shevanel
New Member
This article is a few months old but as I sort of agree with alot of the opinions he makes. I don't know.. it's not the most exciting read.. but it really makes you think about how the gaming industry is really evolving into a "one size fits all" kind of mentality and it sucks.
Nintendo has realized that "good enough" is where the money is
Nintendo actually got it right. Wii all laughed at first but they're the ones who've staged the biggest comeback in gaming history because they figured the market out. They knew that yes HDTVs are awesome and cool, but most households in this generation (2006-2011) will only have one. The kids' rooms will all get the hand me down CRTs, and those are still standard def. So target them, and win the brothers and sisters and parents with interesting game designs that break the mold, following the successful experiment called the DS.
What happens to the industry when 3D game performance is as "good enough" as word processors have been?
But enough about the consoles, which continue to grow in dominance pushing PC gaming into single-digit percentages while publishers insult their customers with DRM and mandatory network connections for single player games. The PC market has long had this secret dark side that nobody wants to talk about, called gaming.
The audience is expanding to include more people who care less about graphics
One serious problem for the industry is that gaming itself is starting to have to reach towards the "casual" market to keep growing (see Nintendo DS or Wii if you're oblivious), and for those people Quake3 and Sims2 graphics are often "good enough" territory, much like upsampled DVDs. Last I checked Quake 3 ran about 60 FPS on two generations outdated low-end hardware (HD2400/GF8400) at any reasonable resolution (up to 2560x1600).