Comments on: Wii Bitter

By: Drowlord

Drowlord — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:42:34 +0000

I can only eek out a few hours per week for gaming. (two evenings, after the kids are in bed, per the agreement with my spouse). I really wish that I could play the heavy content games like Fallout 3 and GTA 4.

…However, with FFXII, it became clear to me after a few months that I wouldn’t be able to play JRPGs any more… At 40 hours into the game (I’d been playing it for over two months at that point), I couldn’t remember parts of the story and I got confused about what I was supposed to be doing. Also, I got really bored of grinding for XP, because I had literally spent weeks doing that without getting any story in return.

Worse yet, heavy-content games seem to pressure you to follow the strategy guides to accomplish things more than in the past. This really irritates the crap out of me.

By: Hank

Hank — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:05:06 +0000

Well, I for one, am planning to hide out in my bunker and bitterly cling to my AAA rpg’s and fps’s.

Actually, I suppose I’m quite happy about the growth of more casual games, and I’m a big fan of both xbox live arcade and wiiware. My feelings toward my Wii could be more generously described as “dissapointed”. I remember being amazed the first time I played wii sports. Wii sports promised a big change in how we played games, but, for the most part, I don’t feel the games on the wii have delivered on that promise. In fact, most of the games on the wii (with the exception of nintendo owned properties) seem to fail both in terms of content and in terms of execution.

As to Nintendo’s license to print money, it doesn’t help Microsoft’s or Sony’s profits that they are directly competing with nearly identical consoles. That’s a recipe for trouble no matter how the games market is trending.

By: Faisal

Faisal — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:06:45 +0000

They don’t mention Rock Band, which while relatively expensive (what with all the kit) is much more a casual game than a “real” game. You can pick up a guitar and crank out a song without first having battled fourteen orcs and increased to level three. You can have friends over to drink beer and belt out songs without first filtering for everyone being able to play at this level. Etc.

I bring this up because Rock Band is responsible for more PS3 purchases amongst my friends than all other games put together, and a lot of these people aren’t buying any further games (beyond RB2 and the $5 downloadable Gauntlet II, of course).

By: Weiguo

Weiguo — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 06:35:00 +0000

an MMO developer once commented on something very similar; in MMOs, the most vocal minority is the “hardcore” group — the ones who voraciously consume the endgame content as soon as it’s released, who play endless hours, and have the most to say about gameplay and balance. And yet for all the development and support time that they consume, they pay the same monthly fee as any other subscriber.

it seems to me that these “triple-A” games similarly require vast development efforts, and they don’t really retail for much more than a casual/party game — less than double the price. And does the increased (?) sales volume come from a disproportional development cost?

the hardcore crowd sounds like the increasingly small fish (in an increasingly big pond) that developers and hardware manufacturers are spending more and more money trying to catch.