ZarkSeven

I’ve started and deleted this post several times, because I’ve been having a hard time collating my thoughts into a coherent post.  I probably won’t succeed this time either.  But I keep having this nagging jumble of thoughts that I need to get out.  It’s gonna be a long ride.  It’s about what I like to call The Nintendo Dilemma.

I look at this generation of gamers, which I’ll define for this discussion as ones that have been gaming for the last 5-10 years, as being caught in a gaming dilemma when it comes to Nintendo.  This is the Halo generation, who define gaming as the first person shooter, who define online by the quality of the deathmatch or the capture the flag.  But is that all there is to gaming?  An older generation of gamers would say no.

I tend to think of this in terms of a stereotypical view of a person’s ownership of automobiles.  When you are a teenager, fresh driver’s license in hand, any car is a car.  You’ll drive anything.  Your parents station wagon, a rusty 20-year-old wreck, anything that moves.  As you get a bit older, get a job, get some disposable income, you start thinking of a car in terms of a something flashy.  How fast does it go zero to sixty?  How will you look driving around in it?  Then you get older still, and maybe start a family, buy a house, and you start looking at a car in more practical terms.  Will it fit everyone?  What kind of mileage does it get?

In the end, all those different kinds of cars are still cars.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Because you like a sports car doesn’t mean that an SUV is not an automobile.  If you prefer a minvan, you can still ride in a sedan now and then.  Their essential nature is the same.  Games are the same way.  Rhythm, FPS, sim, RTS, survival horror, puzzle, platform, RPG… they are all games.  I think some in “this generation” have forgotten that, and the success of the Wii has rocked their world.

I listen to gaming podcasts and read gaming websites and magazines daily.  I would say that the gaming media is generally (not exclusively) dominated by the opinions of “this generation” of gamer.   And I would say that a majority of the conversation is anti-Wii.  Not as editorial policy.  More like a group of like-minded individuals validating each other’s opinions.  They weekly express their disbelief in how well Nintendo is doing, and look for excuses as to how that could possibly be.

They say that everything that comes out for Wii is shovelware.  But 43 Wii titles on Metacritic have a score of 80 or above, and 119 have a score of 70 or above.  Wouldn’t a score above 70 be a decent game?  Above 80 be a called a good game?  There are obviously good games available then.  And good games generally sell.  According to the latest NPD numbers, 5 of the top 10 best selling games in December were Wii games.  Four of the top ten best selling games of 2008 were Wii games (2 of 10 if you add up multi-platform sales for the rest of the games, as all 4 were Wii exclusive.)  Either people are buying shovelware by the dozen, or there must be some worthwhile Wii titles.

Well, they say, that includes Wii Play, which people are just buying for the extra remote.  True to some extent, but the cost of Wii Play is $10 more than the cost of an extra remote, so they are still spending money for the game.  The remote is free with Wii Play, not the other way around.

Well, they then say, those games are all Nintendo franchises.  True.  And facts from an article on Gamasutra have been thrown around a lot, that say that 13% of Wii games make up 80% of sales, with the top 10 SKUs accounting for 44% of all sales, and the other 56% split among the remaining 422 titles.  Ok, that’s true too.  But does that all mean something?  Percentages can mean whatever you want them to mean.  To illustrate, let’s say total Wii game sales were $100 billion.   56% of $100 billion is $56 billion.  Divided by 422 games is $132,701,422.  Developers and publishers would be ecstatic over $132 million in sales for every game!

My example is nonsense, but then so are the percentages.  All they really indicate is what the NPD article concludes, which is that “it speaks to the amazing job Nintendo does, producing games for their own platforms.”  Because first-party Nintendo games are generally very good doesn’t mean that third-party games suck.  Just because some of the top selling games are Nintendo first party games doesn’t mean that there are no good games for the platform.  You don’t see people arguing that there are no good Xbox games, because look at how well Halo sells!

The Wii is still selling like crazy.  Blake Snow had an article recently on VentureBeat that pointed out that in the first 26 months of availability, Wii sales are 10% greater than PS2 sales over the same time frame, giving it fair odds to be the best selling console ever.  (The PS3, by comparison, has just barely sold better than the Gamecube, Nintendo’s poorest performer.)  The market is there.

And if you look at my most anticipated games of 2008 lists, my Wii list is much larger and more diverse than the rest of the non-handheld lists.  Why?  Two reasons.  The first is that developers and publishers are now on board.  Companies like EA admitted to not even bothering to develop for the Wii when it was launched, and they’re now scrambling to catch up.  The way they did that is to throw a bunch of shovelware, ports, and quicker to develop games at it and hope something sticks, while they work on more complex titles.  By all indications, a wave of those are coming in the next 12 months (and probably beyond).

Second, Nintendo has (possibly inadvertently) cornered the market on exclusive titles.  In the past, consoles were different enough that you could not easily develop for multiple consoles at once, and so many titles were exclusive titles by default.  Then Microsoft came along with the Xbox, and Sony and Microsoft started trying to out-hardware each other.  The focus on graphics meant that their platforms became more like each other than different.  And the developer cost of making games that met those big hardware specs meant that it made more sense to develop for both the Xbox and the PS3 simultaneously.  So exclusivity on those consoles became a function of how much each company was willing to pay for exclusivity.

Nintendo, as we all know, took a different approach, with a less powerful console and a unique control scheme.  Both things mean it’s not so easy to make a Wii version of a multi-platform game.  It can be done successfully (look at Rock Band or Guitar Hero), but on graphics-intensive games, it’s pretty tough to deliver the same experience.  As a consequence, it looks like most upcoming Wii games are made specifically for the Wii.  That initially hurt their software sales, but with the console’s continuing popularity, more and more games are coming, and coming exclusively to Wii.

Because most first person shooters are set in a realistic, non-fantasy world (human characters, real world physics), those types of games lend themselves better to graphics-intensive engines.  But older generations of gamers don’t look at games as having to be “realistic.”  Look at Pac-Man… a yellow wedge eating dots and being chased by ghosts.  Super Mario Bros… a plumber collecting coins in a mushroom world on his way to save a princess.  Sonic the Hedgehog… a blue hedgehog racing through emerald worlds collecting rings.  Tetris… rotating falling shapes to make them fit together in a line.

In the “old days” gamers didn’t define games by a single genre.  Today, it almost looks like Sony and Microsoft are cornering (sharing!) the market on first person shooters, and they’ve left everything else to Nintendo.  And Nintendo has taken up the challenge.  Platforming through the galaxy.  Building and blasting through blox.  Saving balls of goo.  Bowling(!) with a group of friends.   Fighting other insects as a tarantula.  Balancing and doing yoga on a board.  On-rails shooters with the ideal controller for that type of game.

So to come back around full circle, what is a game?  The general public, by virtue of console sales, has spoken.  What will “this generation of gamers” do?  I think this is shaping up to be a very interesting year.

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