http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Princess_Peach

And I'm kinda glad they did. The original Super Mario 2 feels like a mish-mash collection of levels cut from the first game for not being good enough.

Oh major industry does that here too. There's a reason our exchange rate is now tanking really bad. It's the bloody automobile industry and similar, bitching because they don't make as much profit overseas. Now the rates tanked, their profits go up leaving them able to raise prices here and screw us over even more.

And the anime industry is a brilliant example of how fucked up it is. A single 23 minute episode can cost the equivalent of $70 to $80. Whereas overseas, you can buy the whole bloody series for that or less! It is often cheaper to import than to buy locally. This is why Atlus regionally locked copies of Persona 4 Ultimate Arena. As the JPN and US versions both contain English and Japanese and the US version is significantly cheaper, they didn't want people importing. So instead of matching the local price to the US one to entice people to buy it here; they regionally locked and charged a higher price.

That move obviously failed, as the second hand market is flooded with copies at substantially lower price -- an indication the game didn't sell well. And now with the cheaper second hand copies out there, Atlus will be making very little local profit.

But yeah, the government is only out to help the big corporations. They're not out to help the public. They're also planning on flooding markets with cash, not at the public level, but such that it goes right to the corporation coffers. They say it's to get enough money out there to allow wage increases, but the reality will be that money sits in company coffers and wages will continue to flat-line or drop.

It also won't help those of us who work for small companies. We have a major corporation as a client who refuses to pay higher inline with any proposed inflation. They've been paying the same rate for over half a decade. So they make a larger profit, but refuse to pass it on even at industry level.

So in short - Japan is totally fucked and if a "major" industry such as the video game one could crash hard, we may be lucky and all will take it as a wake up call.

So that there is no competition at all in the console market? I seriously don't understand why people want a monopoly in the console market so much. I would hate it, i can't even think about the idea of having to swallow every BS a company comes up with with just because there is no competition. Always-online? You bet. Insane price tags? Sure. Investing in new technologies? Nah, why bother if there is no competition.

For me the more competition the better, but it seems people like monopolies somehow. It would be like wishing that GOG died so Steam could take over the whole PC market.

I don't think games need to be rated M to be good. I'd rather get E rated Zeldas, Marios and Metroids than M rated CODs. But i'm that crazy, you know, i think that the rating given by ESRB doesn't determine whether a game is good or not. Hehe, how silly of me.

It's a good idea that you do that, or you won't be able to use your brain.

Mostly due to environmental concerns over wasted hardware, I wouldn't mind consoles either dying or morphing into generic computing machines that follow standards so that developers can write portable code for them (and of course stop the exclusivity madness).

The main thing that I would love, really, is for people to have one large machine tops, rather than a PC and a bunch of consoles (or just a bunch of consoles).

If you factor out the exclusivity of games, all that extra hardware does NOTHING for it's owner.

It's an aggregation wasteful stupidities like that that are causing our ecosystems go down the drain.

With the above in mind, I wouldn't mind Nintendo surviving as a game designer, manufacturer of peripherals for the PC/Mac/Mobile and/or manufacturer of the more generic machine mentioned above.

Thanks, that was a very interesting post.
As a matter of fact in France (europe?), many people consider Japan as the dream country to work/live in. Perceptions I suppose ...

Stop argument baiting everyone in the thread. Stop overreacting to minor statements. They stopped competing with the others since they made the Wii to fill a completely different niche than them. It's not unreasonable to want to play their games when they're good but want to avoid motion controls, or screen controllers, etc.

Oh, sorry, i thought forums were meant to be the place to discuss stuff. Looks like i'm wrong, thanks for pointing that out.

No way. Why would anyone want them to die?

Adhering to a well designed standard doesn't stifle innovation (look at browsers if you don't believe me).

Nothing prevents them from innovating on top of the standard (adding optional non-standard features while keeping a standard compliant core).

That way, those that want to develop for the edgier console specific features can do so and those who want a console-agnostic game can stick to what's in the standard.

Conversely too much platform fragmentation certainly stifles software innovation (as software developers are given a choice between a smaller return by targeting a fraction of their desired audience or spend a lot of overhead supporting multiple platforms instead of using those resources to create original software).

As they are all supported by OS-agnostic languages (or languages that can be OS-agnostic if the right subset of the language or libraries are used), it should matter less and less as time goes by.

If only there was any causality between the two.

For example, Bethesda has made several praised multi-platform games, haven't they? I guess that alone proves that one does not have to lock their games into one platform to make them any good.

And has Nintendo made any good _new_ games in years anyway, platform-locked or not... I'm more interested them releasing some older games on other platforms too.

