Would a gaming collapse help the industry? I ask because we seem to be in a gaming drought,overall. Sony and Microsoft seem to believe that beefing up their machines, makes them next gen worthy, along with adding in various other medias such as movie players, social networking, television connectivity/control, motion control, etc. Some of which have been copied form Nintendo and their history of innovation. However, we have not seen anything truly innovative within the last generation, or two, other than Nintendo’s Motion controllers (Copied and evolved as the PSmove and Kinect), the Wii U gamepad (Currently being copied by Sony and Microsoft in various ways for the next gen consoles), Virtual Boy (maybe copied by the Oculus Rift), and the Gameboy (Obviously copied by many handheld manufacturers – possibly even a concept that Nintendo copied in the past).
I think we can all agree that Nintendo has been an innovator over time, and many of the peripherals and consoles that we have today would not be here if they did not try them first. However, we seem to be in a drought where everybody wants power and graphics over game quality and stories. For example, Call of Duty is a good game, with good graphics, online capabilities and great interactivity with fans. But, for me at least, I cannot be drawn in to play it and immerse myself into it. IT is just a rehash of a rehash of a rehash, each built upon the prior release with better graphics, new weapons and maps, and the same gameplay. The creativity has gone. However, we still see games like Xenoblade and The Last of Us, which caused a world wide uproar to get a North American release.
Back in the 80’s, Nintendo had the guts to try new things and was essential in keeping the video game industry alive. Today, they still innovate and create, not attempting to compete with the two companies that are already in a knife fight against each other. Some say Nintendo is cowering in the corner and riding the curtails of defeat. So what are your thoughts? Are we in a drought, and would another industry crash be enough to revive the industry? Enough to bring back the creativity, instead of just remaking the same games over and over again? Of course. we can not only include games like Saints Row, CoD, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, and more. We must also include Mario, as many of the side scrollers share the same elements, although each game seems to feel brand new again. We can maybe even include Pikmin as well.
If there was a crash, could Nintendo bring the industry back once again, or would we see a new victor?
***Since Lou reminded me about the weekend discussion, I thought I would post something that would bring up discussion on both sides of the fence.
I feel honored!
Collapse strikes me as a strong word, but I agree with the points. Hardware should get more powerful, but the emphasis should really be on games. Right now there's just too much going on with hardware, which is probably a panic reaction to mobile devices. Well, maybe they're right to panic.
My greatest disappointment here is that Nintendo got caught up in it. You mention the 80's – the near constant avalanche of new types of games at the time just isn't what we're seeing today. At some point you need to be a little derivative – you can't always reinvent the wheel – but what we're seeing now is too stagnant.
Look, I love Mario games, but not every game should be Mario! Above all, I do think Nintendo needs to focus more on software. Not saying abandon hardware, but they need more games. Far, far more.
Or to put it a different way. Think of all the Blockbuster move flops this year (Lone Ranger, Will Smith and Son's vehicle, Oblivion, half a dozen others).
Still it was the most successful summer in Hollywood history (in nominal dollars).
With the rise of the app stores and consoles like the Ouya, and with the extreme focusing of looks over content, the quality will decline, but I don't think that it will crash
Nice discussions so far! Keep in mind though, the question is not whether the market is crashing or not, but would it benefit from a crash.
"Sony and Microsoft seem to believe that beefing up their machines, makes them next gen worthy, along with adding in various other medias such as movie players, social networking, television connectivity/control, motion control, etc."
One point worth considering is that the first crash ended when Nintendo adopted some of those strategies. The NES was billed as an "entertainment system", not a game console, designed to look something like a VCR right down to hiding the cartridge slot, with a radically different controller and accessories such as R.O.B. and the power glove to get away from the image of a kid sitting glassy-eyed in front of a TV holding a joystick.
Microsoft, in particular, is going to a lot of trouble to make their new console seem less like a game console and more like a cable box on steroids that happens to play Madden and Halo (someday). I don't think they're doing this in hopes of being in a good position when a crash comes, but it tells me they might think one is coming and are scrambling for ways to be relevant when it does.
Most people reading this probably weren't playing video games when the original crash happened. I was in middle school, at the peak of my interest in gaming. It meant almost all the arcades closed, which was really sad (when they came back due to fighting games it wasn't the same). It meant all the awesome games and systems I'd been reading about in Electronic Games (not EGM) were never released, and then EG disappeared too.
But I was also able to get an insane amount of games and accessories for a buck or two each, especially for the Colecovision and Vectrex, whose manufacturers' home offices were within 20 miles of me, so the surplus stores were packed with their stuff. Meanwhile, the C64 was just taking off, so there was no shortage of games to play, they just didn't come on cartridge (and oh yeah, we pirated them with our friends and neighbors and classmates, at least till 1200 baud modems showed up and kickstarted BBS culture, whose discussion forums were a precursor to sites like this).
