Could motion control cause a game market crash?

Although I agree with some of the points the author brings up, I think his head is stuck inside his own posterior.

The market is in no danger of crashing, ever. The main companies backing it now are simply too rich to let that happen. And they're not likely to just give up any time soon and let one of their competitors take over the market.

Secondly, he assumes motion control technology is the best that it can be in it's current form and that it has no application whatsoever to a 'hardcore' game. Ridiculous. We're still in gen 1 of motion control here (assuming crap like the Eye Toy don't count). Like he said, back in the day controls were vastly simplified to just a control stick (Pac Man) before branching out and becoming more complex. This was to appeal to a wider audience; today motion controls are simpler due to technical limitations.

Just because this first foray into motion control is currently being fed to the mass casual gaming market, doesn't mean it won't or can't develop into a more accepted control method.

People will argue "But I want to sit on my ass and press buttons, even moving my wrists is too strenuous". I agree, I like doing that too. I'm not suggesting motion control is going to kill conventional controllers: it should eventually rise up to their level of precision and control.

 

I get the feeling that the author of that piece didn't actually experience the crash of '83. Yes, that crash happened in part because boatloads of crapware was coming out for a system that had literally no third party controls in place whatsoever; anyone could put out absolutely anything for the 2600. You didn't even have to pay for an SDK or developers license; there were no such things.

But make no mistake, that was just the brick wall that brought a fatal stop to something that already had momentum, and it got its first push from Atari's hugely hyped games that utterly failed to live up to expectations. (Pac-Man and E.T. to name the two biggest disappointments.) That shook consumer confidence which simply began to erode even further as more crapware was shoveled on the pile in large numbers that were expected to sell to an audience they didn't realize were no longer receptive until it was too late.

This was all on top of a market that was still new and interesting and grew with such speed and enormity that it ultimately couldn't support its own weight and collapsed in on itself. The market resurrected a couple of years later and learned from its mistakes.

To think that a single control scheme is going to collapse a market is idiotic. We've been fed shovelware for years now, and it's simply become easier to be spoon fed the crap with connected consoles and DLC marketplaces that offer the crap is smaller but more numerous chunks. Motion control has nothing to do with crapware; it's just another outlet for crapware developers to exploit. This is absolutely nothing new. What's more is that we've been so inundated with crapware that we've largely become inured to it. We know it's there in great, steaming piles, looming over the digital app landscape like binary landfill. We've almost come to accept it as an unpleasant but integral part of the package, and in its own way it lets the gems stand out a little better.

Motion control has its place. It's mostly gimmicky but it is a legitimate and useful control scheme under particular conditions. Its existence or disappearance won't make a damn bit of difference to the industry though; the crapware will be shoveled on regardless of how it's controlled.

 

The only problem that I see for the market of downloadable games is that there are masses of games, including games for emulators, thousands clones of casual games, thousands of games from independent developers. I see that some companies (like Sega) already stop making new innovative games and just rehash their existing titles or even just re-release them. Some other companies build their whole existence on cloning existing titles. It is possible that at some point it could reach some point of saturation where only the very big titles (Mario, CoD etc.) and the very small innovative titles can survive.

 

The reason for all that shovelware is simple: It makes money. It makes money because there are enough people buying it that the revenue it generates exceeds the cost to develop it. As long as that keeps happening, we'll keep getting shovelware.

Recycleware is an even bigger no-brainer; costs to develop are even smaller, especially if no enhancements are done (i.e. original graphics), and in most cases they get to play to a nostalgic audience, presuming the recycled title was popular in the first place.

The bottom line is ... well, the bottom line. If it makes more money than it cost to produce, it will continue to be made, and we the public are telling them with our wallets that we want it. While that's the foundation upon which the video game industry (hell, any industry) was built, there are many, many development houses who are far less about gaming and far more about the money gaming can make them. For some that's the beginning, middle and end of it these days: Screw innovation, it's risky and costs more, and since they're buying the same old crap time and again, let's just give them that. And because it's true, we're telling them we're cool with that.