Nintendo and the art of industry revitalization





As you may have heard, Nintendo head Satoru Iwata did not announce a new name for the Revolution at GDC. I guess we'll have to wait till E3 for that one. Instead, his keynote speech titled "Disrupting Development" focused on Nintendo's different approach to game development.

Of particular interest to me was the story of how Brain Age came into the world, and how Nintendo is using the DS to change how traditional games are played by adding an extra but simple layer of interactivity (see the demonstration of the new Zelda game on DS for the perfect example).

It just underscores that Nintendo looks at game development in a different way than other companies do, especially Western publishers -- who are all too often hung up on merely copying whatever's currently popular, usually adding a popular license or celebrity name to it in the process. It's been clear since E3 2004 that Western developers do not understand the DS--nay, they don't want to understand the DS--and its "different" approach as long as they can keep shoveling out the same games in the same genres just to have everyone continue buying them. Likewise they're not going to understand the Revolution, either. But it's got to catch up to them eventually (right?) and I have to wonder: Is the mainstream US audience that loves Grand Theft Auto, GTA clones, sports games and anything with a license ever going to...ya know...get bored of games because everything pandering to their tastes plays nearly exactly the same? What's the market going to look like if they do? It'd be ugly.

The bigger question, I suppose, is if those mainstream people are willing to keep spending money on consecutive $400-500 game systems and the $60 games that play on them (plus any subscription fee to play online) if all they're buying en masse are just newer/cooler versions of the games they already own. Price has already steered me away from games I might be interested in if they were $40. I love the demos of both The Outfit and Blazing Angels on 360. I'm not gonna spend $60 on either one, though. And with each consecutive Xbox Live Arcade game I've become more frugal -- at first I bought a slew of those games, now I've shut off the tap if the demo can't hook me in five minutes or less. (It hasn't helped that the last few games haven't been worth $10, IMO.)

Then wIth games being so damn expensive, will outlets like GameFly or RedOctane become a cash-strapped gamer's only alternative? I don't see that helping the industry any. And the market for used games is only going to start sucking the money out of the new business even faster in the future. Gamestop deals like their current "bring in 2 used Xbox 360 games, get 1 free" are extremely tempting (though I still try hard not to shop there).

Anyway, this blog post was more one of stream-of-consciousness questions and observations than of answers. There might be a point in there but I'm currently too tired to dig it up. I dunno, what do you guys think?

Posted: Fri - March 24, 2006 at 02:43 AM         | |

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