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The Trouble with Nintendo. A TL;DR topic.

Transient Curse

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Transient Curse

Transient Curse

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The trouble with Nintendo

Here's some thoughts I've had about what's wrong with Nintendo.

1) Cheapskates.
Spend some money. Open more studios. Hire some new talent. Maybe set up a few studios in the West.

I don't know why this isn't happening. Nintendo have a great selection of IP. Titles like Zelda, Metroid and Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, New Super Mario Bros, Starfox and of course Pokemon seem to do pretty well for them. These titles offer lots of different playing opportunities and conceivably mean Nintendo could offer something for everyone.

A lot of these games are so well established everyone knows what's going to happen before they play the game. Zelda? Hookshot now is it, oh no, my mistake, I'm getting the Boomerang now. I liked learning the spin attack again. No wait, it's a completely different game because in this one you ride about on a rhino instead of a horse.
Nintendo need not expend it's magic on these titles. Get them farmed out (like the GBC Capcom Zeldas or Namco's GC F-Zero) or hire more developers to make these games. They're guaranteed moneyspinners, and the formula is so well defined that it doesn't make sense to waste valuable talent on developing them. Instead, they should use their development superstar(s) to come up with new ideas and have them realised in exciting new pieces of software.

The Legends are always coming. Get the games made and on the shelves!

Nintendo have got so much IP that if they wanted to, they could release a fan favourite title every month for years. WiiU would have been THE console to have. Who could resist a launch with Mario, Metroid, Zelda and Mario Kart? Why don't they do it? Because they haven't got enough staff to make the games? They don't want to crowd out 3rd parties? Enjoy your big franchise title in 2 years time - the title that you bought a console on the strength of. The Legends Are Coming! What are Nintendo doing? Where are the games? Why do they take so long to release them? People would buy two Metroids, two Zeldas two whatever else's over the course of a console's life. As is, you get neither, loyal purchaser. Not for years. The legends ARE coming. Get third parties making your games and you're not choking them out either. As an aside, when did Nintendo stop development of games for Wii? It's not like they worked on Wii software until the WiiU was released was it? What are they doing? What have they been doing? Making top notch experiences like MiiVerse?

2) Cheapskates.
Why don't Nintendo make hardware that represents an advancement of the form? With the 3DS it's not so bad, but with the WiiU they've shot themselves in the foot in a big way. Got an Exclusive WiiU title coming, Ubisoft? Seen those Sales figures? They're terrible, aren't they? Fortunately for you, Nintendo created a console that's about as powerful as the ones that came out 7 years ago so you'll be able to port it across to the other consoles without too much bother. Nintendo have got the resistive screened beauty into people's hands, and they've done it a year before the next round of hardware releases occur. A full year to build up a massive userbase. No games. No Games. Why? Because they're being held back to simultaneously release on PS360, 3 months before those consoles have successors on the shelves. What about first party games though? No games. No Games. Why? Too slow to make them, not enough developers. Well, with this old tech the system must be nice and cheap, right? NO! They've packaged every single one with a controller that costs more than any other, not communicated why the controller is amazing and now nobody wants to pay extra for something that looks the same as the much better supported systems elsewhere in your favourite retailer's shop.

3) Cheapskates
Let's invest in new IP. They'd have to hire more developers, OBVS (not allowed - $$$) but assume that they have new people onboard. Here's a Nintendo press conference: Miyamoto strolls out and says I am pleased to announce these brilliant new minds that I have been working with. They have brilliant games for you, I have been overseeing their ideas and I love them. They get the Miyamoto Seal Of Approval and their games will be out before the PS4 is on shelves. PANDEMONIUM. Miyamoto says these games are amazing?!!? Who knows games better than he?! I cannot wait. What does Miyamoto do now? Is he fully onboard with many games? How long until he retires? Nintendo need to get their eggs out of that basket and start promoting for the future.


Imagine a release schedule like this:
January: Metroid
February: New Miyamoto approved IP
March: Mario
April: Zelda
May: StarFox
June: Smash Bros
July: New Miyamoto IP
August: Mario Tennis
September: Rayman Legends (An authentic third party title, just for fun!)
October: Pikmin
November: F-zero
December: Pokemon Hue of Choice

Bit Better than
January: Relax, post Christmas
February:
Rayman (Delayed)
March: Cancelled.
April: Port of last year's PS360 hit with controller gimmick tacked on.
And so on, Isn't it?

