Gamers DON'T Want Innovation.
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I really hope this "Wii U" trilogy he's doing (how the hell it went from being a two-parter to a trilogy is a question in and of itself) isn't a sign of a general drop in quality. Game Theory used to be about fun jokes that displayed glorified fan-theories that where typically on par with the Pokémon Wars in terms of how credible they where. Now, though, he seems to be taking it more seriously and it seems to be drifting away from "Theory" and more into "theory" (by which I mean from the casual parlance to empirical meaning).
OT: I really think there is a time and a place for innovation. Innovation for innovation's sake is an empty pursuit. Innovation for the sake of finding new ways to make games fun, engaging, tell a good story or just being a way to kill a few hours enjoyably.
Like in Telltale's Walking Dead or Dark Souls, innovation doesn't need to be the most noticeable thing about a game, it just needs to reinforce what is there and be a functioning part of the machine.
OT: I really think there is a time and a place for innovation. Innovation for innovation's sake is an empty pursuit. Innovation for the sake of finding new ways to make games fun, engaging, tell a good story or just being a way to kill a few hours enjoyably.
Like in Telltale's Walking Dead or Dark Souls, innovation doesn't need to be the most noticeable thing about a game, it just needs to reinforce what is there and be a functioning part of the machine.
I enjoy GT's delivery. I think it's fun. However, I also think he's talking out his ass on this one.RJ 17 said:
Yes. Well, maybe. It could simply be his sin is not deception but laziness. The point I would counter with is that we do see games which have seen declines, such as Gears of War or Halo, and those aren't minor series, either. Oh, and Ghosts is still running a deficit even compared to last year, though it's available to more users (and it's been on sale so many times). Could be a fluke or it could be the beginning of a downturn. The problem is, you can pull a few small examples to support any point you want to make, but nobody's actually studied the overall data to derive a real pattern.
There are multiple problems with his argument.
-Failure to support any given new idea doesn't mean we don't truly want innovation.
To use a political analogy: Just because I'm open to a black President doesn't mean I think just any black person should be President.
In fact, the fanbase for the Wii should indicate otherwise, though this could be considered another rule by exception if you tried to go the other way with it.
-Failure to reject the norm doesn't mean we don't truly want innovation.
Often times, in an industry with limited choice, people still choose until provided a better choice. This is a flaw with consumers. Hell, it's a flaw with people. How many people vote Democrat or Republican just because they don't wish to "throw their vote away?"
-Failure to support bad ideas doesn't mean we don't truly want innovation.
GT went and ripped the Wii U an new one, so why are we in the wrong for not adopting it as consumers?
-Misuse of innovation in the industry and by GT.
Nintendo's big innovation was LET'S IMITATE TABLETS!!!!!! which is not really innovation. But in this industry, we often praise people for copying ideas. That's stagnant in itself.
-One can want old and new.
I like my beat 'em ups and twin stick shooters and have every iteration of MTG DOTP. I also want an influx of new brands, new ideas, new games, new stories, new mechanics. But if those new things are bad, it goes back to the prior thing. Case in point: bringing an open world to a game series could be a good idea or a horrible one. Just because you call out a horrible one doesn't mean you're against change.
Batman: Arkham X and Amazing Spider-Man both use similar stealth mechanics. In one case, it's done well. It's fun. It deserves praise. In the other, it kinda sucks. Now, let me ask: is the problem with the idea, or the exceution? Because I'd say it's the execution. Also, Batman got huge praise when Asylum hit, and huger praise when City hit. When Origins hit, and it was more of the same we'd come to expect? Not so much. And the series dropped from almost 10 million sales to under 4 million. Fluke? Pattern? Only the Watcher knows.
-It's not our job to know what we want. It's not our job to know how to make a good game.
Seriously, there's a reason game makers are professionals. They're supposed to be able to market their ideas to us. When companies lash out at us for this reason, it's stupid because it means they're bad at their jobs and pissed that we're not doing them.
I mean, I've entertained fantasies about game design, and I bet a lot of people have. But even that's a pipe dream.
Nintendo is supposed to know how to get us to buy stuff. It's worse with Nintendo, because they have a rep for being savvy, though before the Wii their console sales had been declining for generations. Nintendo's approach almost seems like a slot machine, just cranking things out hoping for a jackpot. If Nintendo can't make its products viable, it's not our fault. It's theirs.
