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

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.

Re:Reasons why the lack of creativity

[PainKilleR-CE]

I noticed the article also forgot to mention something else that was blatantly obvious:
The top two original titles (Golden Sun and Advanced Wars) both have sequels now.

Of course, he also ignored franchise titles with original gameplay, such as Wario Ware, Inc. which could be viewed as a commentary on the game industry very much in line with the article, if you follow the storyline. It's much easier to simply examine the titles and figure out which are sequels or franchise games than to figure out what titles actually have original gameplay.