http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/10990-The-Nostalgia-Factor
Finally, someone has said what I've said when I was in the Mortal Kombat fandom and the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom. Just a note, I'm not neglecting fangirls, its just I don't want to write "and fangirls" constantly, so I hope you can get the point without e have to write "and fangirls" a dozen times... =_=
Okay so the main issue in particular I had with the MK fandom was, whenever a new game out, the fanboys would cry about it not being like the original trilogy of MK games. When I won't say Deadly Alliance, Deception or Arm was a good set of games, the fanboys saw them as utter crap and did not see what "good" was in them. Their desire to hold onto the past meant that while the series was going through a rough phrase, nothing that occurred in these games was ever considered worth the time the time took to develop the game. It also lead to the fanboys being a broken record.
"Its not 2D sprites"
"Do away with the fighting styles gameplay"
"The new characters are boring and unimaginative"
"The series has lost the plot for me"
Ditto into the Sonic fandom there was a sense of much the same thing. They loathed 3D sonic, and '06 was constantly being brought up as a example of the series being at an all time low; even when the series began to get slowly back on its feet. Everyone moaned about there not being a 2D Sonic game, yet whenever there was one out, it didn't do as well as the 3D sonic games did. Yet the fanboys praised these games.
Look, I know Sonic was popular in the 90s, ditto MK fans, your game was in the 90s too. But... And this is the big But moment... Your not todays kids. Not MK was aimed at kids, but Sonic was. A series has to update and learn to survive one way or another. Fighting games have taken leaps, ditto platformers, for these games to survive, they can't without making some adjustments.
I found Sonic generations a moot point, some gamers love the influsion of old and new Sonic, I prefered in the end new Sonic over old. I wasn't the only one to point out how the game was set up really to sell the New Sonic over the old, but honestly, I didn't get how some stood there and said the old Sonic was better. It was slow and repetitive, at least New Sonic kept me on the edge.
MK9 was a mixed bag for me, it has the good things I like on the MK games, but did away with some of little notes from the other 3D MK games I fetl were throw doing. And notable, since Midway was now owned by a company known for rebooting, it started with a reboot off the bat. This I felt was not worth it, and a step to side with the nostalgic fanboys. The series did a 360 even in terms of storyline, it felt like they did away with unwanted characters just to please the whiney 90s fanboys who want their Scorpion, Sub-Zero,etc to remain king of the series.
Again, charactes became an issue for Sonic fans... I felt like the new characters were underused, but not completely out of place, and helped build Sonic's world. In turn, this stopped Sonic from being boring. *Sigh* but again, the fanboys didn't like the "ever growing cast of woodland characters". Thee are some situations where a character may need to be created for a single game, thats fine. Shoe-honing a character into the game for sake of it is not fine. But its not bad to introduced new characters so long as their well established and Characters like Rouge, Blaze and Shadow were well set up enough. Other characters like Big, Cream and others had less appeal because I guess it wasn't a case of lack of set up, but it reminded them I guess that the series was built originally for 8 - 15 year olds.
Anyhow, one day I guess this fandom will become this bad... I know I criticize Neru, Haku and co being constantly shoveled in, but there is a very real reason that I criticize this. There is always a risk that unneeded thing within a franchise or series will be included for the sake of making a few fanboys happy, which leads to the lack of progress on some things. The lack of progress, can seriously hold any series back if things are not done carefully and for Vocaloid... We've got a lot of this already.
To make a note of this, I approve of any V1 getting updated because a loss of a vocal is a big issue. But the updating for the sake of updating? This is where we risk slowly going into the direction other franchises are already gotten themselves into. For now, even Miku V3 had some justification because it removed some bugs and issues from the V2 software... But there is going to be a point in Vocaloid history I guess where things will get silly. :-/