Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Running Itself into the Ground?
ZephyrXero writes "That is the question asked by N-Sider.com in their article "Playing it safe". The article talks of how Nintendo's reliance on tried and true franchises may contribute to their lack of innovation and low sales numbers. Although most have already seen this problem brewing within Nintendo for quite some time, it is also becoming a problem for many other game developers throughout the industry." A nice counter-point to Sticking up for Nintendo from earlier this month.
Nintendo is a profitable company with billions in the bank (I remember a year or two ago a report that Nintendo has around 8 billion USD in the bank).
Nintendo's problem isn't that they can't make good games. They have completely messed up their entire image. Don't make purple consoles, while I think nothing of it there are a lot of stupid people who didn't buy the console cause it looked 'gay'. Everyone buys the black ones, so when you go to a store and see nothing but purple gamecube's, there's someone who thought about buying one but when looking at the sleek black and green Xbox or the black and blueish PS2, they probably went for it.
Nintendo ALSO needs to suck it up about their "WE know what is best for the gamer" attitude. They have said that, basically, in many interviews over the recent years.
the Political Inquirer
How exactly is releasing a portable game system unlike anything else out there "playing it safe". Especially when compared to the PSP, which is pretty much as "safe" as it gets....
Monstar L
Nintendo is one of the few companies out there to consistently pump out quality games across all their platforms. Sure, there is Mario Tennis, Mario Party, Mario Golf, Super Mario DS, etc, but every single one of those games is solid. The same goes with the Metroid and Zelda series. Nintendo doesn't use its franchises as a way to sell bad games. They are instead constantly reinforcing how good the games are that come from their franchises.
This guy brings up some interesting ideas but it's not about innovation and gameplay style that is killing them. I got a DS for Christmas and I challenge anybody to say that thing is not innovative. The problem with Nintendo is for every Eternal Darkness game they make they have 10 Pokemon/Harvest Moon/Talking animal games. Teenagers and adults have the money and the market share for videogames. They are the ones that will save up and plop down 50 bucks for Halo 2, GTA, etc.. Buying a cutesy nintendo game means that 5 year old needs to pester his or her parent for the game. Better said then done. Most parents I talk to are apprehensive to shell out money for their child's game habit. Innovation is not the problem. Disney style games are. /my two cents.
-Dipster
The anti-innovation point would have been good, had it been made before the wildly innovative Nintendo DS, and before the announcement that the next Nintendo console will have a completely new control scheme. Even if they use the same characters in upcoming games, they're going to have to be used in entirely new ways.
Glog!
For every decent point, the author trots out the same Mario-bashing that has following Nintendo since the SNES. The author shows a complete misunderstanding of how businesses maintain corporate identity and branding when he launches into such brilliant ideas as suggesting Donkey Konga would have been better served with brand new characters instead of recycling Donkey Kong. Because we all know how the PS2's Taiko Drum Master is burning up the charts (another drum peripheral game, nearly identical to Konga, also developed by Namco) because people are just begging for new drum games featuring all new IP. Come on. Half of those dreaded Mario spin-off games are concepts that nobody knew would become huge, and Nintendo figured that attaching Mario to them was the surest way to help their success. Risk = lousy games would diminish the brand, Reward = good games that strengthen the brand. Was there a huge appetite for cart racers before Mario Kart? For party games before Mario Party? For silly golf games before Mario Golf? Nintendo ventured out (Donkey Konga is a risk... new bulky hardware for a genre that mostly runs off one game, DDR), made some sharp games, people lapped them up... so Nintendo realized they hit gold and made more. And then everybody started doing them, and whaddaya know, they mostly paled in comparison.
You can write the same article about PlayStation, switching in Metal Gear, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto. The major differences are A) that Nintendo has been around longer - and thus has been doing the branding game longer. And B) that Nintendo's core franchises are family-friendly and thus open to constant ridicule by those who don't like them.
This is clearly going to go down like a lead balloon on slashdot, where kissing Nintendo's ass is second only to MS bashing as a past-time. I imagine there are already dozens of furious and/or smug fanboys dashing off "OMG, NINTENDO R TEH ONLY INTEVATORS" rants in response to this.
However, it doesn't change the fact that the central thrust of the argument is true. Particularly the assertion that Nintendo's position in the console market these days is to be largely ignored. This might not be apparent to the average slashdot reader, given the high prominence that Nintendo-based stories get in here, but the wider world doesn't really care about the Gamecube any more, for good reason.
It's very, very true that Nintendo haven't innovated in their game designs for a long time. The point about most Cube games (and I say this as a Cube owner) being rehashed versions of N64 games is the real problem here. Even Metroid Prime, which the article singles out as an exception to this, is only a standard console fps with a bad control system. Sure, it's a good enough fps and it deservedly did well, but it's not innovative. Nintendo's idea of innovation these days is to make a tacky new controller, charge a fortune for it and hope the fanboys buy enough that it breaks even.
Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart 64 and Zelda Wind Walker were all good games. However, they all fundamentally appeal to the same audience. No, not kids; I don't fall for the argument that Nintendo games are aimed at kids. Let's face it, today's kids would rather be playing GTA: San Andreas or Halo 2. Rather, Nintendo's games are pitched at the same people who were buying their consoles as kids in the early 80s. These guys are older now, they don't really play games much, but they like to keep a console around for nostalgia value and, as many of them are part of the slashdot horde, they like feeling "alternative" by owning a console that isn't all nasty and corporate like the X-Box and PS2. This isn't a tremendously huge market and it's not likely to grow much.
So, how does Nintendo break out of this? The article talks at length about 3rd party support. This is pretty much essential, but it's only part of the solution. The GC has very little in the way of must-have exclusive games at the moment, for somebody who's not into Mario. Eternal Darkness is one of the very few that springs to mind. And, as the article says, there are so many games missing from the lineup that you can get on other systems. If I only owned a Cube (fortunately I have a PS2 and X-Box as well), I'd be pretty damned annoyed at not being able to play Burnout 3 on it. Of course, there's a bit of a vicious cycle here; 3rd party developers don't make games for the Cube because they don't sell, so people don't buy Cubes, so Cube games don't sell. It's going to take a lot of money to solve that.
However, Nintendo are also going to need to get up to speed on other developments in gaming... and fast. The classic example here is online gaming. This has been huge on the PC for years, X-Box Live is a pretty incredible achievement and even the PS2 has a respectable range of online games now. Meanwhile... I can count the Cube's online offerings on the fingers of one hand. In fact, I could do so even if I had a couple of fingers missing. And to cap it all of, we have some Nintendo exec telling us that online play isn't what gamers want. Henry Ford said that drivers could have their car any colour they wanted, so long as it was black... remember how well that worked out for him?
Oh, and while I'm ranting, how about European coverage. Europe is a huge market and it's growing fast. However, Europe gets consistently shafted by Nintendo. Major titles come out many months late, or not at all. We don't even get the extra features, by way of compensation, that we get in games by, for example, Square-Enix when they come out late in Europe (eg. FFX has a number of features in the European version missing from the US version and the original Japanese release). This isn't even a ca
The problem is that the GameCube as a whole wound up becoming the Dreamcast of this generation.
Um, maybe it's just me, but wasn't the Dreamcast the "Dreamcast of this generation"?
You probably shouldn't click this.
It goes like this. Video games are just like every other medium of entertainment. Just like movies, music and TV. There are shows, films, games and songs to cover every genre across the board. What's happened to the video game industry mostly mirrors the film industry. There are shitty blockbuster movies which everyone sees that make a lot of money. But the people who know quality most often stick to art house theatres. There they get quality, but the people who make it get less money due to less marketing.
/. love to attack and infer broad sweeping generalisations like that. What I am saying is that overall Nintendo is concentrating on creating an innovative and new gaming experience that can be enjoyed by all people. As long as they profit, they're happy. All the other companies are mostly concerned with making a quick buck. So they release three GTA games that are all really the same with slightly changed themes. And they release a shitty FPS named Halo, twice, which is pretty much a modernized goldeneye plus vehicles and aliens. It makes them loads of cash the same way a blockbuster film does. But you can't honestly say that their games are high quality works of art. But if you play some Zelda or some Metroid its hard not to.
Nintendo has made the error of making high quality games. People don't realize that the game itself and the theme of a game are two seperate things. For example, look at Star Trek and any daytime soap opera. Both are soap operas, the substance of the shows are identical, but the themes are different. One has an outer space theme and one has a theme of eviltown USA. But the actual substance of the thing is mostly the same.
Nintendo makes high quality games. In fact, most of their games are the highest quality you can get. Just about anything that says Metroid, Mario or Zelda on it is top notch. But the theme, other than Metroid, is not one that appeals to punk teenage kids. They are too manly to buy a mario game even though they know it is better and more fun than GTA whatever. Always worried about graphics and self image instead of their actual gaming experience. So games like BMX XXX exist. These types of games are all the same crappy thing. They come in two genres, run around a shoot things and run around and beat things up, sometimes both. But like blockbuster movies with no substance they sell well.
I'm not saying all Nintendo's games are flawless masterpieces. Nor am I saying that all games for other systems are crap. People on
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Yeah, right into the ground...
The article's premise is ridiculous and unsupported by evidence. Nintendo's franchise games are:
a) Consistently among the highest-quality games available for any system, and
b) Consistently among the top sellers for Nintendo systems.
