GBA - A Wasteland For Creativity?

jvm writes "Having been intrigued by heated discussions over licensed games and stagnant creativity in the videogame market, I did some investigation into just how many original titles can be found in the library of games for Nintendo's GameBoy Advance. Depressingly, out of the hundreds of games catalogued, only 9% are not licensed, not sequels, and not remakes of older games. That's fewer than three dozen games, and most of those fall into well-known categories. Graphs and downloadable data are provided for interested readers to do their own examination."

Comments

Reasons why the lack of creativity

[Alpha27]

• Sometimes new things do not get a good chance when they first come out so it becomes more of a cult following. Therefore it's less of a chance of a good sell, and return on investment.
• People like franchises/sequels.
• Some new games are just reinventions of old ideas.
• How new can you get? Many games are similar to each other. We have FPS, RTS, Platformers, RPGs, fighting, sports, card, 2d scrollers, etc. Each genre has their style, and everyone sticks to the style that works.

I'm curious to see a report on other platforms, including SNES, and alot of the older systems. I wouldn't be suprised to see the percentage of new games shrink overtime.

Re:Reasons why the lack of creativity

[jvmatthe]

The definition of original for this article was chosen because it was unambiguous.

Does a title use a license from a movie, cartoon, etc.? Is it a direct sequel? Does it use properties developed in previous games (i.e. is it a franchise game)? Is it a remake of an earlier game? Is it a retrofit of a game from another platform?

As far as I know, each of those questions can be answered definitively "yes" or "no", without debate. Had I chosen to try to find a definition by which Wario Ware, Inc. was considered original, it would have necessarily included defining original gameplay.

The definition of original gameplay is not something I'm even going to attempt at this point. I admit up front (and even at the end) that there is a weakness with the definition. But to push it further makes it an issue of opinion, and probably an intractable problem (for a single person or even a small group of people). Intractable because one would need to play each game considered in its entirety and make a decision, a subjective one, on whether it had enough original gameplay to be considered original.

Hope that makes the choice of definition a bit more clear. It wasn't that Wario Ware, Inc. was ignored. Quite the opposite: it was considered and then binned appropriately under the working definition.

We've Got to Support Originality!

[Gothic_Walrus]

One note - Advance Wars is actually a continuation of a previously Japan-only series of Game Boy games.

Unfortunately, originality on all consoles has been vanishing as of late. Publishers make the easy decision and decide to go with what's guaranteed to sell. No one really needs four different NFL games for each season or a tie-in piece of shovelware for every blockbuster movie, but that's what we're getting.

As was noted in the article, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of us, the gamers. As long as we're content with retreads of old franchises and sequel after sequel to an unexpected hit, that's what we'll receive. It would be nice to see console manufacturers award originality (maybe a price break on the media or the license fees?), but that probably won't happen. Therefore, we, the gamers, need to support originality. We need to buy the games that are different, the ones that take chances. Praising them isn't enough. More often than not, even a mediocre original game is far better than a licensed one. The problem is that we don't do that. We buy the franchises, the crappy licenses (Enter the Matrix, anyone?). We don't support originality, making it an unneeded risk for publishers.

Until we reform our buying habits, nothing is going to change.

This shouldnt surprise you

[Cassius105]

This is to be expected

you cant really expect there to be that much creativity when 90% of the ideas for that technology were used up a decade age

Meh...

[JMZero]

You can go ahead and buy original games (Fantavision? Blix: The Time Sweeper?), I'll keep buying good games (Metroid Prime, Zelda: TWW, Yoshi's Island GBA).

I think we need to realize a couple things. First, "sequel" doesn't mean "not original". Second, "original" doesn't often mean "good".