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Nintendo's Iwata On GameCube Sales, Future Plans
Thanks to 1UP for its article covering a recent interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, in which he discusses "Nintendo's current state and its plans for the future in what will be a critical year for the company." Iwata seems to be confident in Nintendo's "..current target of 6 million GameCube consoles sold worldwide in the current fiscal year, which will conclude in March", and also notes that he believes the China-launched iQue "will grow into a major business in three to five years." Finally, Iwata has comments about the mysterious new Nintendo device due to launch at E3 in May, suggesting he "doesn't necessarily expect this product to be an immediate hit upon its announcement - he's prepared to see a lack of applause from some of the audience."
Game development is deadlocked today. Games have grown in pursuit of more beautiful graphics and more complex systems for 20 years, but that growth is no longer translating into success, and games have stopped selling. The situation won't change if we keep expanding in a conventional way. Instead, we want to offer a gameplay experience which players haven't encountered until now.
This guy must have shot out of some sort of bizzare-o world. I mean, Nintendo may be having a rough generation, but the rest of the industry seems to be just fine, and the overall numbers are still always better than last year.
And it also feels just odd to hear the implication, that innovation in games can't continue without their new hardware, from a Nintendo guy.
It comes off like a suggestion that writers can't continue to churn out new and exciting books without adding whiz-bang 'pop-up' technology.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
If Nintendo did have something that wouldn't smack an audience in the mouth, it would be 50/50 between something Completely Different (abstract hard/software) or Me-Too ("It's a game system, a home media hub, a fondue, AND MORE!"). Personally, the latter would be like Dylan going Electric. Dogs and cats living together, etc.
The N has had a focus exclusively on making Games, not trying to jam as many tech.swiss army gear into their hardware. Not that there is anything wrong with gadget laden stuff, but hopefully that keen focus on Just Games will keep Nintendo in motion. All they really need is just a game that can capture the hearts and minds of a generation, like another Mario. My guess?
Donkey Konga.
ROB The Robot - A robot you can control with your NES? Spiffy! Unfortunately, there was almost no support (two games, IIRC) and he died a quick death
Game Boy - A portable game console? GASP! Since the Game Boy is still around (now as the GBA), it's fair to say that this one succeeded
Virtual Boy - Ooh...pretty 3D graphics. It's too bad that they were just red and black, and that the VB caused massive headaches. Still, the idea was nice.
Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble - Control Kirby by tilting your Game Boy. Definitely a unique idea, but the game wasn't exactly a hit.
e-Reader - The ability to add things to GBA games cheaply (buy a $3 pack of cards) is nice, but there hasn't been very much support. Thankfully, that appears to be changing.
That's just what came to mind at the moment. We've got to remember that most of Nintendo's biggest successes - Mario, Zelda, Pokemon - were completely unlike anything else out there at the time of their release.
I've got a feeling that this will be another one of Nintendo's gambles...a completely wild idea that might or might not succeed. We'll see in a few months...
Come to think of it, this situation reminds me of another famous company...
Nintendo: the Apple of gaming.
Goo goo g'joob.
I'm pretty sure that he was referring to the Japanese game industry when talking about a decline. Since this is actually just 2 interviews translated and chopped up, it's hard to say whether or not that was clarified, but at the same time since the interviews were conducted in Japanese mags, it's more likely that the context of the interview would be enough to justify the lack of clarification.
;)
Anyway, the article does state:
Elsewhere in that same interview, Iwata reiterated his confidence in meeting sales targets for GameCube hardware, but was more pessimistic about the general fortunes of the Japanese games business. In the Japanese market, he said, sales of hardware have been declining over the last three years, and though software sales have been able to cover up that decline in the past, that's no longer possible now. While the overseas market still has a passion for playing games, Iwata explained, that's not the case in Japan, although Nintendo plans to play an important role in revitalizing the market in the coming year.
If you look at earlier portions of the article, he states that Cube sales doubled in Japan, but more than doubled in the rest of the world, showing that there's still a market in Japan that will respond to price drops, but unless the price drops were not as significant as elsewhere, it also shows that the market isn't as interested in the industry (of course, other economic factors are at work, as well).
