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Nintendo's Iwata - Innovate or Die
Linker writes "CNN/Money has interviewed Satoru Iwata, where the president of Nintendo Ltd. says the gaming industry is in the midst of a crisis of innovation, which could lead to its demise. The idea, of course, is to justify the existence of the upcoming Nintendo DS, but Iwata does point out that the gaming market in Japan has been shrinking in the past few years - and the U.S. and Europe may do so soon."
What's the fundemental basis for each console generation.
1st Generation Consoles - 2D
2nd Generation Consoles - 3D
Each generation defined a genre of games that eventually saturated the market. Having the 2nd generation recede is not that surprising. The question will be "Who will invent the next unique genre of games that spurs the market once again."Most companies won't though.
Pushing the same crap over and over is fairly risk free.
God knows I own every Zelda game (excluding the 3D0 crap).
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
I agree, but also can suck in younger minds. When i was little i played heaps of Atari. Moctezuma, Bruce Lee and the like, and all we could comment with my friends was, thats a cool game.
I have listened to my younger cousins conversations regarding games and its like a subculture where they describe places they've been, weapons they own and monsters they kill. "How do you get super magic level 3 armor without the money?, you must first talk to the wizard and bla bla bla....". Ive only seen such avid and complex talks between chess and go players, so basically games as we know them have reached their growth curve.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
from the article: "Dance Dance Revolution," which U.S. officials strongly resisted bringing over from Japan, has proven to be a lasting change to gameplay.
then it doesnt say why they resisted it. And who the officials are.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Funny, your first half of your message was the exact opposite of my problem - games have gotten _too_ non-linear. I find that in many modern games I spend far, far too much time wandering around lost, hoping for some indication of anything that will help me progress. If a game is an action game, then I want action. I want to move forward into the next room and fight something exciting. Not wander around retracing my steps hoping to find something I missed because I've exausted all the possible action in the region.
IMHO, if gamedevs want to innovate, include more easy to use design tools within the game. Either as part of the gameplay (robot construction kits between missions) or outside (a nice, easy map editor for making deathmatch maps).
Star Craft had the best of this IMHO - the gameplay allows players to be very creative, and the mapping tool was easy to use, polished, and powerful enough for most amateurs (hardcore modders preferred Total Annihilation, as they should).
As networking gets better and the industry moves more towards easy design tools due to the insane effort needed to make modern game content, I expect to see more games like Second Life, where the player is surrounded and embellished in player-generated content from his peers.
IMHO, I want to see multiplayer online games where all you need to mod is patience, webspace to host, and imagination (and no, relying on text-editors and consoles are not acceptable options).
the gaming industry is in the midst of a crisis of innovation
Two words: online gaming
If we continue down the same path as we have in the past, people may become tired of gaming
In economics they call this Diminishing Marginal Utility. The more you consume something, the less gain you experience from consuming one more unit of that thing. To combat this, marketers need to offer you something novel. I don't know why anyone would think that video-games are imune to this...
Why is entertainment a waste of time? TV, movies, games, reading, etc. They're all "wastes of time" if you consider the fact that you could be doing something productive with that time. You could spend it building something or learning new things, but would you really want to live your life without any entertainment in it?
Gamers will "tolerate" it as long as the games are good. Tired or not, they're still fun to play, which is really the point. It's not as if Nintendo is alone here... what are the new big games everyone else is putting out? Halo 2? Doom 3? GTA: San Andreas? The next sports game? As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with sequels. If you don't like them, there's plenty of other games out there for you to buy.
I'd also like to point out that sequels can be innovative. Just because it has Mario in the title doesn't automatically mean that it's the same old thing.
When a company's financial situation is worsening, one tactic is to make it appear that it is the market as a whole that is suffering or shrinking and not the particular company's individual performance. Its a simple play to artificially hold up your company's stock, or at least drag everyone else down with you. You'll find that many American publishers have just announced significant profits for this past fiscal year or for the coming fiscal year while Nintendo posted their first quarterly loss in decades.