Nintendo are ancient master game makers, and if there's anything - anything about their business that they know how to do well, it's make games.
Nintendo does have problems and a dismal outlook for the future, but its product quality is not the issue. Its real problems are corporate mergermania and technology convergence, which are in tandem killing off or causing to be absorbed any and all companies with narrow focus interests. Nintendo could make the best games in history, but versus monolithic conglomerates with inexhaustible resources, in the long run, they can't win. It's actually a testament to Nintendo's competence that they've survived so long.
Nintendo's destiny may be to die out or be absorbed, but to blame the game quality for that is ridiculous and utterly wrongheaded. Their best games are as good as the other guys', at least - it's the other areas where they fail to scale. You may as well say that Starbucks and WalMart killed every local business in America because of "better quality products". In most cases, it was actually because of "same quality products, way more resources". As it is with Nintendo.
Everyone keeps saying "Nintendo makes the best games!!!", completely forgetting that that's all kinds of their opinion. The only real AAA title that came out of Nintendo this year, to me, was Metroid Prime 2. They did some other decent stuff this year, like Pikmin 2 and Paper Mario 2, but otherwise? I don't like sports games, so the formula of "mascot + wacky + sport" doesn't appeal to me. I never liked Mario Kart (still don't) and could not possibly care less about the Mario Party games. Given my taste in games, that crosses out a huge number of the first party games. I dig Zelda and F-Zero (the most recent being a Sega game technically) but Nintendo as a whole just doesn't seem to make games that I like. And then there's the overeliance on mascots. See, I'm of the opinion that the Ratchet and Clank games are pretty much the best 3D platformers ever made. It's not innovative, but it certainly is polished to all hell, and it's a lot of fun. But you'd never see Mario running around with an assortment of laser guns. Why? Because that's not what Mario does. Similarly, what if they tried to put Fable-esque elements into the Zelda games, like havi you make moral choices? Well, again, Link wouldn't possibly be evil or shack up with chicks, because it doesn't fit into the tone of the franchise. These shackles, most of it coming from being family friendly, ultimately do more harm than good.
You're confusing "games that I don't like" with "games that don't innovate." Nintendo has personally brought us:
- a game that takes place in real time whether you're playing or not
- games that use GBAs as additional screens
- a card game that uses a GBA for scannable minigames
- a peripheral for playing GBA games on your TV
- a genre-busting combination of puzzle and RTS
- bongos, for both a rhythm game and a platformer
- voice input
- touch screen
- a game based around 100s of 3 second minigames
- first party wireless controllers
And those are all recent ones. Just because not all of these items were a huge success and thus repeated many times over, that does not mean they weren't innovations. The whims of the marketplace turn gimmicks into innovations... and I'll back the guys resposible for the d-pad, analog sticks, and portable gaming as we know it. I'll give them a couple floppy gimmicks (R.O.B.) in order to score the bigger hits (wireless controllers that don't suck).
And for the record, I hated the no-FLUDD levels in Sunshine.
Unlocking features by buying new hardware addons just SCREAMS marketing. Oh, and the last one is just a newer version of the Super Game Boy for SNES.
First of all, marketing is what we're talking about. It happens to be how companies make money. Microsoft isn't playing at marketing with Halo 2.5? Sony doesn't market their HDD when you attempt to play Resident Evil Outbreak and find that it sucks?
The games I brought up, Four Swords Adventures and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles did not unlock additional content... the GBA/Cube connection was a major part of the game design. You're thinking of connection bonuses, like unlocking original Metroid when you hook up Prime and Fusion... but that's always been a half-empty/half-full problem. You're seeing a dirty ploy to get you to buy both a GBA and a Cube. I'm seeing a nice bonus for those who already have them. Although original Metroid is pretty lousy.
I was also thinking of Mario Party-e, an actual card game (you know, with paper cards) that uses the eReader and a GBA for quickie minigames.
Forgot about the Super Game Boy, though. Point for you there.
Bongos. Did you read what I wrote? Of course it's a gimmick. So was the analog stick, once upon a time. I'm not saying that every next-gen console is coming with built-in bongos... but it's still something different that Nintendo threw out there when nobody expected it. Innovation. And you know, if every gamer on the planet bought it, we definitely would have built-in bongos on the next round of systems.
With voice input and touch screen I was thinking of the DS, actually. Probably should have either specifically said the DS, or pointed out how the DS uses both in new ways, like blowing out candles and vomiting goldfish and whatnot. So your stance would be that if Company B improves upon what Company A did ten years ago, that's no longer innovating? You're not going to see a lot of innovation in your life that way. Is the Xbox hard drive innovative? I'm repeatedly told that it is.
And anyway, Nintendo had a mic input on the Famicom.