-Reliance on correlation fallacies.
"These games just happen to be the ones that sold, and they are the safe ones, so nobody likes innovation! Let's ignore any other possible context!"
An argument so terrible it should be made while writing crazily on a chalkboard and wearing a tinfoil hat.
And when people describe them, they are routinely referred to as "retro." Yup. They're basically defined by their unoriginal nature.shrekfan246 said:
He just demonstrated how numbers don't lie, but you can use numbers to lie.War Penguin said:
Yes, but for someone who has such a love of math and statistics, I'd expect him to give a crap that he butchered them.V8 Ninja said:
I always take him with a grain of salt, but he's been mostly solid on factual concepts before. In this one, he was flat-out dishonest or too lazy to give a crap. Maybe there's an inverse correlation between information and sponsorship?
The critical flaw in this entire argument is ignoring market growth as a factor for increased sales as compared to simply establishing that "increased sales means gamers must not like innovation".
Simple facts are the market demographic of games has changed substantially over the last 20 years. The titles selling out 8 - 12m copies per franchise aren't doing it because its "what gamers want" but its because its whats available.
Think of it like this, if you want bread, but all the store has is white bread, you're going to buy white bread...even if you'd prefer a nice slice of potato bread instead. Its just how things go. And the larger the market is and the larger the demand is, if you ONLY supply that demand with white bread, the market customers will buy it because its all thats available and eventually the numbers simply establish that white bread must be more popular than any other kind of bread because...obviously, everyone buys it.
The few cases of "true innovation" in the gaming industry have generally been rewarded but many of these cases were rewarded outside of the general industry standards. Mojang is a direct an immediate example of a nice loaf of 7 grain wheat in the middle of a shelf of white bread. It was innovative, independent and did so well that companies with budgets larger than the GDP of some mid sized industrial nations have been trying to capture its lightning in a bottle a second time.
Simple facts are is gamers buy things because gamers want a game to play. Its not because we don't like innovation, nor do we want it, or a case of not being able to appreciate it when we do see it. But there is innovating to be innovative and different and there is trying hard to be innovative but not really being innovative at all...which a lot of this video is based on attempting to establish that "innovative" titles didn't sell well....except that most of the titles listed as examples weren't innovative in the first place, except perhaps as a descriptive adjective used in their marketing.
Gamers do want innovation, but we want innovation IN our games, not in how we interact with our games (WiiU Motion Controls...the goddamn Kinect...that kind of crap). We want games to break new ground and engage our brains and creativity in new and different ways...which largely doesn't happen because with the size of the market that continues to be willing to buy any bread they can get its simply easier for the game industry to keep shitting out the loaves of the cheapest bread they can make and guarantee a return on, rather than to truly diversify to meet the tastes and demands of a very diverse market base....which from a business stand point makes complete sense.
But to turn that around and say its the gamers fault is more or less ludricrous click bait designed to boost a Youtube channel for CPM revenue and partnership deals...much like this very same Youtuber's video about Pewdiepie was for. Its click bait, linking it here for "intelligent discussion" amongst the Escapists is just feeding the click bait and...yeah, congrats, you just got trolled by a Youtube channel....except you made the guy about three fiddy in the process.
Simple facts are the market demographic of games has changed substantially over the last 20 years. The titles selling out 8 - 12m copies per franchise aren't doing it because its "what gamers want" but its because its whats available.
Think of it like this, if you want bread, but all the store has is white bread, you're going to buy white bread...even if you'd prefer a nice slice of potato bread instead. Its just how things go. And the larger the market is and the larger the demand is, if you ONLY supply that demand with white bread, the market customers will buy it because its all thats available and eventually the numbers simply establish that white bread must be more popular than any other kind of bread because...obviously, everyone buys it.
The few cases of "true innovation" in the gaming industry have generally been rewarded but many of these cases were rewarded outside of the general industry standards. Mojang is a direct an immediate example of a nice loaf of 7 grain wheat in the middle of a shelf of white bread. It was innovative, independent and did so well that companies with budgets larger than the GDP of some mid sized industrial nations have been trying to capture its lightning in a bottle a second time.
