Quote Originally Posted by Roto13 View Post
JRPGs suffer from being Japanese and Japan's game development industry has fallen behind in a number of ways this generation (long development cycles, not really getting online or DLC). But there will always be room for single player games. Some of the most critically acclaimed and best selling games of last year were single player games, including Skyrim, which is an RPG.
Of those best selling games, how many had either an online element or a sandbox-moddable environment? I can't think of many that didn't have one or both. JRPGs have neither. It seems to me that these two aspects of gaming are the things that keep people talking about games long enough for them to become mainstream. Them being mainstream means that more people play them and more people will also play the next generation of the games.

Flower is a lovely game, krissy, but it is also dirt cheap and as much as I would love it to be, I wouldn't call it a mainstream game. I thought it was telling that Journey was a move towards creating a game that is different every time you play it. Games with low replayability are no longer the kind of games people are wanting to shell out £40/$60 on. The wider audience (that game developers hope to tap into) wants to be entertained for months for that kind of money, not days.