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Industry Vets Talking Crazy
IGN has a piece today looking at ten completely outrageous claims made by games industry veterans. My personal favorite: "Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' The Big N has long made bold claims about the marketplace based solely about what is - or, as it happens, isn't - happening in Japan, but this one definitely earns Iwata a spot on our list. Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement."
New and original gaming content that challenges the player without being a cheap knock-off copy of a successful game from the 1990s (or even the 1970s).
"I'm going to only say that it'll be expensive. I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households." - Sony's Ken Kutaragi
There you have it. Sony isn't targeting households with the PS3. I'm not sure **what** he's targeting, but it's not the "masses" so I guess the PS3 is not intended for the mass market or to be produced in any real numbers. It seems to be intended for the same people that drop 50 grand on a home theater system.
I really can't say who will be buying these things, but clearly, Sony is thinking on an entirely different track for the rest of the human race. Maybe there's a market for PS3 on Altaris VI, or in the Alternate Dimension of Lemmu - yeah, that's the ticket, they'll buy these things like hotcakes, and not even know they are being taken.
"[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games" - Hiroshi Yamauchi
Damn, he owes me a new keyboard.
>10 Million DS sold = < 10% online
>16 Million XBox sold = < 13% online
Gee, support "'Customers do not want online games.'" mentioned right in the article, and get marked offtopic. Lovely reading comprehension there.
Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement.
100 million+ PS2 sales.
30m? XBox1 sales.
Several million XBox360 sales.
Who knows how many tens of millions of PCs that games are played on.
Quoting eight million users against roughly 200 million gives maybe 4%.
That's the kind of figure people call statistical error when figuring out say how many people like or dislike a president.
Sure, there are plenty of other games with online components. But to quote 2m plus 5m plus an additional million and claim that makes a mockery of a quote regarding ~200m systems is kind of stretching things.
Even on the XBox - 2m Live subscribers across 30m? sales implies the statement is true: the majority of users do not want an online experience under the terms it's currently offered? 1 in 15? 6.7%? Curiously, 6.7% of the population is also the same percentage that has a sub 80 IQ which puts them in the Borderline Deficiency to Definite Feeble-Mindedness range.
Now I'm all for online gaming. I met my wife on a mud. But "the percentage of the population that are significantly mentally subnormal is also the same percentage as XBox owners who subscribe to XBox Live" is not really a compelling argument that "clearly customers want online gaming."
I don't think IGN gets it. FTA:
"The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal." Thanks, Raph. Memo to Capcom and Sony: Resident Evil 4 and God of War - incidentally the two most critically acclaimed titles of 2005 -- are apparently unnatural and abnormal.
Raph was making a very valid point here, though, if you read the quote in context. He was saying that throughout human history, we've played games with each other. From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before. Games are all about playing with others. It's only computer games that are single-player. (And solitare, I guess...)
His point may not mean much, but it's a lot better thought out and more thought-provoking than the article gave him credit for.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
"Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' "
Oh brother. I love how these out-of-context quotes keep coming up again and again despite how laughable they are. I mean, seriously, he said this in 2004 AFTER Wifi was announced for the DS.
Anyway, here's the rest of that quote:
"most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet, and for some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy."
He wasn't talking about people playing on-line, he was talking about the subscription model that Sony and Microsoft were using. He also backed that up with numbers that showed a small percentage of PS2 and/or XBOX owners were actually playing their consoles on line.
Shame on IGN and Slashdot for perpetuating this quote.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
There are many non-computer, single-player games, and there have been for a long time. The game where you catch the ball in the cup (where the ball and cup are attached by a string) is at least several hundred years old. Games where you move a single piece to eliminate others on a board are also old.
His "point" is nonsensical to the point of idiocy,
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
From throwing rocks at Ogg and Ug to Snakes and Ladders, there hasn't really been a "single player" game before.
Since the first cave teenager yelled, "Mom! Knock before coming in to my cave!" I think you'll find there has always been at least one "single player" game that's stayed remarkably popular.
And, cheap joke aside, to say there haven't been single player games ignores every kid that's kicked a ball against a wall, driven toy cars or flown toy planes around, flown a kite, used a hulahoop, jumped rope, played with a yo-yo, had a dolls tea party, built a cardboard and tinfoil spaceship for a trip to the moon, or kept a hoop rolling with a stick.
"New and original gaming content that challenges the player without being a cheap knock-off copy of a successful game from the 1990s (or even the 1970s)."
Unlike a lot of open source games, huh?
"Oh jeez, these comments always annoy me."
That's because complaining is easy. Doing something is much harder.
What the hell are you talking about? Every new PS2 ships with ethernet built in, and for old PS2s there's a plug-in adaptor available.
I've used my PS2 online, but only to download Action Replay codes. I haven't played any games online, because I've yet to see any that interest me. Include me in the 96%.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yeah, but not every DS game uses the wifi connection. In fact, I think only Mario Kart, Animal Crossing and Tony Hawk.
I don't know the worldwide sales figures, but I do know that Animal Crossing has sold ~ 2 million and MKDS ~ 1 million in Japan alone. So maybe it's more like 20%?
Also, you have to pay to use an xbox online! I think that would depress the numbers quite a bit.
I quit!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_DS_W iFi_games
Granted, some of these titles look a bit obscure, which probably means they were only released in Japan.
His comment in #7: "There are many people in the industry that know nothing about games. In particular, a large American company is trying to do engulf software houses with money, but I don't believe that will go well. It looks like they'll sell their game system next year, but we'll see the answer to that the following year."
