Statistics 1 : Fanboys 0
Nothing bothers me more than an argument about consoles. Preachy fanboys are always quick to judge a console based on it's flaws rather than it's merits. The PS3 is too expensive, the 360 has over-heating problems, and the Wii is "kiddy" and is essentially just an overclocked gamecube. Who has not at least witnessed one of these arguments at some point or another.
Now, I have been guilty of saying at one point that I wouldn't buy an Xbox because I don't like first person shooters and sports games. While I did buy a 360 and it's probably my favorite console to date, I was still rather shocked to see real world statistics supplied by Xbox 360 Fanboy charting out the genres. First person shooters are a mere 11% of the total software. While sports titles are still a quarter of the entire software line up, it should be noted that EA releases a new version of nearly each of their titles once a year.
It just goes to show that those other 70% are titles and I probably would have played simply because I had made an uninformed decision. I now own an Xbox. I've since purchased quite a few titles that were on the backwards compatibility list and honestly I wish I had seen them when they were new, before they had tarnished with age. It just goes to show that you can't believe all the fanatical rants that people spit off. Make your gaming decisions based on hard facts, not the hype. Just remember a system is only as good as the software it supports.
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 10 August 2007
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: fanboys, statistics, xbox
I was very hesitant to buy an Xbox, primarily do to Microsoft bigotry, but when I was given one by a friend, I found that I had quite a lot of fun with it. So much so I ran out and bought a 360.
I just plain had a ball with the 360... much to my amazement, it has been one of my most fun consoles (I am a collector, save for my issue with the Xbox, I have pretty much every console ever made) and it ended my snobbishness. Games make the console.
Of course, to be fair, my XBox 360 just died on me, only four months from purchase. I am still waiting for it to come back from repair, and hoping desperately that I do not have to keep sending it back, again and again.
Some console arguments, it seems, are not without some degree of truth. Alas.
But - even if the 360 really is poorly made, and it is, the games on it, and the experience of Live, is really quite worthwhile. If the machine would only keep working, I would consider it one of the best consoles ever. It is very fun indeed.
Just a bit poorly made.
Statistically, this study means very little.
The only thing proven by the authors is the genre-type releases, and not the market absorbtion rate.
Even though first-person shooters maintain 11% of net releases, that percentage must be measured against total net sales (in comparison to other genre releases) for it to be statistically relevant.
So: Stastics 0, Fanboys 0.
I'm not really a fan of the 360 (anything I'd want to play on it will be available for PC), but this console doesn't totally deserve such a reputation. I'd be likely to also blame members of gaming media, who seem to have this annoying sort of tunnel vision on all things FPS these days..
I would be interested to see what the original Xbox's genre breakdown is in comparison to the 360, especially since the marketing behind the 360 is making a sincere attempt at including the Japanese gamer this time around.
Noun:
Actually, they did a sales adjusted version, and it still only accounted for like 30% (third and first person)
And if you are who I think you are, it's not like you play games that fit into the mainstream market anyway.
to be fair, I have bought about half as many 360 games in the past 4 months of owning it, as I did Xbox titles for the lifespan of the console. however, I am seeing myself coming into a 360 drought after the releases of Eternal Sonata and Blue Dragon.
Microsoft is working harder to woo gamers like me, but they still have a way to go before they can truly topple Sony in the console race.
First of all, I have to agree that sales would be a much more useful set of statistics than what games publishers choose to release and Microsoft chooses to certify. There are a lot of random movie tie-in 3D platformers that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole despite it being my preferred genre, and I would think their sales would be far overshadowed by that 11% of first-person shooters.
I don't buy this "tarnished with age" BS. I just bought my first Wii virtual console game, and it was Mario 64. I was a PC snob when it came out, and thought it looked like a bad shareware game at the time. (No kidding, I really did. Can't explain it now.) Now, I can see that the graphics and sound aren't exactly up to later generations' games, but it's still awesome to play.
I bought Beyond Good and Evil a year ago, but still haven't had a chance to start playing it. I still mean to buy Psychonauts for the PS2. I didn't buy either one for their technical achievements and expect to enjoy them both. Katamari Damacy is still awesome despite never really having been a technical achievement, and the same is true for the N64 and Gamecube Zelda games (though I'd say Ocarina of Time was way more of a technical achievement for its day than Twilight Princess is today.)
For that matter, I still REALLY enjoy playing Galaga, Donkey Kong and Tempest (only Geometry Wars and a few of Jeff Minter's games have ever duplicated the feel of vector graphics, in my opinion.) I actually think that as games got more and more fleshed out, we lost the pure play aspect of the first couple generations of arcade games. Sometimes audiovisual sparseness can suck you into the game more than 2 million polygons a second, and that applies equally to Galaga and Katamari.
So who on earth decided we all have to like 2 or 3 year old games less than when they first came out, if we're still experiencing them for the first time?