Is Wii The Games Industry's Saviour?

[cbrotherson]

Another slant on it is; and I do truly believe this for everything ever!

"It's the advertising that actually sells and not the content..."

This rings true for anything, even if you think that advertising isn't even employed. Hell take makeup for ugly chicks, bigger black shirts for fat dudes - all this [when adorned on the content] is advertising in it's basest form of course - making the packaging seem attractive than what's to be had inside has always been the norm.

Games sell due to one or two things mainly - branding or hype [generically speaking] we have all bought games which should be fantastic but meh :sick: when we actually got home banged it on and played for longer than 10 minutes!!

To say that quality games don't sell just on the quality of them is wrong, and that's not what I am saying - but more crap sells because of advertising and branding than any of the best games out there - there are anomalies to the rule, sure - I'm sure we all know some.

Absolutely. There's a large degree of advertising that affects the consumer when it comes to entertainment, and if something isn’t marketed well the it can only rely off word of mouth – which is somewhat unreliable, to say the least (Serenity, for example, had great reviews and decent word of mouth, but not enough to save it at the box office).

It's the old catch 22. Publishers/distributors want to catch lightening in a bottle, but are afraid their brand spanking new thing won't be successful because it has no brand power behind it, so less money is driven into advertising and marketing, which results in the product doing worse than it should because the company had no real confidence in pushing it in the first place. If it fails, it becomes a case of "told you so", if it succeeds then it's "we should have had more confidence and put more money in it", which often makes the follow-up overblown to take advantage of the new brand. All while having to be the 'same thing, but different'.

No brand is inherently bad – some of the hardcore may be fed up of Madden and FIFA and such, but it's easy to forget how we got to that stage. Both brands, among others, started off at an extremely high and unexpected quality bar, becoming revolutionary at the time (and selling the machine they were on by the bucketloads). It's not so much they're bad games, more than they're saturated brands; but to get there the company had to take a risk in the first place. It's cynical now, sure, but that's business – I don’t think any of us would pass down the chance of free money, which is effectively what these types of games represent.

 

[sagema]

Yes this is true for all products. But what makes the game industry different from most is the price. You have to dedicate a large amount of money, $50 for games that should around $15. You have to pay a high price for crappy entertainment in the game industry.

 

[cbrotherson]

Yes this is true for all products. But what makes the game industry different from most is the price. You have to dedicate a large amount of money, $50 for games that should around $15. You have to pay a high price for crappy entertainment in the game industry.

So very true - games on a whole are very high priced and mistakes are expensive. Painfully so...

 

[Rolex]

Yes this is true for all products. But what makes the game industry different from most is the price. You have to dedicate a large amount of money, $50 for games that should around $15. You have to pay a high price for crappy entertainment in the game industry.

I agree - you don't mind paying for it over say a dvd if the game has seemingly had some effort put into it as opposed to the dvd which isn't interactive - it annoys when the game is just a piss poor port / shovelware! :yesnod:

Also we do have a choice to buy or not - there is no gun to our heads to buy games - a bit of an tenuous oxymoron considering all the money we spend on hardware to play them methinks..hmmm

I can still remember buying games for £4 ($8) on cassette from the local petrol station and now I am paying upwards of £40 ($80) hmmm I wonder if I still had my paper round my wages would have increased 10 fold rrr:

 

[cbrotherson]

I can still remember buying games for £4 ($8) on cassette from the local petrol station and now I am paying upwards of £40 ($80) hmmm I wonder if I still had my paper round my wages would have increased 10 fold rrr:

:lol:

I remember those days too - would head around to the papershop, pick up a £2.99 tape, go home... and sometimes find it was total tripe :lol: Although I remember buying some stone cold classics that way (or stumbling into a new petrol station or something): Get Dexter, FlySpy, Spooked and a fair few others were discovered by 'blind buying' with my pocket money. Kinda difficult to do that now...