It was recently noted by Frontier Developments head David Braben (developers of the WiiWare game Lost Winds) that the reason Wii Metacritic scores are usually so abysmally low compared to the rest of the pack is that these games are being reviewed by “core gamers” and that “family focused games tend to appeal less to them.”

Braben continued by saying, “It throws up a difficult dilemma for those reviewers … are they reviewing the game for those people likely to play it, or for those people who form the bulk of their readership?”

Does he have a point?  Hit me after the jump.

Okay, as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that Braben’s comments are not about Nintendo not caring about ratings, but more about the right people reviewing the games in the first place.  Damn, that’s not where I was going with this.

Well, I’m taking it my direction, and you all can piss off.

Dammit, all right, he makes sense, as much as I hate to admit it.  You wouldn’t send the guys from the TLC show American Chopper into review the latest in moped sales, or you’d get some pretty scathing reviews.  And let’s face it, the people who are dishing out 9.0-10.0 reviews on games like your Resident Evils and your Gods of War are not getting “wowed” over the same things that are going to get those same reviewers to wet their panties over the latest title in the Hannah Montana line.

The problem here is your Wii Sports and your casual games are obviously outselling your quality, artistic titles.  Wii games that explore genres, redefine boundaries, and push the limits of the norm like Madworld and No More Heroes are getting buried by the NPD numbers being put up by games like Mario Kart and Wii Play, which are safe, family friendly nerf-soft regurgitation.  So why take risk at all on something deep and artsy when you can crank out Mario Party 17 and sell a million copies guaranteed?

Ever see the movie “Idiocracy”?  Perfect example. It’s the reverse evolution, where instead of the best and the brightest being elevated through a survival-of-the-fittest style competition, it’s a matter of cranking out useless offspring after useless offspring and hoping that one of them turns grows up not to be a stripper or cranked out on black tar heroin, or both.

Back in the 1990s, when gaming was just starting its slow ascent into the phenomenon that it’s now becoming, it was uncool to be a gamer.  We were a niche market with very specific tastes where you could get away with an Altered Beast or some such nonsense.  There were very few games for kids or your grandparents that blew the doors off any system, because the market didn’t exist.  Playing your 8-bit Nintendo was still shunned by most as “playing games”.

Smash cut to today. Video games are a multi-billion dollar a year industry and reports indicate that more people are playing video games than going to movies; it is a great time to be a gamer.

But now Nintendo has tapped into the blue-hair wig market and the floodgates have opened.  Now the niche market is turning a niche market again, only this time in a negative way.  We’re slowly going from being the hip minority to being the uncatered-to minority as Sony and Microsoft race to play catch up try and take a piece of Nintendo’s casual game market.

It’s like the hip corner bar that you’ve been going to for twenty years that only you knew about has suddenly now been marked as a stop over by a weekly tour bus full of grannies on their way to a slot machine casino in Vancouver.  After awhile, it’s only a matter of time before the bar owner has to start putting in wheelchair accessible ramps and copies of AARP magazine on the bar.

That has to have been the strangest analogy I’ve ever used.

Eventually, games that are innovative and take risks are going to go the way of the dodo in lieu of games that can turn guaranteed profit.

So, just like any business, Nintendo is going to continue to prostitute themselves out to those consumers who are consuming the most, which are apparently nursing homes and ten-year-olds.  The fact that Nintendo just sold its twenty millionth Wii last month and that it continues to outpace both Sony and Xbox monthly sales two to one shows that it is doing something begrudgingly right.

I can just see the granny bus on the horizon, and I don’t like the adult diaper stink that it brings with it.

Tweet This Post