I have some interesting game related questions....

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Erockbrox
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I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by Erockbrox »

So I got to thinking the other day, and I asked myself, how many people out there still play the NES and how many people out there actually still develop for the NES? Like I'm talking about percentages here.

For example, what is the ratio of developers vs players? Obviously more people play games than make them, but it got me thinking, just what is the approximate percentage? Is it 5% or less or like 1 out of every 10,000 or something? So anyone on here have a good guess to what I'm talking about?


Here is another questions I was thinking of. I got a Dreamcast basically to play like 1 game because I love the game and I really haven't played many other dreamcast games. So the percentage of the total Dreamcast library that I've played is very small, probably less than one percent. I wonder, if you were to look at the statistics of an average gamer who owns a particular console and then look at the number of games that the person has played for that console, just how much percent wise has that person played of the total library of that game console?

So if could predict, I would think that the most likely case is that the average gamer probably owns less than 10% of the total library of games for that console. Just from a money point of view, if you bought every game for the system at launch then you would have to have a lot of money just to afford the games in the first place. You could always get them later used for cheaper, but I'm talking about while the console is still being supported.


So I just heard that Microsoft is kinda of starting to phase out the Xbox One console to make way for it's next generation console. My question is this, while I know that companies like to create a newer and more advanced/powerful console every 5 years or so, is it even possible to play all of the content for that system and beat all of the games and such before the next gen console comes out?

Like just for the sake of a challenge, say the Xbox 360 just came out and you wanted to try and play every Xbox 360 game and beat/master it before the Xbox One console came out. Could you even do this? I mean maybe you could if it was the only thing you did for those years, but you have to consider that most people work and maybe only have 3-4 hours per day to play something, if that.

Basally what I'm trying to say here is that video gaming is BIG and there is a lot of content out there to consume, it seems like there is so much content that you really can't consume it all, so the question then that I raise is, why would a company make a new next gen console when most likely the current audience hasn't even played through all of the current content that is available for the current system?

Kind of like if you were at a restaurant and eating a steak, what if before you finished your steak the waiter was bringing you a lobster and then a fish and then a duck. It's like, I'm not even done with my steak yet and now you have brought me tons of other stuff and now I have a back-log of stuff to consume that might take me a while to finish it all.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts and such.
tepples
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by tepples »

To oversimplify things: Companies make new consoles mostly because the company's competitor is about to release its own console with either greater visual fidelity or a new input method. After a couple years of a "Genesis does what Nintendon't" ad campaign, Nintendo had to release the Super NES.
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dougeff
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by dougeff »

I was the key demographic in NES / SNES era. I had about 10 games for each system. I definitely had time to play those games as much as I wanted in 5 years.

These days games are a lot longer. A friend of mine played a tactical RPG game for 100 hours and told me he wasn't even halfway through the game.

And some games have expansion packs and upgrades.

I can see how it's harder to play through your games before the next system comes out.
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gauauu
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by gauauu »

dougeff wrote:I was the key demographic in NES / SNES era. I had about 10 games for each system. I definitely had time to play those games as much as I wanted in 5 years.
We also traded games a lot back then. I let you borrow Ninja Gaiden 2 in exchange for borrowing Super C.
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Jedi QuestMaster
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by Jedi QuestMaster »

This 'too much content' phenomena isn't just with video games.

Realize that you won't have time to watch every film, listen to every song, let alone play every game. And games take time and skill to play, you can sit back and let the movie experience sink in, and, better yet, you can do work while listening to music. But even filtering out all the objectively bad content out there, you will still probably not have time to absorb all the good films and hit singles while multitasking.

By the way, I just finished playing Resident Evil: Director's Cut four times to get the different endings. I have lots of catching up to do. :lol:
pwnskar
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by pwnskar »

The vast majority are probably not at all interested in playing every single game on every platform they own. :)

People like new stuff. I have a netflix account but I have no interest in sitting through their entire library just because I can.
Also, some game experiences would not have been possible if not for newer hardware. You would never have gotten Halo, etc, if the industry decided to just stick to making games for the NES or C64.
tepples
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by tepples »

Someone might claim based on the demake of Halo for the Atari 2600 that that's not an excuse. Had 8-bit game consoles still been state of the art, the design of Halo would have been similarly adapted.
93143
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by 93143 »

pwnskar wrote:Also, some game experiences would not have been possible if not for newer hardware.
The exact experiences, no. The SNES hosted an online FPS (Doom w/XBAND), an open-world 3rd-person action/shooter (Vortex) and a 3D platformer (Super Mario RPG), but they were admittedly fairly primitive and it's not easy to see how they could be brought up to modern standards even with arbitrarily powerful add-on chips.