Simple facts are is gamers buy things because gamers want a game to play. Its not because we don't like innovation, nor do we want it, or a case of not being able to appreciate it when we do see it. But there is innovating to be innovative and different and there is trying hard to be innovative but not really being innovative at all...which a lot of this video is based on attempting to establish that "innovative" titles didn't sell well....except that most of the titles listed as examples weren't innovative in the first place, except perhaps as a descriptive adjective used in their marketing.
Gamers do want innovation, but we want innovation IN our games, not in how we interact with our games (WiiU Motion Controls...the goddamn Kinect...that kind of crap). We want games to break new ground and engage our brains and creativity in new and different ways...which largely doesn't happen because with the size of the market that continues to be willing to buy any bread they can get its simply easier for the game industry to keep shitting out the loaves of the cheapest bread they can make and guarantee a return on, rather than to truly diversify to meet the tastes and demands of a very diverse market base....which from a business stand point makes complete sense.
But to turn that around and say its the gamers fault is more or less ludricrous click bait designed to boost a Youtube channel for CPM revenue and partnership deals...much like this very same Youtuber's video about Pewdiepie was for. Its click bait, linking it here for "intelligent discussion" amongst the Escapists is just feeding the click bait and...yeah, congrats, you just got trolled by a Youtube channel....except you made the guy about three fiddy in the process.
Wow. The creator of that video is a smug jerk.
A smug, oversimplifying, and significantly incorrect jerk, at that.
Yeah, it's the sequels that always do better. That's why Sonic the Hedgehog has... Aww...
That's why Red Faction... Aww...
Why Silent Hill...
...I can go on...
He ignores a large number of points: Super Mario Bros. was bundled with most NESs sold, and the spikes seen in Madden sales coincidentally seem to roughly overlap with the introduction of new consoles. Resident Evil had it's biggest spike when it pulled away from what it had done before with RE 4, and by RE 6 that spike has started to diminish as they do what they have before, only more so. Madden sales have actually been in decline for some time (coincidentally, the author's chart cuts off in 2006.)
And then there's a little game called Minecraft that has sold more than Madden has in its last seven years combined.
So, yeah, he's wrong, and he's a jerk about it; frustratingly, there's a point to be made here, but he end-runs around it in trying to force the audience to swallow his misleading hypothesis.
Innovation is crucial to the industry. It drives the industry forward. Without innovation, we don't get those games that everyone is imitating for the next decade. And yes, gamers want innovation; they're not lying about that.
But real innovation, meaningful innovation, successful innovation- it's not something that can be forced. You can't just turn a tap and say "Forces of creativity and imagination, GO!" You can't throw money at it; you can't even throw manpower at it. Six thousand people working for your company doesn't guarantee one Shigeru Miyamoto, one Sid Meier, one Peter Molyneux.
At best, you can create an atmosphere where people have the freedom and confidence to work on passion projects and hope for the best.
But to say "Gamers don't want innovation" suggests the witless kind of false insight that thinks gaming is encapsulated by only a decade or so (that the author has been gaming). Chances are there would be no Final Fantasy without Akalabeth and Ultima, no Tomb Raider without Pitfall, no Call of Duty without Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. All notably successful games in their own times. Nintendo passed on innovation when they gave up on partnering with Sony, so instead the Playstation helped make optical media mainstream and took over the video game market. The Wii put motion controls over sheer horsepower and ended up in millions of homes, even if the follow-through on software was ultimately lacking.
Not every innovation, critically acclaimed or not, is going to be greeted with public adoration and financial awards. But without innovation, every franchise will eventually fail. Even the all-mighty Call of Duty seems to reflect this.
A smug, oversimplifying, and significantly incorrect jerk, at that.
Yeah, it's the sequels that always do better. That's why Sonic the Hedgehog has... Aww...
That's why Red Faction... Aww...
Why Silent Hill...
...I can go on...
He ignores a large number of points: Super Mario Bros. was bundled with most NESs sold, and the spikes seen in Madden sales coincidentally seem to roughly overlap with the introduction of new consoles. Resident Evil had it's biggest spike when it pulled away from what it had done before with RE 4, and by RE 6 that spike has started to diminish as they do what they have before, only more so. Madden sales have actually been in decline for some time (coincidentally, the author's chart cuts off in 2006.)
And then there's a little game called Minecraft that has sold more than Madden has in its last seven years combined.
So, yeah, he's wrong, and he's a jerk about it; frustratingly, there's a point to be made here, but he end-runs around it in trying to force the audience to swallow his misleading hypothesis.
