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Life After the Video Game Crash
codecasting writes "There's an interesting, very satirical story over at David Wong's Pointless Waste of Time where he makes a good case for the upcoming death of the video game industry. His key points include gaming platforms largely reaching a technological plateau, the aging of the 'Original Gamers' audience, and the slew of games that are just copies of the same game from last year, but with a new title and different cars/guns/bikinis/etc. An interesting and humorous read."
Who remembers the big shakeout of the '83?
Articles like this are not written to make insightful points, that are written to waste your time by making stupid (but funny) ones. By posting it to slashdot you have made their goddamned month, wasting 10,000X the amount of time they can normally get people to waste.
Congratulations on being trolled by a troll that tells you it's trolling before it trolls you.
I don't think he's saying that the video game market will die completely, rather, I think he's making the case that without an innovative, "nust-have" game, it will undergo another reduction in size/units sold, much like it did in the 80's after the 2600 craze ended.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Nintendo has for years been by far the most profitable of the big three video game console manufacturers. It was only in the last year when earnings were less than expected. That does not imply that the GameCube was a failure.
The game industry has been around a long time. It can adapt and change all it wants.
The real reason the game industry is going to die, though, is going to be me, the original gamer parent. All of us with Ataris and NESs and SNESs are now having kids.
I plan on playing video games with my kids.
How many times is my 8 year-old going to have to get beat down by me in Street Fighter 6 EX Alpha Plus+ before he chucks the controller across the room in disgust for having lost the 537th game in a row? How many UT2k12 frags and gibings before he breaks down and cries? Will I have to score 300 points in Madden 2011 before he finally gives in to my superior hand/eye coordination?
My kids are going to *hate* playing video games because dad is either using the system already, or they're going to get their noob ass handed to them each and every time they play.
If you take this analogy, the gaming industry can come out with a new iteration of the same game every five years. So while the gaming industry would probably never be wiped out, it would have to cool down a bit: there are not so many different game types, and the current upgrade frequency might not be sustainable once the novelty wears off.
If you think about it there is a huge variety of different movie types, video-game diversity is not that big. I don't think that video-gaming will go the way of the dodo, but there will be some adaptation from the current model. I hope this will bring out new interesting games.
You do NOT need any GBAs to beat, or even play, FF:CC. It has a single-player mode, which is good by itself (it's not some tacked-on thing to an FPS or anything). It's just that a multiplayer GBA/GC mode is something not only new to FF, but to games in general, and so it tends to get the most attention.
Why is Japan 'Where it counts'?
What percentage of the video game market is Japan anyway? 25%?
Of the 3 big markets in the world, Japan/Asia is the smallest.
The following figures will be total sales as of the end of 2003 (Jan 13, 2004, for PS2).
North America
PlayStation 2 - 29.26 million
Xbox - 8.6 million
GameCube - 7.46 million
Game Boy Advance - 23.78 million
Japan / Asia
PlayStation 2 - 16.18 million
Xbox - 1.4 million (~425,000 Japan alone)
GameCube - 3.37 million
Game Boy Advance - 12.66 million
Europe / PAL
PlayStation 2 - 24.56 million
Xbox - 3.7 million
GameCube - 3.11 million (~3 million Europe alone)
Game Boy Advance - 12.98 million
Worldwide
PlayStation 2 - 70 million
Xbox - 13.7 million
GameCube - 13.94 million
Game Boy Advance - 49.42 million
No reason to lie.
ALL the articles on PWOT are parodies.
erm . . . Hello?
Is this thing on?
Anyone?
Saxamaphone!
Its more then 6 - 8, but yes you are more or less right. Theres a book called 36 Dramatic Sitautions which lists all the plot types, and all of their plot twists. You can read a synopsis here. Required reading for any writer.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
S. John Ross made a list of plots at http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm
The RPG references pencil and paper RPG's, but it's still pretty insightful when applied to computer games.