The conditions allowing the crash to happen back then — a glut of unlicensed Atari shovelware driving down quality and confusing the market, lazy cash grabs by Atari like Pac-Man and E.T. and the hubris of manufacturing more cartridges than there were consoles to play them on, the growth of home computers that could play games better than consoles and let your kid type his term papers too (and balance your checkbook, though I only ever knew one person who did so on the C64), a ton of me-too consoles from minor names and the fact that there were about five larger companies jockeying for #2 after Atari — largely aren't present today. There are a ton of Android-based consoles coming out, yeah, but the big three are selling 2-3 orders of magnitude more cnsoles than any of them, and they're not fighting for retail shelf space because their stores are all online.
One reason you give as the setup for the article, the current drought, has happened at the start of every generation since generations started being called that. The other, the lack of innovation, is illusory in my opinion. There were some major innovations just prior to the crash in the '80s, such as accessories to make different consoles into computers, motion-sensitive controllers, accessories like the Starpath Supercharger which increased the Atari's available RAM by a factor of 48, etc. One man's innovation is another man's gimmick. Where do Kinect and the Wii U gamepad fall in that equation? Does it even matter? In 1983, it didn't. But today there's no answer to that question. Let's say a crash were about to happen because reasons.
So what would a crash look like today? I think Microsoft's diversification strategy would fail, and they'd just abandon the consumer market and become essentially what IBM is today, a provider of legacy business software still bought by millions of businesses for billions of dollars. Sony would still be a TV manufacturer, record label and movie distributor, and after laying off a few hundred people and closing some studios they'd be fine. Nintendo? I think they'd keep selling handhelds, but if somehow retail turned its back on video game hardware completely, Nintendo would find a way to survive, even if it meant making board games and stuffed Mario toys. They've been around over a hundred years. Yamaha makes both motorcycles and guitars. Japanese companies are serious when it comes to diversification. Nintendo would stick around, even if we didn't care about them anymore.
Meanwhile, indie developers would continue making games for PCs and mobile devices. That happened last time around too. Some of the indie developers who started up right around the time of the crash: Electronic Arts and Origin, Psygnosis (now owned by Sony), Infogrames, Accolade, and Ocean (all 3 now owned by Infogrames, which has bought the Atari name and calls itself that), Bethesda and Interplay, and Square. All these major players now responsible in their own ways for the stagnation of gaming and the shallow focus on high-budget graphics got their start as indie developers making interesting games for personal computers during the crash of the mid-'80s. EA, in particular, was putting out these arty, thoughtful games with graphics no one was raving about, but gameplay that has endured. I still love M.U.L.E. Now they're worth billions of dollars but to me they're the perfect example of a publisher who's gotten too big and doesn't know how to make an interesting game anymore.
So, while the big three, EA, and sites like IGN and this one might have to close up shop if another crash happened, as someone who loves indie games, I'd miss Mario and Zelda but otherwise, probably barely even notice that my gaming had shifted away from consoles to Android. I'd be playing a backstock of games I was able to pick up dirt cheap due to the crash. Since we have the Internet now, all of my current-gen consoles would eventually be jailbroken and modded beyond belief.
People who enjoy multiplayer games, on the other hand, would be devastated, since XBL, PSN and NIntendo's multiplayer servers would go dark. (One thing that would not happen, despite the alleged shift in gamers' tastes from hardcore to casual: people accustomed to playing Gears of War today would not suddenly be happy playing Cut the Rope.) Some would move to multiplayer PC gaming using community-run servers, but many would find that too much of a chore or wouldn't be able to afford PCs good enough for current games.
Due to that market being underserved, in a few years, someone would probably release a new device that wouldn't be marketed as a game console, but would bring the industry back to life again. The successful indie developers would grow and grow and either become industry behemoths or be acquired by them, causing their employees to get bored and leave to start more indie developers. The end result would be more games, and more ways to play them, not less.
Just like last time.
Asking whether it would benefit or not is kind of a strange question to me. It would probably end up making more money, and the surviving companies would eventually thrive again. It's not like the hunger for simulations of fun activities inside a computer is just going to evaporate.
But just as the Japanese-dominated industry of 1985-2005 was different than the American-dominated one of 1970-1984, whatever they came up with next will be barely recognizable to those of us who enjoy games as they are today. I know that until about 1991, most of my energy in Commodore, Amiga and DOS-based gaming was trying to recreate the arcade games I enjoyed before the crash, and even today, one of the first things I install on any phone, computer or anything else with a CPU is MAME. People who grow up loving modern video games will be chasing that dragon for the rest of their lives too, and in 30 years you'll find them complaining that games were just never the same after the crash of 2014.
Just like I am now.
Jackson described Howard as a better all-around player and complemented him on the improvements he's made to his offensive game in recent years, but noted Howard is still "learning the post game."
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