Innovation is crucial to the industry. It drives the industry forward. Without innovation, we don't get those games that everyone is imitating for the next decade. And yes, gamers want innovation; they're not lying about that.
But real innovation, meaningful innovation, successful innovation- it's not something that can be forced. You can't just turn a tap and say "Forces of creativity and imagination, GO!" You can't throw money at it; you can't even throw manpower at it. Six thousand people working for your company doesn't guarantee one Shigeru Miyamoto, one Sid Meier, one Peter Molyneux.
At best, you can create an atmosphere where people have the freedom and confidence to work on passion projects and hope for the best.
But to say "Gamers don't want innovation" suggests the witless kind of false insight that thinks gaming is encapsulated by only a decade or so (that the author has been gaming). Chances are there would be no Final Fantasy without Akalabeth and Ultima, no Tomb Raider without Pitfall, no Call of Duty without Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. All notably successful games in their own times. Nintendo passed on innovation when they gave up on partnering with Sony, so instead the Playstation helped make optical media mainstream and took over the video game market. The Wii put motion controls over sheer horsepower and ended up in millions of homes, even if the follow-through on software was ultimately lacking.
Not every innovation, critically acclaimed or not, is going to be greeted with public adoration and financial awards. But without innovation, every franchise will eventually fail. Even the all-mighty Call of Duty seems to reflect this.
dont be deceived, THIS episode is complete crap, but to be honest Game Theory usually brings some interesting point to the table or atleast proposes an extremelly silly theory backed up by some decent argumentationCallate said:
this episode, it was just lazy at best and cherry picking at worst, i suggest you check some other episodes, altough i wouldnt consider the channel educational as far as gaming goes if thats what you might be interested in, that title goes to extra credits
I like the video, it shows how easy it is to cherry pick information for whatever argument one wants to make.
But the simple truth is top selling games are like top selling pop stars, when they are popular everyone buys them because peer pressure and when they aren't the hot new thing people will not give a shit.
And people who actually care about their purchase are extremely rare, probably not even 10% of the community gives a toss, also doesn't exclude them from the popular choices because hey peer pressure is fun...
But the simple truth is top selling games are like top selling pop stars, when they are popular everyone buys them because peer pressure and when they aren't the hot new thing people will not give a shit.
And people who actually care about their purchase are extremely rare, probably not even 10% of the community gives a toss, also doesn't exclude them from the popular choices because hey peer pressure is fun...
I didnt saw the video but I think gamers dont want innovation at the cost of established IPs (especially ones that are already quite special and unique).
For example, dont fuck around with Thief, the same game as the originals with better graphics and visuals is enough.
A new IP however, just go nuts, that shit always brings fresh features (for better and worse) that then can be used and tweaked by a sequel or different franchise.
I want Destiny, Watch Dogs, and The Division to try some cool new shit. Hitman already worked perfectly fine in Blood Money, they didnt need to re-invent the wheel in Absolution.
For example, dont fuck around with Thief, the same game as the originals with better graphics and visuals is enough.
A new IP however, just go nuts, that shit always brings fresh features (for better and worse) that then can be used and tweaked by a sequel or different franchise.
I want Destiny, Watch Dogs, and The Division to try some cool new shit. Hitman already worked perfectly fine in Blood Money, they didnt need to re-invent the wheel in Absolution.
Just because something is "innovative" doesn't mean it deserves being rewarded by the market. The gull-wing doors on cars like the DeLorean are "innovative", but you don't see people clamoring for them on their sedans.
Innovation should bring more to the product, instead of just changing things for the sake of doing so.
Innovation should bring more to the product, instead of just changing things for the sake of doing so.
Now that brings up some variables MatPat willfully ignored. Brand recognition, which is derived from marketing and word-of-mouth, brought up sales of Call of Duty and Madden after igniting the fuse for the explosion in sales the NES got. Diminishing returns, on the other hand, now outweighs CoD's rise in brand recognition and has dampened Mario's popularity. But the diminishing returns slow down or are nullified as time passes and innovations are made; Super Mario World may have had yet another rise in sales due to 16-bit hardware and Yoshi, Super Mario Land rode the all-new wave of portable gaming, and the New Super Mario Bros series came out around 15 years after Super Mario World.NuclearKangaroo said:
Gonna lay some heavy on some people here, and opine that what people want is to know that when they lay down sixty stone cold currency units on an entertainment product they're going to get sixty stone cold currency units worth of fun out of it.
