The theory goes that because the Wii is largely marketed to casuals obviously casual games will sell. The top 2 selling games on the Wii are Wii Sports and Wii Play, case in point. Assuming this trend continues it means developers will be more likely to a) casual up their games and b) stop putting effort into their work. If 50 cent: Bulletproof can sell as well as it did, why would developers spend more time and more money making a great game when they can just crank out generic s*** and make more money. Console games like Oblivion, the R6 and GR series and others show a trend of games becoming more casual friendly in order to increase sales, leaving classic series shadows of their former selves.pundog
It's actually somewhat correct. There's a zero-sum game being played here with development budgets. Lets say a third party developer has forty million to spend in a year. They can put that forty million towards one 360 / PS3 game that takes two years to make, expecting to make fifty million in sales (10 million profit) or they can make four - ten million dollar Wii games, each of which takes a year to make, and each of which have expected sales of fifteen million (20 million profit).
20 million year > 5 million year.
The Wii fanboys like to argue that the Wii is "bringing more people and money into gaming" but the reality is if enough casuals are in the industry, there's no incentive to put the huge budgets and time into hardcore games. Consider, if the hardcore game fails, they're out a ton of money - but in the scenario with four Wii games, even if one sold zero copies they'd still be profitable.
The only thing that prevents a total shift to casual games is competition - with fewer hardcore games, you can have a better chance of making money with one of the rare "more hardcore" titles than a casual title. But even this is tainted by casuals - after all, you can get your hardcore gamers (by definition) to play a less complex version of a game they want more readily than you can get a casual to play a game they think is "too complicated and too hard".
And this has been what has been happening to some extent, some games are being dumbed down to appeal to a broader audience. Things get simplified, oftentimes at the expense of what made a series appealing in the first place.
Log in to comment