With the N64, it becomes more a matter of clever programming to hit all the modern genres in a recognizable form. With the GameCube you're out of excuses. This may be why Nintendo kinda went sideways after the GameCube - they recognized that the hardware was powerful enough to do justice to pretty much any reasonable game concept, and underestimated the marketing power of superior graphics.
nocash
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by nocash »

Erockbrox wrote:Kind of like if you were at a restaurant and eating a steak, what if before you finished your steak the waiter was bringing you a lobster and then a fish and then a duck.
I know thar restaurant! Very sophisticated and very expensive, and they have exactly one meal for vegetarians (rice with cooked tomatoes). Best workaround is to ignore the menu and to order two bread rolls (or better, stay at home and eat normal food).
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pwnskar
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by pwnskar »

93143 wrote:With the N64, it becomes more a matter of clever programming to hit all the modern genres in a recognizable form. With the GameCube you're out of excuses. This may be why Nintendo kinda went sideways after the GameCube - they recognized that the hardware was powerful enough to do justice to pretty much any reasonable game concept, and underestimated the marketing power of superior graphics.
Graphics play an important role in a lot of game experiences today and they would not be the same without them. The gamecube also has a very limited storage media, cpu and e erything else. It's not just the graphics that have improved since previous generations, it's everything.
I get that people want to say that good games can be done on limited hardware and I agree. But some games just can't. You could try to do a port of a current gen AAA title and slap the same name on it, but it's not gonna be anything of the original other than by name.

Someone made a version of Portal for the C64 and that's cool and all, but it' not Portal. It doesn't bend your mind in the same way that a complex 3D space bending game does because it keeps you stuck in 2D and there's nothing you can do about it.
93143
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by 93143 »

pwnskar wrote:Graphics play an important role in a lot of game experiences today and they would not be the same without them.
I'm just gonna go ahead and play devil's advocate here: no they don't. There is no modern game that outright wouldn't work on a GameCube because of the limits of its display hardware. Prove me wrong.

(VR may be an exception. There was a head-tracking VR headset for Mega Drive, but it was so bad it was never released. GameCube could probably do decent VR, but it would be hella blurry and capped at 60 fps.)
The gamecube also has a very limited storage media, cpu and e erything else. It's not just the graphics that have improved since previous generations, it's everything.
No, it's really just the graphics. Even CPU power requirements are driven by graphics. Physics and especially AI basically haven't improved in a decade and a half, and audio has been an afterthought for at least that long. Enemies in Call of Duty are dumber than they were in F.E.A.R.. Physics in Horizon Zero Dawn are worse than they were in Crysis, or Rocket: Robot on Wheels for that matter. The modern bloat in storage requirements is due pretty much solely to graphics - downgrade the models and textures to GameCube level and the problem mostly goes away. Admittedly the mini-DVDs were somewhat restrictive even then, but that's not insurmountable with a bit of ingenuity, and the PS2, Xbox and Wii all used full-size DVDs anyway.

I'm not saying graphics add nothing to a game. But we are deep into the law of diminishing returns, and I don't think there is any modern genre (as distinct from 1:1 ports of specific games) that couldn't work on a sixth-gen console.
Someone made a version of Portal for the C64 and that's cool and all, but it' not Portal. It doesn't bend your mind in the same way that a complex 3D space bending game does because it keeps you stuck in 2D and there's nothing you can do about it.
The Commodore 64 is a little ways back from the point of diminishing returns I've been describing. There are absolutely genres that would be a total mess on a system that old. Yes, you could do Portal in 3D, but at what frame rate and level of detail? There's at least one golf game for the SNES that used texture-mapped 3D graphics at multiple seconds per frame, which might work for golf but is dicey for an action FPS...

...

I've noticed something funny about modern open-world games. They're smaller than the old ones.

Final Fantasy IV was an open-world game. And it was enormous. So enormous that traversing the world had to be represented schematically, with obviously non-real scale and travel times, and the player's imagination filled in the rest. Even locations like towns and mountains were still obviously representative rather than rigidly literal (go a few dozen steps up a mountain in any SNES FF game and look down). But nowadays an open-world game uses realistic 3D graphics that purport to be a 1:1 representation of what's actually going on, and everything happens in real time, which means the world has to be small enough that the player doesn't get bored traversing it, and the result is that everything is miniaturized. See that mountain over there? Yeah, that's technically a hill...
Rahsennor
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by Rahsennor »

The 'voxel sandbox' genre popularized by Minecraft wouldn't work on a 6th-gen console. There just wasn't enough writable storage, until fairly recently, to hold that magnitude of user-generated content, and even with the crappy graphics you still need a meaty CPU and GPU to get a decent draw distance. Not as meaty as Minecraft itself would have you believe, since it's a steaming pile of Java spaghetti, but you either need to draw an awful lot of cubes or devote an awful lot of time to merging their geometry on the fly.

Edge cases aside though I couldn't agree more. I've seen (and written) Quake bots that could wipe the floor with every AI in every game I've played since - and QuakeC doesn't even support arrays! Sumotori Dreams, a demoscene game written by one person, still trumps the physics of triple-A titles a decade later, like Breath of the Wild. And every game made in between plays sounds and music straight out of MP3s, with some layering and directionality if you're lucky.

It's all about the money, not about the fun. And nothing makes money like eyecandy... or a shiny new console to view it on.
tepples
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Re: I have some interesting game related questions....

Post by tepples »

93143 wrote:There is no modern game that outright wouldn't work on a GameCube because of the limits of its display hardware. Prove me wrong.
Some might need their menus and subtitles resized for legibility at 480i, which is vertically not much sharper than 240p. I seem to remember text in Dead Rising being unreadable at on an SDTV, which displays at 360i on 4:3 displays.
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