Not possible? Why? Get the games made and out on shelves. Hey, Capcom, fancy making some money? Knock us up a Starfox will you? People want to buy it.

4) Cheapskates
Why is everything always cheap with them? Tiny battery when there's room for a big one. I've got to charge it up every ten minutes now. Oh, I can't be bothered. Why's the web browser on 3DS so bad? Like worse than a £100 smartphone bad. Why's the screen always so bad on Nintendo stuff? Like worse than on a £100 smartphone bad. Why does their hardware match last gen's specs? Why do purchases/downloads take forever in the E-shop? How much money did you save on that battery, the slow processor and the crappy screen? Was it worth making a product that irritates? Why bother putting a web browser in 3DS if it's that bad? Just don't do it.

5) Tight arses
How old's this game now? 25 years. How many times have people bought it now? About 5 times each. Hmm. How much shall we sell it on the E-Shop for? £12? Hmm. Let's go for £13.99. Nintendo sell everything from their back catalogue at it'd be rude to prices. Who wants this stuff enough to pay real money for them? As in, in significant numbers? Do I want to buy their system when I know I'm going to be paying top price for everything all the time? I'm not so keen. Will I get to keep those purchases? No, the account doesn't transfer and they want to charge me again later.

I think Nintendo need to invest in their future. Refusing to do so has screwed over the WiiU, the people who've bought it and the developers who've started work on games for the platform.

If they want to ignore the rest of the world I don't know why they don't do it properly, they could go completely self sustaining and only have Nintendo games on their platforms.

And that's some of what I think about Nintendo.

EDIT: Neg away, don't read - just neg, Nintendo fans. :hat:

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SMD

SMD

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Said it before but Nintendo's strength is also their weakness. They're really conservative, which meant they survived the Gamecube and N64 years but didn't capitalise with the Wii. They have made some changes but in response rather than in anticipation of the market. They're not going to disappear any time soon but they're not going to push the boat out either.

If they gave more autonomy to their Western counterparts then maybe they might go somewhere but they just do their own thing - sometimes it grates and sometimes they just come together to make something beautiful that makes people wonder why the hell they can't do it all the time.

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gizmo1990

gizmo1990

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I'm a Nintendo fan, am I allowed to agree with the op?

The point that I especially agree on is Nintendo investing in the West more. They are so so daft not doing this. I'm not going to reel out the advantages to doing this as it should be pretty obvious but just a look at their own history should remind them... Argonaut? Rare? I may be biased but a few Nintendo financed UK devs/projects would be a great move for them. Look me up Mr Shibata, I'll be happy to hear from you! ;)

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Barny

Barny

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There are som many things about Nintendo that baffle. The biggest has to be the internet and online. Back in the GC days when everyone else was gearing up for what we have now they were conservative and adopting a wait and see attitude. Then the Wii came out with the worst most half-arsed online system you can imagine which went on basically unchanged up to the release of the 3DS and then the Wii U. And it's still a mess. A mess with quirky, lovely touches and good ideas which are underused. But still a bloody mess.

Oh Nintendo. What will it take for you to join the present? The threat of bankruptcy? Really, really shitty Wii U sales?

I want Nintendo to be the best they can be, to show everyone else what they can do. I know a lot of you love the Wii Music and Sports and all the other new stuff. And it is good to okay-ish but it doesn't grab you and make you go BOOM! Mind blown. Maybe the Galaxies...

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SMD

SMD

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The thing is, they are the best - in Japan. Almost everything they do you can trace to some Japanese cultural phenomenon. Take off-TV play. Yeah it's nice and I enjoy it but it's less of an issue here because people have multiple TVs and it's not so bad when people go off and do their own thing in different parts of the house.

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Ketchup

Ketchup

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Nintendo should be like the Sega of the Dreamcast days. I don't mean horribly in debt and spending all their money sponsoring football teams. But having loads of in house developers making exciting new games that you can't buy anywhere else. Sega gave us Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, Seaman, along with the usual Sonics and fighting games. What do Nintendo do, release yet another Mario game. Remember when Mario 64 came out? We hadn't had a Mario game in years, the same when Zelda OoT came out. Now we have the Year of Luigi where hes in about 50 games because Mario had 70 games he starred in last year.

Nintendo have fallen into a hole, every time there is trouble they release a new Mario game and Mario Kart hoping it'll make everything better. They should be making loads of small unique games, games you won't find on the other platforms. Hire staff to do Virtual Console stuff justice, hire staff to make the OS work properly, hire staff to actually do a good job instead of working old Miyamoto into the ground. It wouldn't surprise me if Nintendo was just a handful of people desperately trying to do everything all at once.

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TheSlugFormerlyKnownAsNap

TheSlugFormerlyKnownAsNap

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There's much to like about Nintendo. I absolutely adore every single one of their handhelds, from the classic brick-like GameBoy right up to the 3DS XL. I love their handheld games, usually they're perfectly suited to the format and even though not every single game is a classic (Steel Diver anyone?), the hit-miss ratio is pretty damn good. Some of my favourite games of all time are portable Nintendo games. Tetris, Advance Wars, the Metroid Fusion/Zero Mission games, Ouendan, Super Mario 3D Land ... it's just an amazing and very long list. I feel that Nintendo totally nails what portable gaming is about.

On the home consoles this is a bit problematic. In this area, I feel the Nintendo 64 was the last great Nintendo console. The NES and SNES were great, they pretty much build the entire foundation Nintendo still rests on today. It was the cradle for all great Nintendo IPs. The Nintendo 64 took these games and once again invented entire new genres by turning them in 3D. Who can forget the first time they saw Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time. Going down the slopes in 1080 Snowboarding. Or how Rare pretty much (re)invented the console FPS with the great GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. It was an amazing leap forward, and even if releases were relatively sparse, the N64 had an impressive library of true game changers. And from here it went downhill. While the GC was still host to some great games, it was pretty much the end for Nintendo as a builder of new brands and experiences. What we mainly got were refined versions of stuff we already played on the N64, most of them worse. 1080 Avalanche was worse than the original 1080. Mario Sunshine wasn't as good as Mario 64. Wind Waker was a pale shadow of Ocarina of Time (yeah, it looked nice). The only true echo of Nintendo brilliance was Metroid Prime. Miyamoto himself said in interviews that this period was terrible for him, as he felt they were in some creative bankrupt rut[1]. They needed to break out.

And they did. And it worked. For them. The Wii was a runaway success. A new control method caught the imagination of hardcore gamers and casuals alike. The Wii was sold out for months. There were 2 problems. First of all, the Wii was weak in the tech department. To keep the console and its new controller affordable - as well as keeping development budgets low, they basically put 5 year old technology in the main unit. While HD penetration reached fever pitch, the Wii looked decidedly naff with its SD graphics. It also meant porting games from the other formats was impossible, so pretty much every major third party franchise bailed out. At the same time, the stagnation of the GameCube era continued and got much worse. A lot of beloved franchises never returned as developer were too busy pampering to a new crowd of casual gamers with more party games, fitness games, weird music games and retro style games with forced on motion controls. As a fan service there was the amazing Mario Galaxy, but most experiments failed. The once former bastion of forward game design, Zelda, now was a complete shambles with tacked on motion controls, excessive handholding and terrible linearity taking the last bit of wonder and exploration from the series. They reached an audience with these games, but a lot of the people who knew Nintendo for taking the medium forward turned their back on them in disgust. So now they lost the hardcore gamer and third parties. So these were exactly the targets when unveiling the Wii U[2].

Fast forward to February 2013. The Wii U has launched, and reception has been decidedly lukewarm. Sales weren't too bad, but there wasn't much of a buzz and, unlike the Wii launch, there never were any shortages or massive media coverage. It just happened. After the holidays, sales pretty much collapsed and have been called 'historically abysmal' by various, traditionally unbiased, sources. The technology is on par with the generation that's currently ramping down. The UPS is a screen that fails to spark the imagination of players and developers alike. Third party publishers openly voice their disappointment with the machine's performance so far. Games are being cancelled, previous exclusives are going multiplatform and the release schedule is pretty barren. Everybody seems to be holding their breath and waiting for the big guns to arrive and/or a major pricecut. There hasn't been a single game announced that people are gagging for. In the meanwhile Sony has shown part of its hand, and it's looking very good. Microsoft is likely to follow suit and maybe make some last minute amendments to keep up with Sony. The position of the Wii U in a year's time is anybody's guess, but I don't think it's looking good.

I realise I have the reputation of being 'anti-Nintendo' in these parts, but this definitely isn't the case. As said, I love the handhelds. I absolutely adored the N64. I love the Nintendo that made Ocarina of Time and Mario Galaxy. But it seems there's very little left of that Nintendo, and I think that's a pity. Because we need companies like Nintendo to tickle the fun and happy glands that the others with their shock and awe approach can't reach.

1. http://www.1up.com/n...ad-gamecube-era

2. http://www.escapistm...Hardcore-Gamers

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pulsemyne

pulsemyne

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You couldn't be me wrong about the system being cheap to make. It's not. The GPU and the CPU are custom and that means the price to manufacture them is much higher than normal. The gamepad actually isn't that expensive to make. The main cost of the machine is from the GPU and CPU.

For example the CPU is a twaeked version of broadway from the Wii, but it's manufacturing process means that it's cost nintendo quite a lot of produce. IBM never made a powerpc 750 chip at 45 nm before, let alone one with a strange configuration like the WiiU one. The GPU meanwhile is flat out wierd, it's a very differant to the ones in pc graphics cards dispite sharing the same makeup as them.

A lot of thought and thus money has gone into the wiiu's design. It's very efficient for the wattage it uses.

Still they have made mistakes but so far it's nothing that cannot be rectified. In the end it's all about the games. If they start to deliver then the wiiu will look like a nice proposition.

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DeFiBkIlLeR

DeFiBkIlLeR

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You couldn't be me wrong about the system being cheap to make. It's not. The GPU and the CPU are custom and that means the price to manufacture them is much higher than normal. The gamepad actually isn't that expensive to make. The main cost of the machine is from the GPU and CPU.

For example the CPU is a twaeked version of broadway from the Wii, but it's manufacturing process means that it's cost nintendo quite a lot of produce. IBM never made a powerpc 750 chip at 45 nm before, let alone one with a strange configuration like the WiiU one. The GPU meanwhile is flat out wierd, it's a very differant to the ones in pc graphics cards dispite sharing the same makeup as them.

A lot of thought and thus money has gone into the wiiu's design. It's very efficient for the wattage it uses.

Spending new money for old rope...dumb

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NEG

NEG

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My chat with a friend:

Friend: I don't really agree with the article. They're slow to release these games and don't license them out much because they care about the quality. That's why they're still legends, unlike Sonic.

Friend: But otherwise, yeah, go for some new IPs I guess

NEG: What you say isn't necessarily true though, is it. The last PilotWings couldn't even bother making a whole new island, instead reusing the one from Wii Sports Resort. If they cared about quality, the two Starfox attempts would have been good as well. If 2D Mario was treated as holy, it would be as rare as they used to be in the day. The GBA is the only Nintendo hardware that has no unique Mario title, but it sure has ports of the classics.

NEG: I could come up with lots of little examples like that.

NEG: Is WarioWare GC 'quality' when it's basically the GBA game in a new interface. Did Wind Waker really have to have 2 dungeons cut, couldn't it just get a delay.

Friend: True, but we complain about that stuff. They wouldn't be any better if they did it more often. I'm glad they spend 3-5 years per 3d Mario/Zelda. They delayed Twilight Princess for quite a while because they learned from what happened with WW

Friend: I'm kind of surprised at the lack of Starfox, though. They could be spamming the hell out of that series.

NEG: Especially with everyone loving the meme.

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angel

angel

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the trouble with Nintendo is massively entitled hardcore gamers.

Had Nintendo released a throbbing cock of a console - it would have made no difference at all to 3rd party support.

If they released an x86 based kick ass machine and some proper Nintendo IP* they would have my money immediately.

*Starfox, Metroid, 3d mario, Zelda, Mario Kart...2 of those at launch, at a level similar to the new consoles. Where the fuck is Metroid Prime 4.

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scottcr

scottcr

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As in unfocussed, unmarketed, thing that most normal people think is a peripheral.

last I checked - it's pretty focussed at being a games console. The name confused people who don't know any better. I suppose maybe having Netflix on there out of the box might confuse the hard of thinking maybe... but... it's pretty damned focussed.

Marketing is bad - I'll give you that.

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NEG

NEG

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the trouble with Nintendo is massively entitled hardcore gamers.

Had Nintendo released a throbbing cock of a console - it would have made no difference at all to 3rd party support.

...well, that's certainly one way to describe 'waggle'.

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