The State Of The Platform Game

simoniker writes "Gamasutra has a rather huge article up explaining the state of the platform gaming genre, with an interesting introduction: 'Platform games used to enjoy a 15% share of the market in 1998 - and considerably more in the 16-bit era - but [has now dropped significantly]. As a consequence, marketing circles are reportedly deliberating that platform games - as a genre - are not as attractive to consumers as they once were. We believe it's not an issue of genre, but an issue of effective design principles of past being forgotten.' There follows plenty of comparisons between Sonic, Mario, Rayman, Crash, Jak, and friends! Is it time for the platformer to make a bigger comeback?"

Comments

Remember the old days?

[starwed]

From what I remember, most of those platformers were licensed dreck. (Anyone ever played the Barbie game for NES? ^_^)

Re:The problem is 2D control.

[dosboot]

I agree. I've argued many times that there are things that 2D can do that 3D can't. It's much harder to make a fun 3d platformer because you can't expect the player to have things we take for granted in 2d games. What 2d games have that 3d don't is precision (i.e. moving, jumping and landing with near pixel perfect accuracy) and clear perspective (the enemy, and hence his attacks, are frequently not in view to the player in a 3d games). When you can't expect the player to have precision and situational awareness things end up being more boring.

I can't help but zero in on this part of the article:

"The real problem was the language barrier and a lack of understanding each other's creative goals. When I would pitch say, a 'platform shooter with racing bits inbetween levels, set in space', they told me it was unmarketable. There was no hook for them. For me, I was imagining the potential fun aspect, but for them, it was about trying to find something sexy or 'MTV" within the concept they could sell to a shop. Fair enough."

Any gamer or half decent developer thinks of video games in terms of their gameplay, and thus thinks in terms of controls. Marketers and publishers don't know anything about videogames. They think we play video games to literally play as the characters, not for the underlying gamey elements.

It's all about the Ds

[Teach]

I can explain the problem in two characters: 3D.

When it was still okay for games to be 2D, then platformers were super common. Jumping about in a 2D platformer is pretty trivial, and such games are fun. The past decade (ever since Mario 64, really), most games are in 3D. Jumping about in a 3D platformer is not trivial, and even usually frustrating. So developers have to decide between making a 2D platformer: and risk looking technologically out-of-date, or making a 3D platformer that just isn't as fun to play.

Google for 'hell is full of jumping puzzles' for a related perspective.

Now, I'm not going to say that it's impossible to do 3D platformers right. Obviously there are a few out there that really pull it off. But the majority do not, in my opinion.

Re:It's all about the Ds

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Jumping about in a 3D platformer is not trivial, and even usually frustrating.

Amen. I will never forget my first real foray into a fully 3d platformer, analog stick and all. it was MediEvil for the playstation, bought with the then brand new dual shock controller.

I loved that game. I still think its one of the best that the playstation has to offer. But I completely sucked at any jumping whatsover. there was this one level, the forest, and you had to jump over three quite large toadstools to get to a certian area. Failure meant instant death. It took me about twenty attempt before I could make it.

Nowadays this is no real problem to me, but I've had years of expierience with 3D titles. Every time I see a young kid trying to play the industries latest ateempt to woo them, I see an excercise in complete futility. The child will not be able to adequately move the character around flat ground, let alone coordinate a jump in three dimensions. They quickly lose interest in the game, and it languishes on a shelf. These same children immensely enjoy any 2D platformers I put on the emulators for them.

3D platformers are not simply 2D platformers with an extra degree of freedom. They have on average about five more degrees of freedom when you include the all the new axes, including the camera. They're really hyperplatformers, and their difficulty, and subsequent collapse of marketshare reflects this.

The genre is too limited.

[Chaffar]

The problem with the platform genre is that it's just very easy to make a boring and repetitive game. Do you really want to go through n+1 levels of jumping on the heads of enemies that look like they escaped from the Teletubbies world?

What the genre needs is a new Kirby (the SNES version, I dunno any other one), a game that just comes and changes the way the whole "Pick up mushroom/coin/magic fruit/hash bag and touch the enemies in a particular fashion", and 2D/3D shouldn't be an issue. Some games will feel better in 2D, others much less.

Re:Look to the past...

[justchris]

I know you're trying to make a joke, but I'm willing to bet you that a game of Mario Paintball with all the Mario characters, would easily outsell Halo 3.