchises crying out for more integration of these functions into the titles? No.
I'd be thrilled if Japan could get it's act together and release more RPGs. But they wouldn't sell in the current market.
You stated it [motion control] was the
most relevant possible direction and I'm sorry but I entirely fail to see how. There are plentiful alternative routes to innovation in games that are just as, if not more, relevant than control schemes. And you still, as yet, haven't offered particularly strong argument as to why that's the best and most relevant way forward. You state a boost in creativity, yet don't elaborate on what exactly that entailed and how it's any more "creative!" than the apparently creatively bankrupt wastelands that are the PS3 and 360 libraries.
I don't necessarily disagree the industry needs to change. It needs things like variable pricing models and appropriate budgeting for those models. Meanwhile, "we" can keep doing what we've been doing and buy things that appeal to us, the onus is not on the consumer to change their appetites, it's on producers to cater to them.
It does not necessitate a wholesale move to primarily catering towards a comparatively fickle market by focusing on a control paradigm that they seemingly no longer care about. And it does not need some sort of draconian restriction on the march of technology in what is fundamentally a technology driven industry.
EDIT: Oh, and I'm not sure why Microsoft's
NSA spycam improved motion controller doesn't enter into this discussion at all. Kinect 2 is going to be bundled into every XB1 to save us from ourselves.