Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, speaking at the Game Developer's Conference this week, urged the industry to create innovative new products rather than an endless stream of sequels. The rising costs of development are forcing developers (and more importantly the publishers funding the games) to take less of a risk on new content and instead stick with the 'tried and true' offerings (like Madden, Final Fantasy, etc.) GDC has been rife with discussion on how much it costs to develop a game, and how those costs really get crazy when you think of trying to fill a Blu-Ray disc with content.

Iwata said the industry needs to look for the next Tetris, and pointed to his own companies innovative offerings such as the wildly successful Nintendogs and forthcoming 'brain training' games.

While we all cry out for innovation and lament the sequels we can't ignore the fact that we vote with our dollars. A wildly innovative, quality game like Psychonauts does terrible (86,000 sales total), while a retread like Madden 2006 sells well into the millions of copies. People buy what they feel they are likely to enjoy, and if it comes down to buying Tony Hawk 13 or something new, they buy that 'same song second verse' product.

Posted by scottsh at Friday March 24, 2006 - 12:19 PM | TrackBack (0) | Category: Consoles | © 2006 Gaming Signal

While I agree with the sentiment of "build new original games" and also agree that sequals sometimes suck, isn't Nontendo being a little hypocritical here?

Resident Evil 1 through 4, top Gamecube seller.

Zelda 1 through (4 or 5 I think?) and on multiple platforms?

Me thinks they should look down thier nose at themselves as well.

(edit: While the "Nontendo" was a typo, its kind of fitting and I think I'll keep that moniker to play out on other forums to fight off the fanboi's.)

Posted by Trent on Friday March 24, 2006 at 3:34 PM

What I thought was most interesting was how he told everybody that the brain training game was developed by a team of only 9 people. The distributor didn't think it would work and so only agreed to take like 10,000 copies at first. The second order was for 850,000. All told, it's sold over 5 million copies now. For an investment of maybe $3M, they've made over $100M.

Posted by Scott on Monday March 27, 2006 at 3:27 PM