All I have ever said, and have been brutalized repeatedly for on this site, is that the American/Eurpoean markets are different from the Japanese. It is easy to show that the gamers have different tastes, a number of recent slashdot articles have proven that, and that the Japanese market is shrinking overall while the western markets continue to show growth. As soon as NoA starts treating American's as special again (as it did with the significant difference between the NES and FamiCom) they have a chance to recover. If they continue resting on their laurels and giving us the exact same hardware and software as is released Japan, their western market share will continue to shrink until they are totally irrelevent. My prediction all along has been the fragment of the market into one worldwide success and a different second place in Region 1 and 4 from Region 2. If the current trend continues the big winner will still be Sony, with MS and Nintendo ceasing to compete directly and each taking second in different parts of the world. The only question in my mind is will Nintendo be too stubborn to port their software to Playstation or Xbox when the Americans finally boot them out of the hardware business.
the IronGhost
I can maybe understand Space Invaders and Pong, but TETRIS? That game is a classic time-waster and anybody I've ever shown it to couldn't put it down. People at my high school would play it on their calculator during math class. I see kids with brand new GBA SPs with a classic GB tetris cart in it (or the GBC tetris). It could quite possibly be the most popular game of all time.
The new versions of it are cool as well. I highly recommend that any tetris fan download Tetrinet.
In the Saturn and dreamcast ereas we saw some of the most innovative and fun games ever -- Sega had to put out fun games they couldn't compete on anything else. But then Sega got crushed by nintendo and sony who were pumping out the same games we played last year but with better graphics and more advertising. To be honest I really haven't been all that interested in games since the dreamcast died and I am not surprised the industry is hurting now. I don't care what your advertising budget is or how many polygons your GPU can push yesturday's gameplay is still yesturday's game!
It's almost repeating to an exact year.
1984: Game industry is bloated with too many consoles with too many accessories created ahead of demand (Intellivision2), the same games being re-branded and resold, too many boring tie-ins (E.T.), and a saturated market that was fed up with it.
Result:
Industry colapses.
1994: Game industry is bloated with too many consoles with too many accessories created ahead of demand (Sega Genesis, 32X, CD, Saturn, Game Gear), the same games being re-branded and resold, too many boring tie-ins (Captain Novolin), and a saturated market that was fed up with it.
Result:
Industry implodes.
2004: Game industry is blaoted with too many consoles with too many accessories (PS2 + HD + Network card + microphone + eyetoy = Jesus Fucking Christ!), the same games being re-branded and resold, too many boring tie-ins (Fight Club, the game?), an a saturated market that is getting poorer every day thanks to these wonderful tough times.
Result:
Who knows, but you can bet your buttons that the Nokia nGage is going to die.
Well, maybe it won't happen till next year. But sooner would make such wonderful symetry.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
but honestly I think that there hasn't been a fresh new game type in a really long time.
I really think the last truly innovative game type may have been the Battlezone remake of 6 or 7 years ago. That was an evolution of game types.
Since then, all we've gotten are refinements on the typical, RTS, SPRPG, MMRPG, FPS Shooter, and F/TP Adventure games.
It's kinda strange how those kids know so little about Tetris, yet are fully aware that ET carts were buried in a landfill.
The problem is that gaming today requires so little mental participation. Why? Well, way back before 3d, video games were subject to a kind of forced minimalism.
These often super-deformed, highly-pixelated video game protagonists of yesteryear required imagination to make them real. It was up to you to interpret what was happening. When you played Dragon Warrior, or Final Fantasy, you had to imagine your charactor hacking away at some dragon/imp/whatever.
You had to picture what he/she looked like, what their weapons resembled, what motions they used to strike and evade enemies. Like reading a book, you were forced to create a mental image of what was happening, since the game itself could not. That's what made it still interesting to play through Castlevania for the 30th time. This was pretty much true with all genres.
Now, the platforms video games are delivered on do that for you. Graphics, sounds, voices are all presented to us with a quality approaching that of movies. We're spoiled on it. The problem is, we're that much more separated from the game itself. Playing most video games now involves little more mental involvement than second-guessing contestants while watching "Jeopardy."
To solve this, innovation is needed, not just of storylines (sorry, but even the storyline to MGS is about the same level of some cheesy Navy Seals Adventures-type paperback) but of the delivery platform itself. Kudos to Nintendo for attempting innovation in this manner.
I like to play games on my PS2. Being a girl, I really don't like the "popular" categories of Guns, Driving, and Sports. I'm not into real violence but I like a challenge.
