Losing My Religion
Posted by Matthew C. Egan on Saturday June 21st 2008, 11:50PM
I waited in line, just ahead of a family waiting eagerly to get their Wii in April of 07. The Toys’R’Us we huddled outside had fifty tickets to hand out, I was #49, and that meant the two kids behind me had one ticket between them. I thought to myself, hey, maybe I’ll give up my spot and head home? Nah, I went back to reading my book while we waited for the store to open. In hindsight, I should have given the kid that ticket, as it looks like Nintendo is more interested in making games for Liv Tyler and Carrie Underwood than it is in making games for Mii (See what I did there? Heh.)
I don’t have friends hanging around my house anymore. I don’t drink, so I don’t really enjoy games like Smash Brothers or Mario Party, I’m a much bigger Zelda nut, and Twilight Princess was a launch title. I haven’t really wanted to play anything since. I did buy Mario Galaxy, and that was neat for the few hours it held my attention, but I’m looking for the Final Fantasy or the Metal Gear and there just isn’t one on the horizon for the Wii. I am picky, really stupidly picky. I may have blinders on, but it takes some really amazing reviews to get me to leave my little Konami/SquareEnix/BioWare comfort zone and try something new. Like Portal, everyone needs to play Portal, but I didn’t until I read about it first.
I am not the customer ole Reggie is looking for, and that is going to really skew the console war this time around as the target audience spans a much wider spectrum than it ever has. So am I just a stubborn gamer not wanting to share my geek title with all these newbies? Damn straight I am!
You need to have spent money on Lair, only to crash into a mountain sixty times before you drove to Mountain View and force fed the SIX AXXIS to a Sony Intern before you can call yourself a gamer! We’re an old and closed minded lot! We’ve been through too much with painful titles like Kane and Lynch or Haze to share this title with your Mom and Aunt Gina! Have we suffered so that they may play?
Looking back on the previous generation, many quickly comment on how poorly the GameCube sold. I worked as a Retail Representative for Nintendo back then, back when I was in love with the company, and I know for a fact that with 90% of the major titles being first party they were putting away huge dollar on that system whether it was winning the console war or not. The Mario’s and the Metroid’s always sold big, and all those dollars went one direction, instead of three or four when you have a publisher and a developer to split the paycheck with. Nintendo was the single bachelor, able to spend their paycheck on booze and hookers while its buddies Sony and Microsoft had their paychecks eaten up by angry wives EA and Activision respectively. Jeez, now that there is practically a Wii in every living room, I should have invested in Nintendo back when it was matched dollar for dollar by the company!
In the end, the success of the Wii shows me the value the dollar holds over the Video Game Industry and in many ways breaks that child’s bubble of a belief that game developers are out there to make great games for me to burn quarters on. This is and always has been a business, and as Mom and Aunt Gina come around and pick up that DS and get behind the novelty item the Wii seems to have become, more systems will go out and more bloatware will be shoveled onto the market. There is that popular forum graphic with the Nintendo Exec and Miyamoto holding up the DS exclaiming “It Prints Money!” I don’t think it is far from the truth. It started with Nintendogs, and as someone that has witnessed a room full of two hundred adults all nursing pixilated puppies, it is clear that like it or not my era of games has come to an end.
Maybe I am a doomsayer, maybe these new casual players are just a new wing of the market. My true waking fear becomes that when the casual market proves more lucrative to develop for than my customer bracket, that we’ll see less and less games like Mass Effect or Metal Gear, and more titles like WiiFit and Pokemon Ranch. Rest in Peace Solid Snake, good night Commander Shepard, come along Pikachu, I have a Mudkip you just have to meet!
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Bloatware. Nintendo used to make games just for me. Not anymore.
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