What this means is that there is a constant struggle between reliability and innovation. If you repeat too much, your product is boring. If you innovate, you run the risk of the cool new thing you did actually turning out to be kind of crap. If it overwhelms what you did right in the first place then you've got /gimmicky/ crap. You may even find that you have gimmicky crap layered over repetitive crap from last year that would've been better off just being repetitive on its own merits.
Do gamers want innovation? Sure. But we have to accept that not every new, innovative idea is, at least in itself, fun simply because it is novel. A game where I have to feed my toenails into a sensor to procedurally generate content based on the crystalline structure of my pedal keratin may be innovative, but it is not implicitly fun and is of infinite disuse to people who, for whatever reason, lack toenails.
Contrariwise, if there's something you enjoy that doesn't change its formula too much between releases, it's a safe bet that you will feel secure in its purchase. That doesn't mean you don't want or welcome innovation, it just means you know what you like and you trust them not to screw it up too badly on the road to next new thing.
Is innovation dead?
No, not by a long shot. Innovation isn't just high profile failures or amazing revolutions in the industry. Sometimes it's just bringing back an old idea that didn't fit in it's own time. Often, it's the little touches that make something old new again, or bring it to the attention of people who never saw it before.
Are gamers killing innovation?
No. They're curating it.
What this means is that there is a constant struggle between reliability and innovation. If you repeat too much, your product is boring. If you innovate, you run the risk of the cool new thing you did actually turning out to be kind of crap. If it overwhelms what you did right in the first place then you've got /gimmicky/ crap. You may even find that you have gimmicky crap layered over repetitive crap from last year that would've been better off just being repetitive on its own merits.
Do gamers want innovation? Sure. But we have to accept that not every new, innovative idea is, at least in itself, fun simply because it is novel. A game where I have to feed my toenails into a sensor to procedurally generate content based on the crystalline structure of my pedal keratin may be innovative, but it is not implicitly fun and is of infinite disuse to people who, for whatever reason, lack toenails.
Contrariwise, if there's something you enjoy that doesn't change its formula too much between releases, it's a safe bet that you will feel secure in its purchase. That doesn't mean you don't want or welcome innovation, it just means you know what you like and you trust them not to screw it up too badly on the road to next new thing.
Is innovation dead?
No, not by a long shot. Innovation isn't just high profile failures or amazing revolutions in the industry. Sometimes it's just bringing back an old idea that didn't fit in it's own time. Often, it's the little touches that make something old new again, or bring it to the attention of people who never saw it before.
Are gamers killing innovation?
No. They're curating it.
Rate of abandon is not fixed and support will continue even after most support is gone. It doesn't guarantee viability of the last gen system as a current gaming device.Bad Jim said:
360/PS3 support may stay strong because there are issues with one of those consoles and the Wii U, but that's not a given. And you can hardly blame people for wanting to actually play current games.
Though this is coming from someone without a current gen console or a real interest in one. And while I game on my PC, I'm hardly rushing out for new games. Honestly, though, at some point I will reach a point where the only place the games are is the next gen consoles or PC. At that point, I will need to buy a console/upgrade my PC to comply. And that has nothing to do with graphics.
Eh I disagree with him a lot in this video especially the later points he makes when he starts to talk about cross gen sales of games but not taking into account install base. The amount of gamecubes is a hell of a lot different to the install base of the other games while CoD had a fairly stable install base. He also ignores the CoD and Bf games that did sell less.
The fundamental flaw in his reasoning is that he's using sales figures to determine what gamers want. Problem with this is that sales figures don't tell us what gamers want, they tell us what gamers can afford. Everyone wants innovation, we just can't always afford it.
As someone else said innovation needs a purpose, there has to be a PROBLEM being solved, sick and tired of game devs saying but everyone uses the left analog stick to move and the right for camera, we have to innovate and be different. No what you need to do is give me an engaging story that I want to play, not screw with the game controls. I want something which makes me want to play it, not something which takes forever to learn because its "innovative" and certainly not something which makes the game WORSE for the sake of being differentRJ 17 said:
I think I should put this video on my favorites list because I keep having to pull it out everytime someone says I should buy tripe just because someone made it purple with pink spots