Square Enix President Looks To Online Play

Gamespot has a story detailing comments by Square Enix president Youichi Wada. In the article, they touch on the fact that Square is going to be increasingly looking to online play in their future games. From the article: "Wada predicted that online games will be Square Enix's main source of income in the future. 'I think that over half of our income and profit will be based on network content [including games] by 2008 or 2009.'"

Comments

Re:A Nail in the Coffin?

[Prien715]

So there are insightful intelligent people on slashdot, who knew;) In other words, thank you for your intelligent reply.

Campell's work deals with cultural reverse engineering: basically taking a bunch of works and analyzing them for commonality. The story-maker's role is the opposite. None of the great mystics or storytellers read Campell's work. They happened to make stories that followed his rubric quite unintentionally. Simply put, even if all great stories follow this formula, it's possible that anyone who attempts to follow the the formula intentionally fails.

Thus, I find ambivalence in your 3rd paragraph. It is precisely through experimentation that great creative works are made. Companies like Pixar and Retro studios have been doing great things precisely because of their independence. For some reason, companies don't understand math. It's simply a better business strategy to produce riskier products if their average return is greater. They're too focused on optimizing the worst case of the small picture.

I still want to pick up Square's previous games and have much more desire to play them than FFX2 (though Xenogears has the most repetitive battles known to man). Nintendo on the other hand, and maybe I'm going out on a limb, has managed to keep the most consistantly great/innovative games of any publisher for the longest period of time (from the original Mario to Animal Crossing; even their sequels try to do something different and novel. many people still consider Mario64 to be the first landmark 3D platformer just as Super Mario Bros was considered the first landmark 2D platformer).