FABIO wrote:

Fussbett wrote:



Just like it did in 1984 when sales dropped so quickly and massively that entire companies went bankrupt? Don't explain console lifecycles to me again. Rest assured, this is a case of you misunderstanding me.

Don't you think the console market is just a WEE bit more well established than it was in 1984?

The collapse of Atari could be contributed more to their incompetent sense of business than the fact that their games weren't making any giant leaps foward.

Anyone who thinks the technical leaps foward (actual AND perceived) in each new console generation has been getting smaller and smaller is sadly mistaking. How is the fact that the PS2 is the PSX with smoother polygons and better lighting affects any different from the SNES being the NES with a wider range of colors and some nifty zoom affects?

No, there won't be an all out crash again for the reasons I already mentioned. But, if things stay on course (HINT: THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS SUB-THREAD) there could be a recession because people who bought a PSX and a PS2 could look at the PS3, see Duke Nukem Forever, Tekken 5 and Madden 2005 and say "Geez, is that really worth the money?". When a new system is unveiled, the games you currently own don't suddenly become any less fun. Well sure, that's a false statement for you and I, but not the norms.

The salesclerk will point out how Duke Nukem Forever has naked strippers you can kill, and Tekken 5 has breakable environments and Madden 2005 features bump mapping, realtime grass blades, and pixel shading. But dude, Duke Nukem Forever seems a little like every other FPS I've ever played, and Madden 2004 is still totally fun, and Tekken 4 was kinda boring after a while, and isn't that pricetag a little high? And aren't I getting a little old for videogames anyway? And do I really need to invest in another video game system? And what's my financée going to say about me buying another video game system? And is the PS3 laser going to fail like it did on all my previous Sony systems?

People do stop investing in video games sometimes, yes. I have three friends that stopped at the PSX for example. Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin presented the idea that even more of my friends will stop buying games if the attitudes in the industry towards graphics and gameplay continue as they are.

Where in the hell are these constant leaps in gameplay innovation of yore that you speak of? I gave up on buying console games entirely from '89-'92 because everything was just another shitty platform game or boring RPG, and that was back when Nintendo Power was brainwashing us all and "buying" a game ment I got it for free as a christmas present. Now there are tons of PS2 games I want to try. I can count the number of SNES games I thought were worth buying on one and a half hands; I'll probably end up buying over 20 titles for the PS2.

Yes, Little Computer People is a sandbox game but seeing as, unlike The Sims, it doesn't occupy six slots of the top ten sellers list, I chose to leave it out of my examples.

I thought you said that people will still be playing their old games and refusing to buy new ones. The idea that everyone is still playing LCP instead of The Fucking Sims is just as ridiculous as the notion that people will still be playing only current generation games ten years from now.

Remember when people claimed that RPG's as a genre were dying out? Yeah, look how accurate that turned out to be.