Developers running out of ideas

The changing of the guard at Nintendo has brought about a surprisingly glum outlook on the gaming industry's future, with both the retiring 74 year old president Hiroshi Yamauchi and his (relatively) youthful replacement Satoru Iwata both bleak in their outlook. "We can't be optimistic about the game market", Iwata told journalists. "No matter what great product you come up with, people get bored. I feel like a chef cooking for a king who's full." Yamauchi was even more depressed about the whole thing, commenting that "game developers are running out of ideas" and that "delivering surprise is becoming extremely difficult". Which could explain games like Mario Tennis, Mario Golf and Mario Tiddlywinks. Even worse, game development is becoming too costly and too time consuming, leading Nintendo to seek to develop their games more rapidly without sacrificing quality. Which may explain games like Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin, both of which are a lot of fun but rather short lived. You only have to look at Square to see what they mean though - having hundreds of artists slaving away for years on a game that costs millions of dollars to develop is rather excessive, however pretty the end result. If it wasn't for the inevitably stratospheric sales that any new (single player) Final Fantasy game achieves these days, we suspect it would be something of a dead-end even for Square. Is this where the industry as a whole is heading?

Source - Ananova