Nintendo's Iwata - Innovate or Die

Linker writes "CNN/Money has interviewed Satoru Iwata, where the president of Nintendo Ltd. says the gaming industry is in the midst of a crisis of innovation, which could lead to its demise. The idea, of course, is to justify the existence of the upcoming Nintendo DS, but Iwata does point out that the gaming market in Japan has been shrinking in the past few years - and the U.S. and Europe may do so soon."

Comments

This is a common technique

[Mike Hawk]

When a company's financial situation is worsening, one tactic is to make it appear that it is the market as a whole that is suffering or shrinking and not the particular company's individual performance. Its a simple play to artificially hold up your company's stock, or at least drag everyone else down with you. You'll find that many American publishers have just announced significant profits for this past fiscal year or for the coming fiscal year while Nintendo posted their first quarterly loss in decades.

All I have ever said, and have been brutalized repeatedly for on this site, is that the American/Eurpoean markets are different from the Japanese. It is easy to show that the gamers have different tastes, a number of recent slashdot articles have proven that, and that the Japanese market is shrinking overall while the western markets continue to show growth. As soon as NoA starts treating American's as special again (as it did with the significant difference between the NES and FamiCom) they have a chance to recover. If they continue resting on their laurels and giving us the exact same hardware and software as is released Japan, their western market share will continue to shrink until they are totally irrelevent. My prediction all along has been the fragment of the market into one worldwide success and a different second place in Region 1 and 4 from Region 2. If the current trend continues the big winner will still be Sony, with MS and Nintendo ceasing to compete directly and each taking second in different parts of the world. The only question in my mind is will Nintendo be too stubborn to port their software to Playstation or Xbox when the Americans finally boot them out of the hardware business.

Re:*Innovate or DIE!*

[ironghost]

Games will eventually start being more and more similar to movies or to real-life. Better AI, better graphics, interesting ways of presentation and good stories. But the genres will remain the same, with rarely any innovation - if any at all.

This is what I think should happen, but I think that the story should not be linear cut and dry. I like multiple endings, I like being able to change the character/story as time progresses/the mood I'm in. Game developers I feel should be less story tellers, and more of environment builders allowing us to progress with the tools they allow us under our own intellect and capabilities. Let us create the story in the world that they give us.

Of course Japan's market is shrinking...

[Rayonic]

...because Japan's population has been shrinking. And getting older, on average. And that economic slump isn't helping things.

Until someone comes out with some real polling results, you can't say that the Japanese populace is becoming "disenchanted" with video gaming. There could be many other factors at work.

Re:*Innovate or DIE!*

[Macgrrl]

As a RPG designer I would agree that one of the key differences between a CRPG and a tabletop game at a game convention is that the CRPG is often linear in it's resolution (often only one viable solution), whereas a tabletop game has to accomodate anything the players come up with. Players are extremely scathing about "fishhook" modules - game that drag you along a set path as if their was a fishhook in your mouth.

I have no idea what would be involved in giving a CRPG the degree of flexibility you can get in a table top game, there would need to be character AIs which change their actions based on past actions and behaviours of the PCs. The biggest problem would be writing all the branches to emulate the way a tabletop GM can ad lib.