Whenever I see another Wii game, or any other casual game, trying to make more sales by featuring a picture of mom or grandma playing the game, I'm constantly reminded of how powerful the casual audience has become; there are just too many to ignore. And this is inevitably shaping today's game industry, and I don't like the way it's going.
To make more money off of this massive audience, more and more developers are trying to make more (and not necessarily better) casual games that can appeal to the normal, non-gamer audience. And by doing so, the quality of games is lowered. For a longest time, people relied on market's competitiveness to advance the market forward, resulting better and better games. But if there's just so many not-so-well-informed consumers eating up any trash games devs put out, who'd try hard to create a triple-A, high-quality title costing them a pile of gold in developing it?
Game has been nothing more than toy as long as humanity existed. Now that we've developed technology to finally thrust game forward and turn it into something more meaningful, we're suddenly struck with this very distracting second renaissance of casual games. I just hope the troubling situation of today's Japanese game development doesn't become a global trend.
NPD charts are unavoidable. They're released monthly, and when it does, each and every news outlet out there, be it a magazine, a news website, or even a blog, seems to write it up as if it's an obligation. So, failing to avoid the unavoidable, I took a look at this month's chart and found it very un-surprising; Wii-whatever is on the top! Just like last month, and few dozen months before it.
Then, I thought:
Maybe, just maybe, the reason Nintendo's flagship titles* sell like crazy is because their games are not really "games" at all. *I mean Wii-Fit, Wii-Play, Wii-Music and stuff like that, not their traditional major titles like Zelda.
This theory comes from my belief that gamers who're in gaming for epic experiences are still a minority in this stinking world, that even with stellar technological and artistic achievements numerous titles contributed, the term "video game" is still mentioned as a degrading, childish play-thing ..thing. So, whatever that will go beyond the usual nerdy audience and reach out to the "normal," busy people with real lives will inevitably float to the top of the charts. And this is where Nintendo seems to excel.
Of course, I don't have a Wii and only had some playtime with it prior to the release of the balance board. So, you can and probably should take whatever I say here with a grain of salt.
But just look at that damn thing. It's a board you stand on and some simple instructions on the screen for exercising. Yes, excercising! It's not really something where a "player" "plays" it to enjoy the experience (by this I mean characters, stories, and interaction between players and characters). And besides this instructional program, the only thing that can be considered "game" are some extras that can barely be called games.
Let's think about the majority of people who buys Wii and Wii-Fit. Without any scientific data to back my theory, I say they are some average Joe who enjoys drinking beer, going out to movies, watch television, and only when friends come over does he fire this Wii up for maybe an hour of laughs and happy happy time. Is this what I consider a gamer? They are as much a gamer as bleak a game Wii-Fit is, if you ask me.
This is why I think NPD should not include Wii-Fit, Wii-Play, or any other so-called "casual" games in the same chart as games that traditional gamers, who enjoy games for game's sake, plays.
And when we do that, and start counting casual games seprately from traditional games, I bet there isn't as much expansion in the market as there is heralded to be.
Now, please sit back and enjoy this promotional video of the popular *tiny pause for dramatic effect* Wii-Fit:
Wii has been something of a novelty product for me; it's not something I have to have, but would be a fun system to play on occasionally. This is because Nintendo tried so hard to capture larger crowd, that is the "casual" audience, that they pretty much didn't put much effort in developing more serious titles for more "hardcore" audience. This is obvious if you consider their choice of executive officers and who they picked to come up to the stage at E3 2008 press conference and kick off the show: Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo's VP of sales and marketing.
However, with the announcement of Vanillaware, the creator of much-beloved Odin Sphere, bringing their next title, Oboro Muramasa Youtouden, a beautiful 2D action RPG just like the previous title, to Wii, Nintendo finally got me seriously interested in their system. I was 'meh' at Mario, Zelda, and any other titles they had, but this, I really want to play.
But let me keep myself from dishing in heavy investment into Wii just yet, until they truely convince me that there are more titles like this on the horizon, or I'm sure I'll regret it later...