It takes work, but it is possible to find creative games from companies willing to put out something somewhat unique. Kya: Dark Lineage is a good game from Eden with fighting, puzzles, and stealth. Sly Cooper (Sucker Punch games) is an awesome looking game also involving some intelligence to get through.
I am disappointed in most of the sequels they are putting out now. The original Jak & Daxter was a fun game, but Jak 2 and the rumors about Jak 3 follow the formula of guns and hijaking vehicles. Yawn. Sure it's safer to crank out a tried and true character sequel, but at least put some thought into what the gamer wants to see. However I will not expect it to change, and I'll keep up my feeble search of quality games.
They're working on that, it's currently scheduled for a release on the 24th of September
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
...because Japan's population has been shrinking. And getting older, on average. And that economic slump isn't helping things.
Until someone comes out with some real polling results, you can't say that the Japanese populace is becoming "disenchanted" with video gaming. There could be many other factors at work.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
As a RPG designer I would agree that one of the key differences between a CRPG and a tabletop game at a game convention is that the CRPG is often linear in it's resolution (often only one viable solution), whereas a tabletop game has to accomodate anything the players come up with. Players are extremely scathing about "fishhook" modules - game that drag you along a set path as if their was a fishhook in your mouth.
I have no idea what would be involved in giving a CRPG the degree of flexibility you can get in a table top game, there would need to be character AIs which change their actions based on past actions and behaviours of the PCs. The biggest problem would be writing all the branches to emulate the way a tabletop GM can ad lib.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I again find myself referenceing Uncle Orson. What about "The Game?" This is the type of game I would love to play. The game adjusts itself depending on how you react and it is different for everyone!
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
I think these attempts at innovation by Nintendo have more to do with internal company factors than truly revolutionizing the state of gaming. Like pushing the revolutionary GBA-Gamecube link, which IMO had more to do with Nintendo trying to leverage their handheld dominance in the console market (the results speak for themselves, maybe a couple of decent games, the rest being unlockable content that did nothing but force Gamecube owners to buy a GBA to play a Gamecube game.)
Nintendo sees the writing on the wall- they can't compete head-on with Sony and Microsoft (it's tough competing against a consumer electronics giant on one hand, and the Evil Empire on the other), so they are trying to change the game. Which is fine by me, it's just all the self-serving PR that annoys- Nintendo, the company that cares.
If Nintendo really wanted to innovate, they might have actually tried to enable online play with the Gamecube.
That being said, the Nintendo DS at least looks better and has some potential (but really so does the PSP to some degree). I look forward to seeing if any DS games are able to capitalize on the new hardware and really offer truly significantly new gameplay experiences. If those games don't come out, the DS dual-screen and touchscree will be all for naught, leaving the PSP with the significant hardware advantage.
One of the biggest things you can do is to support independent developers. There are a number of smaller developers out there that are trying to push the envelope in gameplay. Of course, with limited resources the smaller developers can't provide the flash and dazzle of the larger games.
I'm part of one of those smaller game development houses; we develop online RPGs. Our current game, Meridian 59, is a classic online RPG with open PvP. Yes, open PvP isn't for everyone, but many people wish to have this in their game. Our game is smaller and not as well-known as the larger online RPGs, but we get by.
Of course, the first reaction of most people is to judge the game by the graphics. Unfortunately for them, the graphics do not indicate the quality of gameplay. The combat is fun, there is not much of the "treadmill" you see in other games, and the PvP has been carefully balanced over the years. Meridian 59's gameplay is very fun, and we even charge less than most other games requiring no box purchase to play the game in the first place. But, people who judge games only on screenshots will never enjoy these finer aspects of Meridian 59.
Really, this is why many games go for the flash instead of substance; it sells more games. We're working on an engine upgrade to Meridian 59, but this is not going to affect the gameplay, it will only make the game look better in screenshots. And, we have many other upgrades in store as the game grows. However, think of the time and effort we could have poured into gameplay....
The point of this ramble is that if you want to see more innovative games, then start searching them out and playing (and paying for!) them. There are a number of great independent online games (I'm more familiar with them given that I work with online games), and there's a good number of quality single-player games out there as well. It's just a question of going a little bit off the beaten path and finding them for yourself.
My thoughts,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog