Carmack hasn't done much either.
At least Quake II and Quake III Arena were released to some measure of success. But there's no denying that neither John has had the same success as they did in Doom's heyday.
Although John Carmack's engine opened up a lot of possibilities, John Romero's level designs were also a big part of Doom's success. The key difference is that Romero hasn't done much since Daikatana landed with a thud.
sold over the course of over 6 years (so plenty of longevity). The total is more than the PS3 by far. So if Nintendo wants to save the Wii U, it could start by delivering some new IPs to go along with its franchise titles in order to target the audience that made it so successful in the first place.
Given that of the ~22 million people who bought Wii Fit, ~20 million came back for Wii Fit Plus 2 years later, I wouldn't be so sure that the audience for these things has evaporated.
The Wii sold almost 50% more games than the PS3 over its lifespan. This stereotype that everyone bought it for Wii Sports and then chucked it in a closet isn't reflected in the sales numbers at all.
Games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit are mature IPs, in that they're aimed at actual adults who might not normally play a lot of video games. The problem the Wii U is having is that Nintendo threw a lot of money at 3rd party development for games like Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2 which don't really push the system's unique feature (its gamepad) and don't hit that broad audience like the Wii did.
It's a bizarre shift in strategy from a company that really should've known better.
My contention is that the market is not large enough to sustain Nintendo's hardware development costs and they will be forced to exit the market after the next handheld system flops (or possibly the system after that). People who think everything is just fine must believe Nintendo can survive on ~2 million/year sales or possibly even less. If they do survive, the systems will be limited to almost entirely Nintendo games with relatively few 3rd party titles due to the small install base.
This year to date in Japan, the 3DS has sold ~3.6 million. All other systems combined have sold ~2.4 million. That kind of market dominance guarantees there will be a 4DS, that's where the next mainline Monster Hunter and Dragon Quest entries will wind up, and those will keep the platform going for the foreseeable future based on the 3+ million games they sell per release.
Since over 100 different Wii titles sold over a million units, and the platform sold over 870 million games, customers seem to have found quite a few titles worth purchasing. Though not surprisingly, the top 10 best selling games all came from Nintendo.
The Wii's success was mostly a fluke caused by MS and Sony raising prices too much, and a couple of gimmicks that were worth some attention by some: motion controls, and wii fit.
That was no fluke; it was the logical extension of the same strategy that made the DS so successful after a rocky start. Nintendo built a system with a unique feature (motion control), made new IPs that leveraged that feature (Wii Sports, Wii Fit), targeted the nongamer crowd by offering a pleasant "Mii" aesthetic and offered classic Nintendo franchises for everyone else (Mario Kart). The end result was wildly successful.
By contrast, the Wii U is bombing because although it also has a unique feature (gamepad), its new IPs are mostly niche titles (Wonderful 101) instead of mainstream ones and the next iterations of Nintendo franchises are either also niche (Pikmon) or late (Wii Sports, Mario Kart).
if (var = NULL) {/*error*/}
isn't what anybody wants, whereas mixing assignment and conditionals may make sense in other contexts, like:
if (NULL == (var = func())) {/*error, var is NULL*/}
The "we'd like your thoughts" link is a standard mailto: URL. If it's using Outlook, that's because your browser is configured to use it.
Even if you don't wind up doing a better job, reinventing the wheel is a good way to understand how wheels work. So the effort isn't wasted if one learns something at the end of it.
I don't have any trouble getting Python code to run without either, and run into problems due to whitespace approximately 0 times per year. Python the language only requires that code blocks be indented consistently. And since you're the one having problems with that, perhaps your development environment is defective since the files you're feeding the interpreter aren't what you think they are. If that's the case, you'll need all the help you can get.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz
