What if America was as laxed as other countries to the point where AO games were allowed to be sold in retail stores?
What if all the school shootings never happened(this is in relation to how it's affected the industry)?
What if the Video Game industry had lost the Supreme court hearing in 2011?
ALL HAIL THE 1 2 P
Originally Posted by THE 1 2 P
I am gonna modify your question. What if the video game industry lost its first battle when mortal kombat came out?
But i guess the answer to my rob question was what i thought. If he never existed american gaming industry would not have evolved as much as it did.
Here is another What If.. What if enough time was given to developers to complete E.T and polish pacman. Would the gaming market crash have ever happened? Would atari still be making consoles?
Probably the only thing that would happen is that Atari would have had more money from more units sold and Ray Casar would have been in charge longer. They wouldnt have been sold or had computer systems. The arcade crash was gonna happen no matter what, these games didnt affect it. Other really crappy games though would still have piled up everywhere and businesses would have still gone out, but Atari's name wouldnt have been as damaged. Probably their fall would have started in the 5200 era, and the 7200 would have been sold in more places but people would passed it up to get an NES. There probably would have been more 7800 versions of games though.
If enough time was given to the programmers of E.T. and Pac-Man (Howard Scott Warshaw and Tod Frye, respectively) to actually create worthwhile games rather than to rush out something that would fireup in a 2600 early Christmas morning, it would mean either two things:
1) Atari's suits learned to respect both the art of video game making and their consumers and, in turn, learned how to competently run a video game company or...
2) the rights to make the games just happened to be acquired earlier in the fiscal year, giving the programmer more time to work on their projects simply by chance.
If #2 happened, it is probable that Atari would have stayed in the game long enough to initially challenge Nintendo's meteoric rise, but if the same mindset ruled Atari that rushed out E.T. and Pac-Man, it was only a matter of time before their business practices yielded control of the North American the home console market to the Japanese. Providing that E.T. and Pac-Man on the 2600 were de facto the catalysts for the Crash, this scenario could have more than likely softened the "crash" into more of a "slump."
If #1 were the case, it is difficult picturing Nintendo seizing dominance the way they did, meaning Atari would probably have kept making consoles for years to come. Doubtless, the video game market wouldn't resemble what is looks like now. Nintendo along with their 3rd party developers changed the game in ways that would never have materialized if Atari maintained hegemony over the market, regardless of whether Atari surpassed their former golden days if they never precipitated the Crash of '83. New life and innovation was breathed into the market in the changing of the guards. If Atari remained the undisputed champs, I think all of us gamers would be worse off for it- not that we'd know any better, mind you.
It would be nice to have ports of Moon Patrol, Missile Command, Jungle Hunt, Frogger, etc. for the 7800, wouldn't it?
I'm not entirely sure how much of this relates to Rob's posts, but this seems to be one of those "PHYSICAL GAME COPIES ARE GONNA DIE" type of points. I think I'll respond to this with some counter-points to that;
1) Just because Nintendo's offering digital downloads for all their Wii U doesn't mean there's gonna be a big shift to using them exclusively anytime soon. To start with, the Wii U's hard drive options currently really can't hold the amount of retail titles available to download as it is.
2) The Nintendo Direct from this month, and how it addressed "transferring" Wii VC games to Wii U VC (hint: They're nickel-and-diming you for it, and if your game was Wii supported but not Wii U supported you're probably SOL on having Wii U upgrades), has pretty much already showed Nintendo fans an example of what kind of things can "go wrong" with a non-physically-stored game that is "married to your console" - and this is for stuff that cost $5-8. Imagine if next gen, this starts happening to those $69.99 "digital" retail games?
3) The PC Market had very different situations from the console market that allowed Steam to thrive as it did, which include factors ranging from things that are common issues in PC gaming (PCs not being uniform in spec and games needing to account for that) to things that started becoming ridiculously problematic around the time the Xbox 360 came out (Absurd, at times potentially PC-breaking DRM, which unfortunately has seeped over in the console gaming side in some manner on both physical and digital contents) that soured PC gamers to the idea of going to the store and buying a PC game. Console games are... were... well, most still are, barring some complicating factors and unique cases, simpler in that regard; if you got a physical copy of a game for X console, it would work on any of X console or X-console backward-compatible hardware. One of the main cons of "digital" game copies is that this is not the case, has never been the case, and unless developers drastically re-think their business methods, will never be the case.
Also, while this is a bit of an anecdote, people I've questioned on Miiverse on the subject of physical vs. digital have basically unaminously prefered physical copies. Of course, I'm sincerely hoping Nintendo puts up some official stats regarding digital downloads.
I don't really see how the school shootings affected the industry.
You don't? The reason why the ESA has been in court so many times is because certain states used those shootings to single out the industry as needing government mandated ratings and censorship. Those school shootings are also what led up to the Supreme Court case in 2011.
ALL HAIL THE 1 2 P
So what? It hasn't changed anything, companies are still making really violent games and they're still selling like crazy.
The reason why it hasn't changed anything content-wise is because the ESA has constantly gone to court over the years to prevent that from happening, finally making sure that all video game content(violent and non-violent alike) is protected speech under the constitution. But the school shootings over the last 10+ years have obviously changed the perception of video games to the casual outside observer/politicians/soccer moms.
Now for another what if. What if Nintendo had bought Sega after they left the hardware business.
Last edited by The 1 2 P; 01-26-2013 at 04:51 PM.
ALL HAIL THE 1 2 P
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