The oncoming video game crash

Interesting stuff over at Slate’s business site, The Big Money, on Nintendo’s oncoming woes:

Though the game industry won’t implode this year, there’s an analogy to be made between 1983 and 2009. The Nintendo Wii, innovative when it was released because of its wireless motion-sensing device, has seen too many clones of games. For every Wii Sports, which features the bowling game even retirees like, there are a score of riffs on the same theme. There’s a dangerous similarity to many Wii games that makes 2009 look a lot like the badly made games of 1983. Nintendo has lost more than half of its stock value because investors believe the Wii can’t sustain its huge, previous sales numbers this holiday season (when 75 percent of the games and consoles are sold).

This sounds about right. I own a Wii and haven’t bought a game for the console in a while (almost a year, probably). With my weird movie-viewing schedule I don’t have a ton of time for video games, but even if I did there’s nothing too terribly tempting out there for me. I’m still getting enjoyment out of Resident Evil 4 and the games I’ve downloaded off of the Virtual Console (old NES and SNES games, which was really the selling point on the system for me: I wanted to recapture the sidescrollers of days gone by).

As I understand it, the real problem for video game production houses is the absurd cost it takes to make a big game like Grand Theft Auto IV. In addition to the $100 million production costs you have tons of programmers on staff year round, even when there isn’t a lot for them to do. Video game studios are evolving into movie studios, where one or two big tentpole release drives profits for the rest of the year. It’ll be interesting to see how sustainable that is in the economic downturn…