I'll resume with the E3 game analysis in my next entry, but today I wanted to write a few thoughts about this article, mostly based off of some quotes from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on CNN/Money.  It's an interesting article, and well worth reading.

However, I basically disagree with everything Mr. Iwata says in it. 

The basic gist of the article is that without innovation, the game industry is doomed to declining sales.  I'm not really trying to pick on this article in particular, but I've often heard laments about how un-original and stale our industry has become.  Heck, a major gaming mag wrote a big piece about Age of Mythology trumpeting it as "the last great RTS" not because of anything about the game, or even the genre, but that he as an individual was growing tired of the same core mechanics.

There are two basic reasons I think that this line of reasoning is flawed. 

First, the market has shown absolutely no indication that it either rewards innovative games in particular or punishes games which fail to innovate over time.  On the one side, take a look at any sales chart for the past 5 years and you'll see they are regularly dominated by sequels and franchises.  On the other side, the market is littered with the burnt out husks of games which were quite innovative but failed commercially (heck, I've worked on more than a few of that type myself).  I'm not judging whether this trend is good or bad, here -- just stating that the factual analysis that innovation drives sales is a fallacy.

Second, and more importantly, there is a tendency to conflate innovation and fun.  Innovation, while an important element of many games, is not a subsititute for fun.  Usually when people haul out examples of innovative games they point at things like the Sims, or EyeToy (which, I admit, technically is not a game).  I would argue that these games were not successful because they were innovative.  They were successful because they were both innovative and fun.

DDR was a very innovative game when it first game out.  It's also an incredibly fun game.  It is no less fun now, 5 years from when I first played it as an import.  In fact, the fact that it was innovative actually kept it out of the US market for many years because Konami thought it was too strange for us straight-laced Americans. 

Now, that's not to say innovation doesn't have it's place.  Many of the most influential and vocal gamers have become quite jaded.  Whether it's reviewers, game developers, or hardcore gamers, that segment of the audience that does play just about every game that comes out understandably grows less enthusiastic about seeing the same core gameplay "recycled" into another iteration.  Innovation in a game also usually provides a great marketing hook, and can be a powerful aspect of positioning your game, especially in a crowded market like RTS or FPS games on the PC.

There are a lot of other issues around innovation from a development side, but that's easily a whole entry in itself.  It's definitely a mixed bag from the inside; you have to balance expertise, audience familiarity, and risk mitigation of a well understood kind of game with the marketing and other benefits of innovation I mention above. 

Regardless of those, it is definitely not the cut and dried issue that the CNN/Money article and quotes from Mr. Iwata present it as.  Innovation is a great and useful tool, but every year plenty of fun but NOT innovative games continue to sell well and delight gamers.