Gaming is mainstream and growing, this is obvious to most video game enthusiasts. Even Jack Thompson has failed in taking down the industry in his efforts on video game violence and general FUD. In order to survive in a mainstream environment publishers and developers are going to target a broad demographic to make them as much money as possible.
The game industry, like other entertainment avenues, is a risky business in which publishers have to pick titles they “predict” will do well in the market while passing on other “risky” propositions. While a the good ol’ shooter title will break sales records, the market cannot rely on one genre to carry the business especially considering many of these titles are forgotten within two months from launch. Publishers are going to be forced in expanding their reach to “family games” in order to finance new blockbuster titles.
Enter family gaming.
The idea of designing a “family” game isn’t new to our industry, as a matter of fact, it’s one of the oldest cornerstones of video game entertainment. Pong, Centipede, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and many other classic titles were no doubt playable by the entire family, but things have changed. We’ve evolved from hit titles like Donkey Kong to hit titles like Halo. We migrated from 2D gaming to full 3D adventures and pixel graphics to pixel shaders, but where do we go next?
Nintendo has the correct vision for the next stage of the video game industry and it involves bringing the entire family into gaming. It’s mainstream, right? Mainstream isn’t your dad playing a video game in the basement after the kids go to bed, it’s replacing Sorry with Spore and bringing out Wii Sports and having little family tournaments. We must respect what the big titles have done for the industry in merchandising, novels, sequels and spin-offs but we should not rely on them to carry us into the next generation of gaming.
(more…)
I enjoyed watching the press conferences this year. I’ve been waiting to see Mirror’s Edge and Assassins Creed, but also took an interest in a few titles I didn’t know anything about. I absolutely loves that it was less talking and more videos.
I mainly play The Sims series, so what I took away from E3 was the information released about The Sims 4.
I was glad to hear that there is an autosave feature since my Sims 3 game has crashed so many times and I’ve ended up losing hours of gaming. I also enjoyed seeing the new feature: The Gallery (Similair to The Sims 3 exchange) and hearing that it would be in-game.
I am glad to hear that the lots our sims visit will actually be full with people. I am excited to see what the emotions system is going to be like. The world looks great and I am just really excited about the Sims 4. I am counting down until September 2.