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Nintendo President On Future Of Gaming
Thanks to IGN Cube for their summary of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's keynote speech at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show. Interestingly, Iwata suggested that "...gamers are getting older and tastes are becoming more sophisticated", but didn't necessarily see that as a good thing for industry growth, "because gamers might buy fewer games due to longer play value and a desire to play only software with very high production values." He also remained unconvinced that convergence of functionality for game consoles was the right path, saying: "Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, it troubled me that we had moved to a hardware where the sole function wasn't playing games" and concluded: "It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone. I don't agree that multi-function hardware is the only answer."
Doesn't "...gamers are getting older and tastes are becoming more sophisticated" disagree with ""It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone"? Which is it?
I don't think that this is mutually exclusive at all. It's not as if young people don't play video games. In fact, the aging of the 'first generation' of video gamers has significantly spread the range of ages that games.
I cannot imagine a neo-luddite buying a console for a 3 year old, but my 3 year old likes to play on my GC. He thinks Zelda is great, and runs around talking about 'adventure boy', and that piglet game, well, it's piglet! Add to that the fact that I'm in my mid-30s, and we play these games *together* (I get through the hard parts, he runs around), this is a much bigger spectrum of ages than the 12-18 that one might initially percieve as 'video game ripe'.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
I don't think the two are in disagreement. He's likely differentiating between "gamers" and "people who play games".
Someone who just plays games might be the guy who pops in Halo and plays with his buddies for an hour and a half before they head out to the bar, or the little kid that likes to play Kingdom Hearts because he wants to hear Donald talk.
A gamer is someone who would, say, post messages in a Slashdot Games forum to debate the finer points of speech given by a Nintendo executive. =)
How about we put it this way: "A game machine should not be unnecessarily complicated."
I think we can all get on board with that.
"Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, it troubled me that we had moved to a hardware where the sole function wasn't playing games" and concluded: "It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone. I don't agree that multi-function hardware is the only answer."
It amazes me that Nintendo manages to refer to its proprietary disc DRM strategy as some sort of feature year after year and never gets called on it. When you're using a full size DVD-ROM drive for your games, tossing in movie and CD playback is trivial. It takes hardly any resources to add that and certainly doesn't take away from game production/functionality. But when you desperately, desperately want better DRM in your console, you have to make some sacrifices, like added features.
"...because gamers might buy fewer games due to longer play value and a desire to play only software with very high production values."
And the solution that Nintendo has already used for this, of course, is to implement the e-Reader in its GBA games so that you need to pay $4 or so per pack for new cards just to unlock the features that are in the game that you already paid for, like the extra levels in the newest Super Mario Advance game or the special attacks in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire.
Why do these guys think that giving the customer more bang for their buck is a bad thing? Do they really think that that's the way to defeat the PS2 and PS3, which offer (or will offer) DVD playback, music CD playback, backwards compatibility, games that you don't need to buy peripherals or cards for, and everything else that they can possibly squeeze into your $200 console and $50-$60 games?