Is there a market for innovation?

"First of all, why can't anyone leave the right analog stick alone? In third-person games, its job is to control the camera - that's what it's comfortable with. You try and work it into combat and it just gets frightened and confused." - Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw

One of the things that has been emphasised in the course so far is the idea that despite constant development, how slowly change actually occurs in the gaming landscape. Innovation can be a dangerous path for developers, and change is not always welcome as illustrated in the above quote from Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee. Put simply, innovation is only viable when there is a consumer base willing to accept and learn how to function with the associated changes brought about through innovations within gaming.

Innovation is often used as a buzzword in the build up and hype created around new releases, and is IDEALLY a sign that you will be given a new and unique experience. However this is often not the case, and we are presented with either:

a) A repackage of something which already exists and works or

b) something which just doesn’t work (such as the frightened analog stick)

This could also be viewed both as a commentary on what consumers want to get out of games, and the reliance of large scale developers on what is knows it can sell. Why release something which could confuse or annoy people when you could just reskin the last successful game you released?

It’s not that I don’t think there isn’t innovative content being released, it’s just that there seems to be a lot of missed opportunities. In the pre-release hype for the Kinect (Xbox owner - going with what I know) the promise was that ‘you ARE the controller’ with this innovative new product. And the Kinect itself is a pretty amazing piece of technology; making a motorised camera with spatial and sonic awareness a household object is a feat in itself. But after the release it seemed that the main purpose of the Kinect was to play bowling and tennis/volleyball games. It soon becomes apparent that you’re still doing the same flailing movements to play volleyball as you did with an Eyetoy in 2003 (Does anyone remember Eyetoy?).



This seems like a terrible waste of development, and is even more frustrating considering the amazing array of uses found for the Kinect when hacked and adapted to purposes outside of games. The sites below present examples not only showing novel uses for the kinect such as Shadow puppets and web navigation, but also implementation of the kinect as a serious tool in hospitals.

http://www.1up.com/news/ten-best-unintended-uses-for-kinect
http://bitshare.tumblr.com/post/4007657631/how-the-kinect-is-revolutionizing-medicine

Is there no market for innovation, or is it simply a slow moving process between what developers are willing to risk and consumers are willing to accept?

With all this said, I did play the game which used the analog sticks for combat and it was TERRIBLE.