Platform Games
Platform games
used to enjoy a 15% share of the market in 1998 - and considerably more
in the 16-bit era - but 2002 Chart Track results showed a staggering
drop to 2%.
As consequence, marketing circles are
reportedly deliberating that platform games – as a genre - are not as
attractive to consumers as they once were.
We believe it’s not an issue of genre, but an issue of effective design principles of past being forgotten.
Thanks
to Naughty Dog and Insomniac, the PS2 has been awash with well-produced
platform games and we’ve also recently been blessed by new outings from
Mario and Sonic on Gamecube. However, although they’ve all been
successful in their own respects, these games have failed to match the
astronomical sales success enjoyed by their predecessors.
To
prove our point, we’ll use the best selling games of each top-selling
platform game series and compare them alongside the recent
next-generation updates.
According to online
reports, the worldwide best sellers of each series – that were not
initially bundled with their respective consoles - are:
- Super Mario Brothers 3 – more than 17 million worldwide total sales
- Rayman – over 4 million worldwide total sales
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – over 6 million worldwide total sales
- Crash Bandicoot – over a million worldwide total sales
And the next-generation products we’ll examine are:
Jak and Daxter, Super Mario Sunshine and Sonic Adventure
Some
would say that it’s pointless to compare to the 16-bit or even 8-bit
days, as it was a different market and of course, it’s true that the
market has changed.
Another truism however, is
that if online reports are correct, not a single game – of any genre -
has sold as much as Super Mario Bros 3. Being that we’re in an industry
which is largely built on forward thinking, it may be productive to
look to the past for lessons in improving the present and future of
games - and this includes looking in classic game designs and ideas.
For effective feedback, we’ll look at game design elements in these games alongside other relevant conditions, in detail.