[spoiler] GI: Comic and games have both faced challenges being taken seriously by people who aren't into those mediums. There's the perception that they're both entertainment for kids-it's a misconception that's being shed, but it's still there. What do you think both industries need to do to completely shed those misconceptions?
Rubin: You know, that's a really hard problem to solve. Obviously, video games are not just for kids. You look at the statistics on the PlayStation 3 or the PlayStation 2 or the Xbox user base, and they completely dispel that. The fact is, video games are not just for kids. The thing about video games is that they never really reached the most mass audience. The same thing goes for comic books. And what video games risk doing to themselves, in my opinion, is traveling in the wrong direction. Guitar Hero is the right direction. That's not to say that every game needs to be as mass market as Guitar Hero, but games like Guitar Hero make people who don't play video games have a very hard time saying, "I don't like video games." What they say is, "I don't like video games, but I like Guitar Hero." And as you get more and more of those games out there, eventually what they say is, "Well, I don't like some video games, but I like video games in general." So Guitar Hero helps the cause.
What I think hurts the cause is having every video game that comes out being a first-person shooter and half of those first-person shooters being based on World War II. That's not to say that any of those games shouldn't necessarily exist-in fact, some of them are fantastic games-it's just that when every game becomes those games, you end up in a situation where anybody who doesn't like those games stops going to the video game store to buy games and they'll never come back. And that's exactly what happened to the comic-book audience.
If you go look at the history of comic books, it used to be much more diverse, which meant many more things like Richie Rich-who was not Spider-Man, not Batman-you had Betty and Veronica. Those were all around, they were sold on newsstands and the total industry was a lot bigger-more than 10 times the size that it is today. What ended up happening was slowly but surely, comic-book creators said, "We make more money on and have more popularity with the Spandex characters, so let's cut our offerings in other places." They pulled back from the newsstands. Eventually, the newsstands dropped them, because they couldn't sell the Spider-Man stuff, because the collector wanted to go to the comic-book stores, where they could buy unwrinkled copies on better paper. That reinforced that people who went to comic-book stores weren't buying Richie Rich, they weren't buying the more diverse products, and you ended up in a situation in the comic-book world where people basically only bought the Spandex superheroes and the market dropped to a tenth of its size. Even thought there's nothing wrong with Superman or Spider-Man and Batman, if that's all you're providing you end up in a situation where the comic-book industry is for comic-book geeks. That's what anybody who doesn't read comics would say.
What I fear is going to happen in the game industry-and I've been saying this for years, long before I started working with comics-is that if all we serve is the core gamer, it's going to hurt the industry. So things like Guitar Hero are really a breath of fresh air that keep us from becoming, "Well, I don't go to EB." The day that Wal-Mart says, "We can't service the game industry anymore because we're not selling enough diverse product and all the hard-core gamers are buying their stuff online or are going to the EBs and the GameStops of the world, that's when the video-game industry kind of turns into a self-serving industry and moves away from mainstream audiences. The thing is, there's nobody that's doing anything wrong. There's no guidance from the top. It's not like someone's saying to EA, "Well, of course you can make a first-person shooter, but you really should be taking a bigger risk on something that's maybe a little bit more mass market, because it helps the industry." It's one of those things where you can see the train wreck happening, but you can't necessarily stop it. So when you do see something like Guitar Hero being so successful, you say, "Wow, great, that's good, because it helps keep the industry from kind of internalizing itself," and every time you see another first-person shooter based on World War II, but this time with aliens or having something else come out, you go, "Why can't we as an industry be more diverse or come up with more diverse products. That, by the way, is what keeps the movie industry from being marginalized. They make everything from movies for grandmothers to movies for kids. And that's what keeps it so mainstream and keeps people respecting it.
GI: After all your work with Sony, what do you think of the PS3?
Rubin: I think Sony kind of forgot the golden rule - that price matters. And I think that they also believe that polygons are more important than product. At the end of the day, I don't think any gamer is counting polygons anymore. I gave a speech in 2003 called "Great Video Game Graphics: Who Cares?" that basically said that we're at the point now where the polygon count doesn't matter anymore, what matters is content and quality and price. I think that Sony kind of made a mistake by believing that having the most powerful system on the planet-which I do believe they have-that it was a guarantee of success. I don't think that's the answer. I think the success of the Wii shows that gameplay and again broadness of market and price are incredibly important in the video-game wars. [/spoiler]
http://gameinformer.com/News/Story/200707/N07.0725.1755.21074.htm?Page=1
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