The Popularity of Gaming Today
By ultimatepunchrod 6 Comments
I heard a game developer on the bombcast say that if you told gamers ten years ago how popular games are today, they wouldn't believe you, but if you told someone ten years ago why games were so popular today, they wouldn't want to believe you. It's true. I'm living in the here and now and I still don't want to believe it. Gaming is popular now on all the wrong platforms for all the wrong reasons. I use the word platform loosely because some of these “platforms” are not very traditional in terms of gaming. Gaming is popular now because it is convenient.
Let’s take the worst offenders first: facebook and myspace apps. You know these. They are things like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and all the other stuff that fills your social network activity stream with spam. These apps are no more games than a youtube video is a movie. A lot of work may have gone into them, and they may be good practice for getting your foot in the door of that particular industry, but they are not really a final product. In other words no one should aspire to make facebook apps for a living. Hopefully the point is to move onto real games. Look at the latest update for Farmville compared to an upcoming triple A video game release.
This:
Does not equal this:
Now portable gaming has the same problem. Too many oversimplified and bite sized games to really be considered an actual platform for games, but as sure as I’m typing, Apple is billing the ipad and the iphone as “real” gaming platforms. While this is true up to a point, (Epic Games has done some great things with their Unreal engine on the platform as well as id software) most games that come to these devices are not even on par with most flash games you can find on any free gaming site. While these apps are cheap and easy to access with the extremely dominant app store, they are not really games. The original gameboy had probably less than a tenth of the processing power of the iphone, but its games were more in depth and substantially more fun. Now, iphone games are more on par with other portables than Facebook apps as far as visuals go, but seldom do these games actually have the same amount of depth as a Playsation Portable or a Nintendo DS Once again here’s a comparison.
This:
Doesn't quite equal these:
Now possibly the biggest threat to traditional gaming is the target audience for the Nintendo Wii. It really is pretty lame that the biggest game company in the current race and the longest running game company can make their way back to the top by making their games so simplistic and unentertaining that anyone can get into them. Making games accessible is a good thing. What Nintendo has done here, is not. The biggest reason for the Wii’s success: price. It’s the cheapest console on the market and has been since its launch. Also, parents remember the name Nintendo even if they never played it. Now, making this new inexpensive console is a good thing, but the sheer amount of sub-par and downright unplayable games on the market for the Wii are astounding. And people will shell out so much money to play them because, “Look, when I shake the remote, he moves.” It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and not because I dislike motion control. It's just that whenever kids today remember playing a video game for the first time, their memories will be of shaking controllers to make their Mii do something vaguely reminiscent of that motion.
Now am I so bitter that I cannot respect Nintendo? Of course not. They have brought gaming to the masses and are now trying to sneak a few really great games back into the mix with Donkey Kong Country Returns, Metroid other M, Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and Epic Mikey. These are all really good looking games that might trick some Wii-owners into buying an actual good game.
All these add up to very little, however. Most “serious” gamers have either an Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or all three consoles. They don’t bother with Facebook apps and only play iphone apps for convenience sake rather than getting a legitimate piece of portable gaming hardware. But that’s exactly the problem: people should not want to play video games for convenience sake but for the love of the industry and the desire to get the best experience available for home or on the go gaming.