The Winning Next-Gen Console Is The Most Diverse?

simoniker writes "Gamasutra's latest 'Analyze This' column has game industry analysts commenting on the rise of casual games, asking whether simpler games that take less time to play may be vital to game industry growth. David Cole of DFC Intelligence disagrees that any one genre or game type is vital, suggesting: 'A key for the industry is being able to diversify.... For the N64 and GameCube, Nintendo focused primarily on its big franchises and didn't have the same level of diversity. The platform that did was the Sony PS2. Which platform could work as a karaoke machine, allowed you to put yourself in the game, had all kinds of trivia products? The reason the PSOne and PS2 sold [so well] was diversity.' Is this the key to working out who wins in next-gen?"

Comments

Which led to diversity in games

[SuperKendall]

Because they had the best third-party support. End. Of. Story.

If all those third party developers had been focusing on only one genre or two however, it wouldn't matter how many there were.

Which comes back to the true key being diversity of games on a platform, even if the diversity comes from one maker.

Consoles need a comerade

[spyrochaete]

I was just about to post "Nobody will buy a console to play Bejewelled" but then I remembered Tetris and the Game Boy. But will this work for TV consoles?

Diversity = 3rd party

[Astarica]

And every console war has been decided by the 3rd party games. If you assume that every Nintendo game bought translates to a system sold, and assuming tastes in Nintendo games are pretty similar (e.g. Mario and Zelda captures essentially the same group, so that 1 Mario and 1 Zelda game translates to 1 Nintendo system sold, not 2), then you get the number of Nintendo systems sold due to Nintendo games isn't anywhere close to the number of PS1 or PS2s. For that matter, it also isn't close to the number of NES, SNES, or GB/GBAs sold. If winning means 'getting the biggest marketshare', then winning obviously has to come from being diverse because even the biggest software powerhouses don't come close to explaining the hardware sales even if they're so powerful that every game sold led to a hardware purchase. It has long been said that FF7 was supposed to be the turning point of PS1 in Japan, but FF7, for all its glory, only sold ~3 million in Japan, which means no more than 3 million people bought a PS1 due to FF7 in Japan (assuming no one bought a PS1 due to FF7 but did not purchase the game, which would indeed be odd) which isn't close to the number of PS1s sold in Japan.

Now there's no doubt FF7 provided the push PS1 needed, but in the grand scheme of things, no one company accounts for any significant part of a successful system's fanbase.

Re:Mostly backwards.

[marshallbanana6]

Yes, backwards. But that doesn't mean it's out of the hardware manufacturer's hands.

Companies like Nintendo might have been overconfident when they just decided to do their own thing with the N64 and decided that when everyone else saw how cool it was, they'd all build lots of content for it. It's these kinda decisions that don't take into consideration the feelings of major game developers (Squaresoft, EA to a lesser degree) that slowly encourage less support for a console. If Nintendo had said "we need lots of third party support, including a wide base of casual games, and we can't do this all on our own" and had therefore listened to what developers wanted, they might have been able to build more support for their console. They forgot that this wide library of games they enjoyed on SNES doesn't just happen on its own.

If companies like Squaresoft and Namco had released titles like FF7 and Tekken 3 for the N64, it would have been a much different picture. But Nintendo just decided they'd be fine without them.

It seems like everyone has learned this lesson now, and is doing all the necessary kissing up to developers. A lot of the success of this generation could simply depend on launch responses, which is where Nintendo could really gain an edge (if people don't decide Wii sucks) with their lower price. Once an edge is gained, by whoever gains it, it is quite likely things will just take off from that point and they could have the "#1" spot for a whole 5 years. Who knows though, gamers are fickle.

Why do you need a next-gen console to do this?

[antifoidulus]

Am I the only one that predicts that the PS2 may very well come out the winner again? PS3 will fail because well, it's way too friggin' expensive considering the fact that it offers what Microsoft and Nintendo do(Xbox live and the motion sensors respectively), only they don't do it as well, and they add in a blue-ray player that nobody wants. Microsoft is doing some interesting things, but I see nothing to suggest they will be as dominant as Sony once was, but I don't see them crashing either. The Wii could very well take the cake, but only time will tell(Nintendo is the #5 holding in my Fidelity Pacific Basin mutual fund, so I do have a vested interest in it but..).
However, the PS2 already has a large install base, and provided Sony keeps on manufacturing them, are only getting cheaper. Plus, save for the hardest of the hardcore, the PS2 is more than capable, and I don't really forsee any of the next-gen consoles knocking it off it's throne as king console till at least the end of '07, but that is just me talking.