Has the Video Game Industry Lost Touch With the Gamers?

February 16th, 2007

Things are changing. The next gen consoles are now referred to as the new gen consoles. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have all laid their cards on the table, and I see one card in particular that has shown up in all three hands - they’re all losing touch with the gamers they’re trying to appeal to.

Many of you may be surprised to see Hideo Kojima pictured at the top of this article, however, it was his words that got me thinking about this topic. This morning kotaku had an article up about Kojima’s vision for a zombie game. In Kojima’s own words:

“The zombie idea I have is a bit different…Imagine a large town where half the inhabitants are zombies. Users would subscribe, get inside the town and get bitten. At that stage they become undead and can’t control their character - all they can do is modify the camera angles… They’d see their character attacking humans and have to pay just to watch! The only way they could end it is by opening another account, hunting themselves down and killing themselves. Of course, the problem is that your second character can get bitten as well.“

I was a little surprised by this. I’ve been a big fan of the Metal Gear games over the years, but this is a terrible idea for a game. Forcing gamers to pay a subscription fee just to watch their character bite others is a little over the top to say the least. If you had control over your zombie’s actions as he or she terrorized the innocent, that would be a blast. However, if my choices are either to pay to watch the game play itself, or pay more to make another character to kill my first character (at the risk of being zombified by the original character) I’ll choose not to play. This is an idea for a cash cow, not a unique gaming experience.

For months leading up to the launch of the PS3, Ken Kutaragi had a lot of interesting things to say about the future of gaming and the PS3. My personal favorite of his quotes was “Microsoft shoots for the moon. Sony shoots for the sun“. These bold statements hurt not only Kutaragi’s image, but Sony’s as well. It portrayed them as arrogant and detached. They stuck by the idea that gamers would be lining up to buy them even with the $600 price tag. We ran an informal poll back in January, and when asked “why haven’t you bought a PS3 yet?” 52% of those surveyed said that $600 was just too much for the PS3. That means that a significant portion of the gaming community does not agree with Kutaragi when he says that the PS3 is “for consumers to think to themselves ‘I will work more hours to buy one’. We want people to feel that they want it, irrespective of anything else.”

Jack Tretton (President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America) has also put his foot in his mouth recently. In an interview with EGM Mr Tretton had this to say:

“If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that’s been on shelves for more than five minutes, I’ll give you 1,200 bucks for it. I can get any retail buyer on the phone with you and get them to verify that there’s not a single retail location in America where there’s a PlayStation 3 on the shelf for sale. They’ve all been sold in a matter of minutes.“

Put simply, it is not very hard to find PS3’s. EGM proved this by calling 18 stores….. 9 of them had PS3’s in stock. Penny Arcade also went searching for PS3’s after seeing that statement. As per the terms of Mr Tretton’s bet, they were able to turn up $13,200 worth of PS3’s. This shows that Jack Tretton has a very weak understanding of how his product is viewed by the public. In other words, he is out of touch with what is going on in the world outside of his office.

Nintendo is out of touch in a different sort of way. They made the commendable decision to go with an entirely new control scheme, which has been more or less received very well by the public. However, in an effort to produce an affordable console, they sacrificed graphical capability. The Wii doesn’t look much better than the Gamecube visually speaking. Some gamers (like myself) feel that a good game is more than just flashy graphics, however, a large number of gamers and journalists have criticized Nintendo for this decision. It seems a high polygon count is far more important to gamers than Nintendo had guessed, and in the long run it could potentially spell disaster for the big N.

So what about Microsoft? They spend a lot of time listening to customer input, but it takes more than that to show that you’re truly in tune with what your customers want. MS has a long track record of underestimating their customers’ needs and wants. The most recent example of which is the way that they handled the launch of the Xbox Rewards program. In what can only be described as a blatant underestimation of demand for the service, the sign up page crashed immediately upon launch, and remained down for almost three days due to an overwhelming amount of traffic. This turned what could have been a glowing success into a PR nightmare. The problems don’t stop there though. Xbox 360’s continue to crash, and Microsoft continues to deny that there is any significant problem to speak of, even in the face of a report done by popular BBC show Watchdog. These problems combined with repeated letdowns from MS have done damage to the 360’s image.
You’ve heard my thoughts, now tell me yours.