An Open Letter to Nintendo

[Zilla]

Originally Posted by Grand Master Kickface

Even though the article is 3 and a half years old, it still holds true today and makes Nintendo's strategy perfectly lucid. Basically, if Nintendo doesn't expand the market base, no one else is going to, and eventually gaming will become more and more of a niche hobby until it stops existing altogether. It's only because Nintendo continually ropes in new players that video games have any longevity as a medium, and Wii was an absolutely necessary move for the industry's long-term health.

I disagree with this. Gaming as a whole was better when it was niche. The development structure was FAR less corporate and you didn't need to pour millions of dollars into a game to get it to sell. From the crash of 1984 until about 1998 or so when some serious 3D games broke into mainstream media, video games were at their most creative and impressive. Now, we've got the countless unoriginal sequels and the pandering to casual audiences and crazy demographic analysis that makes the industry more lucrative for the giant corporate monsters with fat wallets to fund that stuff, while making independent and lower-cost games pale in comparison, doomed to fade to obscurity.