Looking at Japanese sales figures for 2001, 2002, and 2003, you can see some trends such as more games selling over a million units in 2003, but the top-selling game for 2003 sold fewer units than the top-selling game for 2002, and the top-selling game for 2002 was the #2-selling game for 2003.
Overall, games seem to stay in the weekly top-selling lists for either a fairly long period of time or a very short period of time, with little falling in between. In other words, they sell extremely quickly to their core audience and probably receive mild reviews or little attention from those outside that core audience and disappear after the first week or two on the charts. Games with broader appeal and a more well-known name seem to stay in the charts indefinitely, even on fairly moderate weekly sales, as only new highly-awaited titles will shoot up the charts.
To put it another way, how good is the market when Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire was #1 in 2002, beaten out of #1 by FFX-2 in 2003 (by a small margin), and is still in the top 15 on the weekly charts a little over a week ago? Good for Nintendo to be able to maintain a title to almost 5 million sales in the Japanese market and hold the charts for 2 years, but everyone's released plenty of titles since then, and the North American charts reflect a much more friendly environment for new games, and a more moderate timeframe for successful games to stay on the charts through continued sales.
All of that being said, there could be some other more blatantly obvious explanation
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Planet GameCube has a bit about how they're re-releasing a mess of old NES games for the Game Boy Advance, as well as producing a new GBA/SP with a color scheme with the old color scheme. It sucks from my point of view, since I spent a lot of time in used game stores and pawn shops this Christmas looking for an old NES for my wife. She loves Super Mario and Dr. Mario.
My guess from what I know, is that Nintendo will debut their long announced wireless project.
In a nutshell, it'll be a wireless device, that will send/receive a signal and create a grid/P2P type network. This will allow almost lag-free gaming across a fairly wide area. It'll be good if you're in a city, for example, and it catches on, you could play against all the locals. Would really catch on if it came with voice chat.
The iQue really seems to be the predecessor for such a device. You pay for the player (an internal hard drive, possibly?) and then can download all of those old school games (NES, SNES, GB, GBC, N64) to your GC, paying by the game, not the month. Possibly even have a Nintendo-blessed compact flash cartridge for the GBA (one a little less unwieldly than the eReader) that you could then download the game (well, non-N64 one) to your GBA...
Those of you with a GCN: check the underside of the console. There is a third port, aside from the online adapter and GB Player ports. You can create a third device that sandwiches between the GCN and the GB Player, with a pass-through port for the GB Player to access its port.
I really think there's going to be an online component to this. There has to be a better reason to buy the online adapters other than Mario Kart, Kirby and Phantasy Star...
Wow. I wasn't aware that having $6+ billion in the bank was classified as "standing on your last leg". I must have lost my legs long ago..
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
One of the things Nintendo is best at is coming up with extremely bizarre products...and then making them work.
At first, I had to check your list there to see if it was a list of things that didn't work. They all are, save the GB. More importantly, many of those things are items from the golden age of Nintendo. The e-reader is more recent, but compared to what they were churning out prior (add the powerglove to your list, the Mario mouse, the exercise pad) most of these are from years ago. Nintendo introduced them and then they quickly faded into the background of popular culture. Really, the only innovation that is still being used is the Gameboy. Even Mario and Zelda are from their glory days (Pokemon was an idea from a company that Nintendo bought).
That's not to say that I didn't love Windwaker, or the GBA SP. But these are evolutions of concepts formed years ago, not fresh innovations. This makes them completely unlike Apple, who is still actively a market leader in design (from the iMacs to the iPods to, well, putting a small letter in front of words to make them sound cool). Nintendo, on the other hands, is doing its best to catch up. Even the Wavebird, a fantastic wireless device, is an evolution and not an innovation. Meanwhile, and in the same industry, Sony is releasing Nintendo-esque products like the Eyetoy - and, at the same time, getting a good deal of success while doing it, which is more than we can say for Nintendo's efforts.
I like Nintendo's apathetic "investor-may-care" attitude; this idea that they'll cater to 10% of the market for the duration of their corporate lifespan (which is, admitedly, very Apple-Like). Unfortunately, (and unlike Apple) I just don't know if there's room enough in the console market to support that kind of niche company. I hope so.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The Powerglove... 2!" ::Crickets heard chirping::
It would be worth it for the sheer humor value.
Dude, just use the google cache for those particular pages, that's how I get around it at work :P
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...