It’s with great joy I see lots of my old favourite games from 20 years back make a come back on the market. Some have resurfaced as handheld games while others are downloaded or played on-line. How is it that when we have consoles that can outperform anything we had 20 years ago we still look back to those old games and bring them to life? Wii have a built in virtual console souly for the purpose of redistributing old games (which however is starting to be used for new games as well).
The battle of the gaming market is almost always fought in media by counting the number of units sold, here Wii (24,5 million sold units) just overtook Xbox360 (19 million sold units) and the Playstation 3 is far behind (14 million sold units). One seldom mentioned fact is that both the Wii and Xbox360 are far surpased by both Playstation Portable (PSP, 37 million sold units) and most of all Nintendo DS (70 million sold units!). The major part of the gaming market is now in hand held devices.
What I’m getting at is despite the highly advanced PS3 and Xbox360 that can make incredibly advanced games it’s the hand held devices with far inferior technology that actually sells the most. The price of the units are surely also a large factor in this (the Wii and hand helds are much cheaper than PS3 and Xbox360). A game published on the PS3 or Xbox360 is expected to have superiour graphics and use the extreme hardware to the maximum, if not it’s a dissapointment. This creates a heavy presurre on developers to invest alot of time into making the game perfect (graphics wise) and only major developers can afford this.
On hand helds, or even better downloaded content, the technology is no longer a basis for judgement. While graphics do play a major role (and perhaps using the available pixels and colour depths as best as one can) it will no longer become a central role in the verdict on the playability of the game.
Games will invariably become better looking as the consoles keep getting better, I do however believe that there will always be a market for simple games like those on hand helds and downloaded content today. It’s simply to much fun in 8 bit!
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles
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