"The trouble with the business now is that we've got this sort of hamster-wheel mentality," said Betteridge in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. "If you look at the chart you'll see a lot of sequels in there, and people re-spinning those ideas for new sequels as fast as possible for next year."
Betteridge believes that the constant rehashing of existing intellectual property, while retaining old fans, won't attract new players who were never interested in the first place.
"We'll never really attract any new audiences from doing that, and that's my problem with it. The box comes down cheaper, we'll get a few more people who were waiting on the sidelines, but the lady that showed us to our table today - I bet she's not got a 360, and has no intention of buying one. So to me, games are still somewhat of a niche experience compared with music, television and most art forms."
He does have some possible solutions to this problem though. He cites the price point as an obvious way to encourage more people to videogames.
"Price point is key when you come through these first two transitions of content - you'll get the early-adopters that will buy anything to play the latest games. You'll get people who will upgrade their PCs to play the latest titles too, but that's a limited number. Then you'll get a lot more people who would really like one, but don't feel they can justify a certain amount, and they're the people that have been coming in through the last 12-18 months."
Bettridge also states that he feels the industry needs to take a fresh look at how they can implement existing technology in a new way, rather than just continue doing the same thing but with better graphics.
"I think the industry is sometimes too insular in thinking that people want the best graphics, they want this, they want that," stated Bettridge. "Whereas something like Wii has shown that it's not just graphics that new players want. So it's expanding what entertainment can be, because there's no doubt that the Xbox 360 is a very capable piece of hardware in terms of processing and rendering, the bandwidth of the Live network - in essence you've got a very powerful processing box that's connected, millions of people connected together.
"But you look at it through the games industry's eyes and it's all about squad-based shooting games - whereas you could look at it from a PC point of view and something like Facebook, it's just a framework to link people together and post photos and messages. But look at the community aspect around that - it's about expanding what games can be, and I think that's what we're most excited about, rather than fighting in genres that everybody is already fighting about."
"To me it's price point, interface, content. They're the three pillars I suppose," he added.
Rare's new entry into the Banjo-Kazooie series, Nuts & Bolts, will be released on the Xbox 360 in Australia tomorrow.

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