1604: Dissonance

There are two, great, bizarre pieces of dissonance in the games industry right now, and Nintendo’s live video presentation earlier highlighted one of them very obviously.

Both pieces of dissonance are very similar: they regard how good, interesting and widely-praised a platform is, and how poorly they’re selling. The systems in question are, of course, Nintendo’s Wii U and Sony’s PlayStation Vita — both of which are excellent systems, both of which have a ton of excellent games, and both of which are selling like shit despite passionate, if small, install bases.

Why is this happening? Well, it’s at least partly due to the fact that the big-hitters of the industry — Sony and Microsoft — are now doing a much better job of appealing to the mainstream market than Nintendo were during the Wii era. The market that Nintendo courted with the original Wii — casual, family gamers — have since moved on to mobile phones and tablets (where they’re having vastly inferior experiences, but that’s a subject for another day). This leaves a different kind of mainstream market — the Call of Duty-playing beer-and-pretzels multiplayer brigade who are, for sure, bringing a ton of money into the industry, but who are also indirectly pushing budgets sky-high and encouraging some of the worst practices in the industry.

The market that plays Call of Duty and other big-budget triple-A games on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, in other words, is much larger than the market that plays Mario on Wii U or JRPGs on Vita. This has led to both Wii U and Vita being perceived as “failures” somehow, despite the fact that they’re both trundling along quite nicely, seemingly mostly oblivious to the rest of the industry. Both platforms, notably, provide something markedly different from what is seen on PS4 and Xbox One; Xbox One and PS4, conversely, currently have relatively little to distinguish between them — a swathe of predictable triple-A games, a promising-looking indie lineup and a bunch of features a significant number of people aren’t sure if they really want or not.

It was highly apparent during Nintendo’s event today in particular that the games on offer for Wii U are completely distinct from anything coming down the pipe for Xbox One or PS4. They’re colourful, they’re family-friendly, they’re creative — they’re the sort of things computer and video games used to be, in other words. I’m not saying that this is inherently “better” than the muted blues, greys and browns of modern triple-A — those games have their place, even as people like me aren’t interested in them — but that they provide something immediately more noticeable and distinctive than the identikit worlds of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Call of Duty and Battlefield.

Vita, too, has a ton of interesting, unusual and distinctive games, whether it’s colourful JRPGs or portable takes on indie titles. Developers for the platform have long since given up trying to make a “portable triple-A” experience and I, for one, am glad about that. Vita doesn’t need to be a portable PS3/PS4 — it needs to be its own thing. And, despite the relatively small number of people who have one, even as more and more people yell about how great games like Persona 4 Golden are, it’s doing a very good job at catering to the clear and distinct audience it’s been building up.

All this doesn’t make Sony’s announcement and subsequent retraction of an announcement for Final Fantasy Type-0 on Vita any less frustrating, however. Still, Final Fantasy Type-0 in HD is one more reason to pick up a PS4 or Xbox One, and those, for me, are in short supply so far.