As I transition back to this blog, updates will increase.
Here are a few things for giggles:
Pac-Man was intentionally designed for girls:
For the first time, girls flocked to arcades.
“Before Pac-Man was released, most games were aggressive, where you did things like shoot aliens,” explains Iwatani. “Pac-Man was planned around the concept of, ‘Let’s have girls in game arcades.’ This is why the enemy characters were colorful — they would be harder to dislike.”
And here is the periodic chart for video game controllers. If you are a science geek, you will love this.
And as for the latest NPD low numbers for Wii, the reason for low hardware sales is because of uninteresting software. What was the latest big software release for Wii? It was Mario Galaxy 2. The software is clearly not moving the hardware. Wii Party, however, is a different story, and it really shows how embarrassing Mario Galaxy 2 sales are. Keep in mind the purpose of first party software is to move hardware numbers. There is no purpose in being a first party software company if the software wasn’t intended to sell the hardware.
The ‘User Generated Content’ wave of Nintendo games really destroyed the Wii. All Nintendo can do since then is to pick up the pieces. The wave of games following the ‘User Generated Content’ ended up being ‘hardcore games’ as shown at E3 2009 such as Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M. While this wave of games is not as destructive as ‘User Generated Content’, it will not push Wii sales. They actually remind me of ‘Gamecube games’ which means it will lead the hardware to sell like the Gamecube. Seriously, Pikmin 1 and 2 did nothing to rocket the Gamecube up. At best, Pikmin 3 is going to give Wii some Gamecube level sales. The same for more 3d Mario and Yet Another Metroid Game. In other words, Nintendo responding to the ‘hardcore whiners’ is going to retard any recovery of the Wii after the User Generated Content destruction.
What is going to help the Wii are Wii styled games. In other words, Wii Party sells Wii hardware while Mario Galaxy did not. If Nintendo had some decent Wii orientated or Motion Plus games coming out now, which should have been started back in 2007 or 2008, instead of sequels to games of Gamecube philosophy (Pikmin 3, Galaxy 2, Other M), Nintendo would be a better position.
Disruption literature says that the biggest problems occur when a company is at the height of success. We can trace all the current Wii problems back to the Wii highpoint of around 2007. People at Nintendo got extremely arrogant and lost their minds to think they could make games with no content (let amateurs provide the content) as well as resume making games that led them to the Gamecube abyss (more 3d Mario, more Pikmin, cartoon Link, etc).
I don’t think it has dawned on video game makers yet that they will no longer have the opportunity to make the games they want to make. There is decline everywhere. And do you know what the true reason for the decline is? “It is the business model,” sniffs an analyst.
No.
The problem is not how the businesses are set up. The problem is the people in the business. If you keep changing the business model and keep having bad results, maybe you should look at the people the business models revolve around. You can blame either the suits or the developers or both, but it is clear everyone is dodging around the fact that video games are not selling as they used to because they are not as good as they used to be. Game developers who think they are so talented, who go on interviews and talk about their ‘vision’, are not as talented as they think.
The reason for the decline is not because of ‘change in consumer behavior’ or ‘need for new business model’. Much of the decline can be attributed to the ‘talent’ behind the games… both in the business side and in the creative side. It seems most game developers should probably resign and just work for the movie industry since “cinematic experiences” are what they really want to make. Video games, in general, are in decline because developers keep trying to use them as a vehicle of self-expression. What does the development of games have anything to do with self-expression? Sports, which are games, has nothing to do with ‘self expression’. People do not play baseball to ‘express themselves’. People do not go to baseball games to see ‘baseball creativity’. This could explain why that the more a game developer tries to “express himself”, the faster gaming slides into decline.
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