He wasn't barking complete bull plop. If companies had to have profitable business plans, the Xbox would have been right there with the Phantom. They lost, what, 4 billion? And who knows what they're losing on the X360.
...was: Gosh, those poor doctors must have contracted some nasty disease from their bovine patients.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
A lot of those games haven't actually been released at all. Bleach DS looks like it's the only current one missing from my list. Metroid Hunters and Tetris DS launch in a few days too, but they aren't providing any connections to Nintendo WFC right now.
I quit!
If you carve a neat definition of what a game is, you can pretty much claim anything whatsoever. If you look however at the grand scope of what people do to keep themselves entertained, there were always a _lot_ of things people did alone, not only Solitaire. E.g.,
- reading a book or watching a theatre play or music/dance performance (I like to think think that when people in ancient Greece watched the Illiad or Odysey, it _didn't_ involve any real multi-player interaction. It may have been in a public place, but as far as watching the play was concerned, it can jolly well be a single-person thing: just me watching the play, not engaging in elaborate social games with the other viewers.)
- solving puzzles (rubik's cube, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, etc.)
- playing with toys or dolls (a lot of kids did at least some of that alone. And dolls are a particularly interesting case there, because they have always been used as, basically, an NPC. Ask any little girl who's ever had an imaginary tea party or enacted some scenario with her dolls. Or any little boy who's did the same with "action figures", "toy soldiers" or the like. They're not a new invention either: you'll find that such toys were being made since ancient times.)
- pretty much any creative activity (ranging from pure passtimes like Tangram or Origami to actually sculpting a statue or writing a novel. The best novels were written as a solitaire activity, not as some MUD/LARP/whatever kinda interactive multi-person improvisation exercise.)
- any scientific or learning activity that people ever did as a passtime (This is important since Raph Koster's Own claim in his theories about fun in games is that fun is learning in a controlled environment.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And since the computer is just flexible enough to do much of the same things, claiming that doing the same as people did for thousands of years is wrong, well, it's just outright stupid. For example, RPGs are also all about telling a story, who's he to say that taking the same model as books do is wrong? The "just me and the content provided by the author" worked for books or theatre plays for thousands of years. Or since a lot of games involve puzzles, who's he to say that Tangram was wrong and it should have been purely multi-player all along?
So basically Raph Koster is talking out of the ass, as usual. The guy just needs to take a break from his "I'm so great and know it all" ego trip, and start thinking before shooting his mouth with such idiocies. It's just yet another stupid claim in his long history of stupid claims and rationalizations.
And why are people still caring about what he says, anyway? We're talking the guy whose latest claim to glory and to knowing everything about fun in games is... Star Wars Galaxies. Hello? It's the game that was boosted by _the_ biggest franchise in history _and_ by the fact that anyone playing another Sony game gets it at a discount (or anyone with Station Access gets it for free) and drove it into the ground. It has two orders of magnitude less players than WoW, and more importantly, it has less of them than the point where other games were considered a failure.
If you want to learn about good design, fun in games, and generally making a successful game... why not ask those who _did_ make a fun and successful game? It seems to me that when it comes to voting with your wallet, the vast majority of the MMO gamers have voted that WoW is more fun than SWG. So why not ask Blizzard about how they make a successful game, instead of paying attention to yet another round of "I know better than all of you what you really want" bullshit from Koster?
And not many of the remaining players would claim that SWG fun, if you asked them. It's just an unimaginative _merchandising_ exercise, not much smarter than getting a license to print Star Wars t-shirts. The whole game is just an exercise in meeting Star Wars characters and playing with official Star Wars props in an otherwise sterile sandbox of a
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you're supposed to examine 1000 cow carcasses a day, you MUST go crazy and as result you will go crazy. Industrial veterinarian is one of the worst jobs you can get.
Just wtf it gets into the games section?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Sony aren't worried about the household market. The real money is in selling to despotic regimes anyway.
probably 2 million PS2 online players. (FF11/SOCOM/etc)
50 million (?) Xbox sold.
75 million (?) ps2 sold.
25 million (?) GC sold.
So using these estimates, only 2.6% of gamers have made console online play a priority. Yes there are a lot of online pc gamers, but he was referencing consoles with the statement. Personally I think there is a huge untapped market for offline multiplayer gamers. There are VERY few sold, and those are 90% sports/racing/fighting.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
There is a huge untapped market for *cooperative* multiplayer games, both on and offline.
There is likely also an untapped market for gamers but it is unclear where they can be safely purchased. I liked Todd a lot, even though he was a console guy, but Sweden announced a crackdown on www.pirategamerbay.org and I didn't dare.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
Maybe its because N shoots itself in the foot by offering only a very small segment of its DS games in online versions.
Not to mention that the DS's WiFi ability only works with newer routers and often fails to connect with success.
Jeez. If you're going to run your business under the assumption that no one wants online games, you'll cripple your online game offerings.
N should take a serious look at user experience on their WFC network. Maybe they'd see what their quick-tally numbers are really saying.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
XBox doesn't have much more market penetration, and that's embracing online play.
This comes from the same folks that brought you "we don't fix prices" and then send registered system owners $5 coupons and telling a senate panel "we don't allow violent video games like Lethal Enforcers on our game player" and then lethal enforcers II is released for the super nintendo about six months later.
... so the super mario RPGs and the Mario and Luigi series mean your systems are for losers who play in dark rooms?
RPGs are for losers
For millenia, people have found plenty of ways to pass the time outsmarting someone (the puzzle/game writer/constructor/programmer) when there's no one else around.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.