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Nintendo's Iwata Talks European Neglect, DS Origins
Thanks to Kikizo for its transcript of an interview with Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata, also available in video form on the site. When asked, Iwata "apologise[s] to the fans of Nintendo products in Europe" over repeated delays, presumably including games such as Animal Crossing, finally out this September in Europe, mentioning "we are now putting our energies so that the European version of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes will be launched in Europe by the end of this year, at the sacrifice of the Japanese launch by the end of this year." He also discusses the origin of the Nintendo DS, "Talking specifically about the DS, [legendary 76-year old Nintendo president Hiroshi] Yamauchi specifically hit upon the idea, and proposed, 'Why not have the two screens?'"
Microsoft isn't working on easier more efficient tools, it is working on a simpler cross-platform API. So the game of the future that requires 50people to make the content can have more of a chance of recouping the expense as it will be more likely to get on more platforms. Producing the game will still be a mamoth effort.
What Iwata is getting at is that it is costing more and more money to produce games on more and more powerful hardware. Yet, the WOW factor is getting less and less. 2d->3D gives a big WOW, 1000 polys in a scene -> 10,000 gives a slightly smaller WOW, 10,000 -> 30,000 gives a tiny meow. PS3 with 100,000 a frame - who cares?
It is also becoming more and more difficult to come up with totally new titles, add that to the shocking cost of development and marketing. You would be mad to go out on a limb with something weird (i.e. viewtifulJoe - lost its publisher a ton of money).
Where can you innovate next to catch the punters imagination -> stick all your old gaming favourites on a twin screen portable with added stylus control. It's certainly different, the games aren't any harder to make and the twin-screen and stylus should prompt a few new ideas. Average punter can't fail to notice the difference, whether he likes it or not is another matter.
But he proposes that instead of beefing up the processing power they should be looking at alternate user interfaces (like they did with the DS).
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I see nothing wrong with this approach. The fact is, there are an awful lot of crap, boring games being written, and if you trace it back, kinetically, in the end it could be simply because of the limitations of control.
Consumers ability to control things - touchy feely things like mice and keyboards and such - has definitely been proven to be pretty oblique. On one end of the scale, you have the 8-yr old button-smasher, and on the other end you've got the 33 year old vi-using console jockey. Games have to be good for both ends of that scale, or at least hardware games systems do
It tends to be a little more significant than the 'raw specs' of hardware, whether or not the box you intend to mass-produce is going to work for -all- control scenario's that might be required for the truly imaginative games of the future which might be possible with these mega-GPU's
Again, I don't think its A vs. B, here. Sure, its great that we're getting great silicon from the Next Gen game wars, but it is also true that there is a lot left to be done on the human interface, control side of things
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"You're absolutely right. Nintendo had a massive installed user base and then Sony came out of seemingly nowhere and got a stranglehold on the market. I see a very similar situation here: Nintendo, currently number one with no real innovation in years, facing competition from someone with a technical edge over them. Interestingly enough, it's the same company challenging them. If you question whether or not Nintendo has innovated in the last... 15 years or so that the gambeboy has been available, just think about it: up until about a year ago there was *still* no light and you had to hold the damn thing at an awkward angle sometimes. Color took forever and they were still pushing ugly graphics on expensive media. The battle over handheld dominance will be very interesting as we know Sony has a track record for taking hold in the video game market"
Wait a minute, adding a light source to a handheld is innovative? Waiting to add color is uninnovative? What the heck? First of all, color pretty much was nonexistant in any portable device until the mid to late 1990s. And even so, color handheld games is more of a technological upgrade than an innovation. Same with the frontlight on the GB. What portable devices do you remember having an internal lighting source when the GBC came out? While I admit, Nintendo should have included a light in the GBA, at least they corrected that mistake with the GBASP, and they didn't sacrifice performance or battery life for it, the way it should be done. These things have NOTHING to do with innovation: They have to do with the technological limitations of the time. I mean, look at how the Game Gear performed with the color it had. Technologically, none of this: a game boy with color and/or a backlight/frontlight couldn't be done until six or seven years ago. Don't confuse that with lack of innovation.
Nintendo has not innovated? Wtf? Why is it that people say that? Just because Nintendo often uses the same characters in its games does not make them uninnovative. Mario Kart was innovative in that it started the kart racing subgenre. Mario Party: What games were like it beforehand? It made a board/minigame hybrid party game. How about Pikmin, a game in which you play as a guy and control an army of small plants which have special abilities and powers? Or how about Wario Ware? How in the world is THAT not innovative? Nintendo, just like everyone else, uses brand names, because people love what they are familiar with. It's human nature. Not only that, but when people see a game with Mario in it, they're pretty sure it will be high quality, because that's what mario games usually are. Brand names help inform a consumer of what to expect from a product, like that.
The Playstaion got more support than the N64 because it was, in order of most importance: Cheapter to develop for, easier to develop for, and had more storage. Now, let's look at the DS and the PSP: The DS allows developers new ways to make games, and appeals to video game developers' creative side. the DS will use a cheap semiconductor memory unit, 128 Megabytes and beyond. Now, Mario 64 was 16 Megabytes. 16 megabytes was the typical maximum for an N64 game, although there was one game that was 24 Megabytes (Ogre Battle 64), and two games that were 32 Megabytes (Pokemon Colloseum 2, and Resident Evil 2). 128 megabytes should be plenty for developers, unless they want to use a bunch of pre-renders and high poly models, which don't really matter on a handheld. The price of the DS looks to be pretty cheap, too.
And the PSP? Well, it uses 1.8 GB disks, so, again, it has the memory advantage of an optical format over a cartridge. But that's the only advantage that the PSP has over the DS that the PS had over the N64. It looks like games will have the production costs of Playstation 2 games, and higher prices disencourages innovation and risky moves by developers. That's one reason