The weird thing about Satoru Iwata is how much he’s praised and how much we have been following none of his advices, as an industry. Almost a decade ago, this is what Satoru was talking about:
We frequently compare ourselves to the motion picture business. We are fascinated with the movies. Hollywood is like an older brother who’s already succeeded; we race to measure our success against his.
Our method of content creation is modeled on the studio system. We measure the popularity of our virtual stars against Hollywood’s real ones. Over the years, we have frequently created games based on the movies’ biggest names — and we now take pride when a movie occasionally develops a script based on one of ours. Angelina Jolie starred in two "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" movies, which were based on the video game adventurer.
But in terms of reaching a mass audience, we are not quite ready for our close-up. Although video game sales and movie box-office receipts are similar in the U.S., movie sales, rentals and pay-per-view keep them far ahead of us.
We may even be headed in the wrong direction. A recent survey of U.S. high school students shows a trend: Young people who used to say they played games weekly now report they play only monthly. Sales have been declining for several months.
When we gather for the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the L.A. Convention Center this week, we may want to blame outside factors. But I fear we are doing much of the damage to ourselves. Most of us who create, publish, sell and consume video games see ourselves more as a tribe than representatives of society as a whole. We adopt our own beliefs and behaviors, and we often disregard those who don’t conform — not a prescription for market health.
Throughout recorded history, playing games has been a natural form of entertainment, practiced by all ages, all cultures and both genders. Our challenge is to bring more people to our modern version. In this sense, Hollywood can be a role model. The film industry welcomes all consumers, creating content with a wide appeal.
On the other hand, there are two significant ways in which we perhaps would be wise not to emulate the movies. First, video games have decisively adopted the high-risk business model of the blockbuster. For some new game machines, development budgets will reach $20 million, perhaps even $30 million — plus marketing costs. Even if retail prices rise, it will be increasingly difficult to recover costs if the audience is not growing.
Second, we would do well to consider what Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, describes as "the innovator’s dilemma." We are an industry that has spent many years "improving" our product along a single performance vector — in our case, graphical realism. But we are reaching a point of diminishing returns. Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects, we need to find other ways to improve.
Through the years, motion pictures have benefited from several significant technical advances. They added sound, then color … and air conditioning inside theaters. Only one of these — color — had to do with what was actually seen on screen. The other two enhanced the nature of how movies were enjoyed by stimulating other senses.
It’s funny how game developers keep getting confused about the fact that you can be inspired by something (Hollywood mass appeal) and simultaneously reject part of that something (studio business model). The bits on how we game developers are a tribe rather than representatives of society as a whole rings true today. Where are the elderly games, you know they’re going to be a majority in all countries pretty soon right? I’ve never seen any game developer besides myself on my blog wonder about computer games for elderly. The tribe.
We haven’t really moved on and that’s worrying.