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Thread: Video Game History What If's?

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    Rob is right sadly.

    Look at sales on games even.... What sells the most? Physical games or downloads? Well for the console end its still physical games. But thanks to services like Xbox live and PS store and Nintendos version of the same service its shifting.

    I mean the PC market thanks to services like steam. Buying a physical copy of a computer game no longer exists. And true hardcore gamers that have no care as to what platform they play like myself tend to lean to the PC for games because why spend 20 dollars on borderlands game of the year edition on xbox when i can get it for 5 dollars on steam during some crazy sale for the pc??
    Last edited by Collector_Gaming; 01-25-2013 at 11:09 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Collector_Gaming View Post
    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?
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by IHatedSega View Post
    There probably would have been more 7800 versions of games though.
    It would be nice to have ports of Moon Patrol, Missile Command, Jungle Hunt, Frogger, etc. for the 7800, wouldn't it?

  3. #63
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    Quote Originally Posted by Collector_Gaming View Post
    Rob is right sadly.

    Look at sales on games even.... What sells the most? Physical games or downloads? Well for the console end its still physical games. But thanks to services like Xbox live and PS store and Nintendos version of the same service its shifting.

    I mean the PC market thanks to services like steam. Buying a physical copy of a computer game no longer exists. And true hardcore gamers that have no care as to what platform they play like myself tend to lean to the PC for games because why spend 20 dollars on borderlands game of the year edition on xbox when i can get it for 5 dollars on steam during some crazy sale for the pc??
    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by The 1 2 P View Post
    What if all the school shootings never happened(this is in relation to how it's affected the industry)?
    I don't really see how the school shootings affected the industry.

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    Quote Originally Posted by A.C. Sativa View Post
    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by The 1 2 P View Post
    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.
    So what? It hasn't changed anything, companies are still making really violent games and they're still selling like crazy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by wiggyx View Post
    And my response was that you can't always count on past business models to predict how the market will shift in the future. Game companies will cater to themselves as they get bigger and bigger, not ANY user-base, regardless of casual or serious.

    As if that notion is the all-encompassing model. Man, you really walk around with horse blinders on...

    In any number of ways.
    The small design teams I think you're dreaming of do exist and put out games....on the iOS! Android too, but mainly Apple stuff. Any way, with new Xbox, PS4, Steam Box, and Nvidia's handheld, there's a lot of choices. I'm not doubting that Ouya will get plenty of games, but 99.9% of the public will never hear about them, because they don't have the corporate structure behind them. Now, does that mean they can't succeed? We shall see, I know people feel this could be like the 80's and 90's on computer systems. When game developers sprang up overnight, and eventually become huge. I suppose it's feasible, since those computer games were always pirated. But don't let them kid you, their goal is to get their stuff on the big consoles to make more money.
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    Quote Originally Posted by A.C. Sativa View Post
    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.
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    SNES CD would have been terrible no matter what. CD-based gaming hadn't evolved by the time it would have had to come out. Sega CD had crappy FMV games for the same reason that the Wii has crappy motion-control-for-the-sake-of-it that it has. Nobody knew what to do with it, but laserdisc games already existed so it probably seemed like a good jumping-off point.

    What if the Saturn hadn't been a complete pile of crap in the US? Great arcade ports, some neat gimmicks (steering wheel, netlink), but I think I have yet to play a Saturn game I like that is not an arcade port or . I know when I bought my Playstation in 1997 the Saturn was still a contender, but the PSX felt better and had more exclusive titles that I thoroughly enjoyed.

    Oh, oh, I have a good one:

    What if first-round "multimedia" stuff like Grolier Encyclopedia, Prize Fighter, and such really had been the killer app and took off like gangbusters? Do you think the CD-i would have had a chance in such a market, or would Sega have been able to use their installed base? If "multimedia boxes" like CD-i or 3DO had taken off, would Sega have had a chance in this market as a "games" company? Could the Pippin have saved Apple as a late contender in this market?
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    I found the ULTIMATE what if.



    What if this is all true (I am not gonna do cross referencing right now to see if its 100% true). What if they didn't lose the license and Popeye was the star of Donkey Kong?

    What would video games be like today? Would mario still exist?

    But even if so lets just assume for a second What If mario never did come to be. Super Mario bros never happened.... What would gaming be today? What would Nintendo be without its flag ship game series and staring characters?

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    That is a pretty interesting question: what if one of the early, most popular arcade games was just a derivative of something else?

    It's kind of tempting to say that games would have either gravitated towards licensed properties and/or otherwise stuck with simple concepts when no license could easily be applied, such that games would have always stayed in the shadow of something else. But something else like Dig Dug would have come along eventually to show the way.
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    Quote Originally Posted by treismac View Post
    What if the Turbografx-16 won the 16-bit Wars?
    The Turbo didn't have a chance against the SNES. It's sort of an intermediate between the NES and SNES on power whereas the Genesis is much closer to the SNES.
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    Hardware strength isn't much of a factor in popularity. I mean, the PS2 was weaker than the Xbox and GameCube. The Wii was weaker than the 360 and PS3 yet still massively popular. In Japan, the PC Engine crushed the Mega Drive. It's more about the kinds of software a system gets than anything. The PC Engine was more in tune with Japanese tastes than the Mega Drive. It could've beaten the Super Famicom too if not for the fact that the Super Famicom was getting tons of RPGs from Squaresoft and Enix and such. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy alone are a big factor in which system sells best in Japan. In terms of impressiveness of the games, that's mostly on the developer. Despite some hardware weaknesses of the PC Engine, Rondo of Blood looks and sounds more impressive than almost anything on Genesis/Sega CD and SNES.

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