Gearheads of War

Nintendo DS and MMOs

Japan is dominated by the DS.  It is the number one console there and has been for nearly 2 years.  Lets see what happened there....

Nintendo, 2years later on a console with a faster dev turn around than PS2/Wii, is the only SUCCESSFUL training game develouper.  All others have failed miserably and have to resort to deceptive packaging for sales.  Even in the rarer case of a unique training game title being develouped before Nintendo (Eye training in this case) the non-Nintendo product failed, and the later Nintendo product succeeded.

What did the usual 3rd parties develoup on the DS in Japan?  More training games?  Nope!  In many cases their best titles and best develoupment teams chocked out Japanese "hardcore" games galore.  (RTS / RPG)

The DS has had 4 Final Fantasy series games (5th in dev now)
The DS has had 2 Dragon Warrior series games (and #9 is in exclusive develoupment)
The DS has had the usual slew of Anime fighting games (many good in their own right)  several quite successful sellers.

The point is this:  The solid develoupers of hardcore games continued.  It was only the mediocre develoupers that hopped on the Training bandwagon (and failed).  The same will happen in NA.  The develoupment for hardcore games will continue by the publishers known for it, while the crummy C-title devs will latch on.

The Hardcore community is BETTER OFF WITHOUT THESE DEVELOUPERS "."  
Let them flood the market with Cgrade training games instead of crappy C FPS / Action games I say.  They would not have contributed anything worth mentioning to the hardcore community.

Develoupers develoup what they want to, and well known hardcore develoupers aren't going to start selling out to instead bring you "Baby Training" any more than they were selling out to bring you "Hello Kitty Adventure Island" when WoW started bringing in cash hand over fist.  Hell maybe the hardcore community will get its own training games...  I for one would welcome such titles as "Jedi Lightsaber Training" and "Combat Readiness Simulation"