Wavebird. Wireless controllers were a joke for years... the sort of thing nobody expected to work since they sucked for so long. Then Nintendo did it right. And despite losing the rumble feedback (was that also a Nintendo innovation?), the Wavebird has become one of the singular best features of the Gamecube. Taking something that was a common joke among old time gamers and making it absolutely essential is awful damn close to innovation.
And I'm calling Pikmin the RTS/puzzle combo. I'm sure I ripped that out of a review somewhere.
All companies have tossed their share of innovations into the ring, and Nintendo more than anyone over the course of their history. Their greatest modern failing is the lack of online games, which affects them more in the court of public opinion than anywhere else (and even that is only in the hardcore gamer's court of public opinion, not families, non-gamers or occasional gamers.) If this whole discussion is going to degrade into a semantic fight over "gimmick" versus "innovation," then it's already a waste. A gimmick is simply an innovation that doesn't procreate.
Nintendo is the only remaining console producer who has strong first party development. Sony is beginning to try their hand at it with stuff like Gran Turismo and ICO... but they don't make nearly as many games as Nintendo. Nintendo was able to keep the N64 afloat pretty much single handedly through some skilled 1st and 2nd party development. Sony in comparison relies almost entirely on 3rd parties to sell their systems. Nobody would have bought a PS2 if not for Square, Konami, and Enix. Microsoft relies pretty much entirely on their marketting and Halo. I have to wonder when that's going to blow up in their face, but that's beside the point.
My point is that Nintendo is the only console manufacturer with strong game development internally. They are consistently among the top publishers, and although they rely on a core set of mascots to sell their games, each game of a franchise is often quite different from its siblings. (take Paper Mario to Mario RPG to Mario and Luigi, or Metroid Prime to Super Metroid for example).
I just think it's a little absurd to rag on Nintendo for lack of innovation while Sony and Microsoft don't even make their own games for the most part, and when they do, they are often sequels as well. And most of the 3rd party developers prefer to build on their franchises as well. (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Splinter Cell, Kingdom Hearts, etc. etc.) I just happen to see a lot of new stuff on GameCube, such as Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Ikaruga, etc. And such games are often greatly appreciated.
In other news, DC Comics has realized that it should stop publishing Superman and Batman titles in favor of new characters that nobody has any investment in.
I'd have modded this more "insightful" than "funny".
What's funny is how much Nintendo gets bashed around the net, considering they're, you know, the only profitable game hardware company out there. People act like they don't know what they're doing and that somehow Sony and MS have got their number. In reality, I think it's a lot more likely that Kaz at Sony and Bill over at MS sit there looking at their market share numbers vs. their profit/loss columns and think "huh? Shouldn't we be the ones making money here?"
Nintendo's doing something right; something that MS and Sony aren't. They realized a long time ago that dominating the industry is not necessary to be profitable. If you really look objectively at what they do vs. what Sony and MS do, you can make the following observations:
a) They've got a corner in every part of the market. They have strong first-party game development (unlike Sony and MS, which rely more on second- and third-party development), and they get all of those profits for themselves. They have two handhelds and one current home console, and in various territories they still sell "classic" consoles as well.
b) They allocate a certain percentage of development to proven franchises and a certain percentage to new titles, and they carefully manage that (it's not haphazard). This article seems to argue that the percentage allocation to proven franchises is too high, but where most game developers have failed is in doing the opposite. That's just the reality of today's market, which is "brand" based, for better or worse.
c) They have a strong "house style". Whether or not you personally like their house style is not really an issue - the fact is you buy a Nintendo product and you basically know what you're getting. Nintendo is not nearly as reliant on third parties to define their products, nor are they as reliant on "killer apps". You buy a Nintendo console for the overall Nintendo "experience". It's similar to what Disney does - it almost doesn't even matter whether a particular Disney movie is any good, people will go see it anyway because they know basically what it's all going to be about.
All this adds up to a well-managed company that tightly controls everything they do, which results in nearly continuous profit (I believe they've had one non-profitable quarter in something like the last ten years). They also just flat-out sell a lot more stuff than most people think they do - last year I think they were the #2 software publisher overall in terms of sales, for example, and I remember over Thanksgiving week this year they sold more total hardware in one week in the United States than their competitors sold for the entire month combined - and that's in their weakest territory. (That's including all of their systems; GBA SP, DS, GameCube.) The GameCube itself is #2 in sales worldwide, Nintendo handhelds have 95% of that market, I mean this company does sell a lot of products.
Whether or not you understand their business plan is pretty immaterial. A lot of people don't personally like what Nintendo's doing and they therefore don't personally think their strategies are sound. But Nintendo has continuously proven those people wrong throughout pretty much their entire history. And yet the naysayers still won't go away.
That may be true, but the question is, does Burnout 3 need that much space? My guess is no. The previous two games didn't seem to have a problem. It's a racing game after all...