You can compete also without locking games to one platform only. Then the competition is not about being forced to buy a certain piece of hardware to play a certain game, but you select the hardware that offers the best bang for the buck, and still can mostly enjoy the same games as others. For example if one console platform pushes always-online gaming and the other does not, and both offer largely the same games, I guess many people would opt for the one which doesn't push the online requirement.

You are promoting a form of competition where e.g. Sony pictures movies could only be watched on PS3/PS4 and Sony TVs, or Sony music could be listened only with Sony-Ericsson smartphones. Competition through HW-locked media is such an unattractive model from the end-user point of view.

As for your Steam vs GOG example, I am not promoting games being only Steam or GOG-exclusive. People can use the service that offers the perks that they enjoy the most, while still playing the same games. But even that is still not quite analogous to having to buy certain HW to play a game or watch a movie, as Steam and GOG both run on largely the same platforms. There the exclusivity means just having to install another client on the same platform, at worst.

And since GOG games are DRM-free anyway, in their case the exclusivity only extends to purchasing/acquiring the game, not installing or playing it. So to take a movie or music example, it would mean you could purchase your Sony movie or music only from Sony stores or services, but after that freely use them on any piece of HW that supports the media type.

EDIT: Just to clarify my stance: I don't necessarily want Nintendo stop making hardware, but simply release games also on other platforms besides their own HW.

I know that, but it was perceived as Mario 2, the creatures have been accepted into the Mario universe, so it practically is Mario 2. The true reason why they rebranded Doki Doki Panic as Mario 2 isn't the difficulty though, it's the fact that the game sold poorly in japan. Keep in mind that it isn't enough for a Mario game to sell copies, it has to sell entire consoles. So if a Mario game can't even sell itself and gets outsold by another platformer the logical choice is to make the better selling game the flagship title. The downright unfair difficulty didn't help either.

Of course Nintendo products are aimed at kids, but that still doesn't excuse bad gameplay and hardware. While nobody expects to find any complex and dark storylines in a Nintendo game (Majora's Mask somewhat excepted, depending on what you consider "dark"), there's no reason not to expect good gameplay. Look at the original Super Mario Bros through to Super Mario Galaxy. Underneath the child-friendly setting and story, pretty much every main entry in the series is an excellently designed platformer and not one of them is a simple clone of its predecessor. Platformer fans of any age would agree that those games are, if not the very best of the genre, they're right up there. Hell, just look at how many franchises, particularly platformers, tried and failed spectacularly to go from 2D to 3D. Not only did Mario succeed at where most other failed, and not only was it one of the first to even try, but it pretty much made 3D its bitch. Nowadays, however, the Mario series is simply coasting on nostalgia by releasing the same old "New Super Mario Bros" over and over again. That's not even mentioning their other franchises, or what's going on with their hardware.

This is largely why old fans of the company are so displeased by Nintendo. It's not because Nintendo products are still being aimed at kids, it's because they no longer want to put in the effort to make something both innovative and well designed and executed, be it child friendly or not.

Even the PC is not agnostic. You can't play most games if you don't have a Windows OS installed. It is "hardware agnostic" but not "software agnostic", since you still need a specific OS to run games. I would much rather use a OSX machine if i could, but i'm locked to Windows because most software is written to run on it.

The way games work is completely different than the movie and music industry. You're comparing things that are completely different. Games rely much more on specific hardware setups and programming languages than other forms of entertainment. And even then, the movie scene is from being as agnostic as you say. Who owns the Blu Ray format again? Yeah, Sony, and if you want to produce a Blu Ray movie or a Blu Ray player, you need a license from Sony. The 3DO had a similar concept back in the day, it was licensed to many manufacturers to make their own 3DO consoles, such as Panasonic.

The hardware-adgnostic concept, while beautiful in theory, would never work because of how the games market work, at least in my opinion. The hardware market is way too risky and expensive to get into, which is why we only have 3 companies and many have failed in the past. Consoles are sold at a loss most of the time (which doesn't happen with other types of eletronic devices) due to the insane hardware they have to put into their machines to be able to compete in the market while keeping a low cost for consumers. They try to regain their investment through licensing fees and by selling games. This fact alone is enough to put an end to this utopia. Companies won't bother purchasing licenses to sell their games on consoles with smaller userbases.

Also, programming languages are completely different. The Xbox 360 uses Microsoft's Direct3D while Sony uses Open GL on the PS3.

Even "multiplatform" companies such as EA ditch one console in favor of others, like they have just done with the Wii U. My point is: even if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo drop the exclusivity, there will still be one console that will have more games than the other.

Heck, even the mobile market is not agnostic, we have games for Android, Windows Phone 7 and iOS, each with their own exclusive games.