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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.
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.
Microsoft has realized that it should discontinue the Office brand in favor of new software that will be more "innovative" than simple word processing.
And McDonalds has decided to discontinue all of its hamburgers, fearing that they haven't created any innovative cuisine in the last 20 years, instead becoming a steakhouse.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
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
Whine about the resaons why Nintendo isn't the dominant player in the industry gets old. Listen, just because the big N isn't number one in console sales, doesn't mean that they are not a successful company, or that they are on the brink of failure. BMW isn't the number one auto company, but hey seem to be doing all right. Apple might not even hold a candle to the other PC manufacturers, but they service a niche. I love Nintendo, and it doesn't matter if they dominate the market. They meet a particular market need, and they get by just fine. They will proabably never again rule the console roost, but they will continue to be a profitable, successful game company.
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
...wasn't this year's Christmas season made up almost entirely of top-notch, blockbuster, super-selling sequels? Judging by what the general video-gaming masses throw their money at, doesn't adherence to the tried-and-true actually make financial sense?
The guy goes on and on about how these franchises aren't attracting new gamers. That's bullocks. The problem is that the GameCube as a whole wound up becoming the Dreamcast of this generation. Not enough AAA-rate games to keep gamers happy: No Burnout 3, no GTA, limited sports support. Simple as that. Metroid Prime got attention, but for many reasons (lack of deathmatch being one), it wasn't the Halo that pulled Microsoft's similarly-shitty XBox release schedule out of the crapper. If Nintendo had gotten their crap together by snagging more third parties earlier, or perhaps by getting Mario Kart DD online, the console wars would've been completely different. As it stands, Nintendo blew the console wars again.
Then again, on the bright side, their profits are pretty damn good. What they lose in licensing, they've made up for by never selling their console for less than a profit and by making more profit for their first-party games. MS and Sony couldn't say that for years and lost more money in their deep pocketbooks than they'd ever care to admit, and paying for exclusivity deals with third parties takes its toll, too. Nintendo, as shortsighted as they are in getting American gamers' attention, have always been pretty good with the pocketbook. That might not mean much to gamers in search of a good system, but it does mean that Nintendo is going absolutely nowhere in the console wars. They won't fall like Sega anytime soon, but they do need to shape up with the new Revolution system, because they won't survive a third N64-style last-place finish, and two bad systems in a row is not a good reputation to go into the next generation with. Can we say Atari?
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.
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!
Welcome to bizzaro-world. Nintendo is the one console I've seen where non-franchise games seem to do well. I Ninja, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, P.N.03, and Tales of Symphonia are the majority of the games I've played on my GameCube lately, and they're all non-franchise as far as I can see. Compare this to Playstation 2, for example, where the games of choice at the moment are TOCA 2, Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto 3 San Andreas, Star Ocean 3, and Elder Scrolls 3, Final Fantasy 12... Maybe that's just me, but franchises certainly aren't what I was thinking about when I bought a GameCube.
If anyone needs to invest in non-franchise games, it's the other two consoles. Hell, even the non-sequels that show up on Playstation 2 and X-Box seem to mostly be things like movie franchises. Ugh.
Random and weird software I've written.
As opposed to... what? Who's pushing the boundaries like Nintendo is at the moment? Sure, the Big N uses familiar franchises pretty often (which is the only gripe I could find the author had). That's to build on established brands, a common marketing strategy.
Despite familiar characters and storylines, Nintendo's in-house games are some of the most original and interesting available today, whereas Sony and Microsoft will play host to the latest multiplayer futuristic shooter or various racing games. Sony practically produces nothing in-house, yet the worldwide PS2 sales are well above GameCube, a distant second place, and Xbox.
The author of the article claims that Nintendo doesn't try new things, and then mentions Super Mario Sunshine. Sunshine tried a new concept, and the fact is that it wasn't well-recieved. EAD tried a new approach to the genre, but it's not their fault people didn't like it.
And that's the thing about innovation. New ideas usually don't start a revolution; they can often backfire, as did the Virtual Boy, or (to a far lesser extent) the graphical style of the new Zelda. For every hit, there are a number of misses. For every DS, there is a Virtual Boy, and an innovator must be prepared for that. Most take the easy, tried-but-true path and use a proven formula to produce a mediocre game, where success of some degree is guaranteed.
The problem with the article is that the author is trying to directly relate innovation with market domination, but if that were the case, Sony wouldn't be in the position they are today.
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.
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.
Actually, this is a load of BS. Burnout 2 sold better on the Cube than it did on the Xbox. Explain to me why the sequel is available on the Xbox and not the Cube again?
Oh, that's right: It's because Microsoft has created an unprofitable, unmaintainable business strategy of buying/paying off developers to create games for its extremely expensive system. It's not healthy for the industry, and if they can't do a 180 turn on their losses in the next generation it's going to come around and bite EVERYONE, gamers and developers included, in the ass.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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.
"new bulky hardware for a genre that mostly runs off one game, DDR"
Though DDR has overshadowed most games in the Rythmn/dance genre, a most underrated game that hardly saw American shores was Samba De Amigo (here and here). It started off as an arcade game with maraca controllers (something you wouldn't likely see in American arcades), and was then ported to the Dreamcast. They even had maraca controllers for the 'real' experience. I guess it was the failure of the Dreamcast (Despite the many good games released for it), or the strangness of shaking maracas to latin beat with a dancing monkey, but it's one game you aren't likely to see in stores again, despite the enormous enjoyment one can get out of it.
Perhaps if the monkey had been Donkey Kong it would have taken off?
"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."
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy here (when I actually haven't touched my Cube in a while, my GBA more recently though), I have to say: What?
Nintendo has almost always had some of the cheapest, high quality hardware on the market. I've seen videos of a Gamecube being thrown out of a car and dragged behind by a rope, and still running games after that. How much does it cost? $99. Try that with a $150 PS2 or XBox. I'm scared to death to lug my Xbox around, for fear of upsetting the hard drive with my precious saves on it. My Gamecube is perfectly content to be tossed around.
Even Nintendo's newest handheld is also cheaper ($150) than Sony's offerings ($200), and the features seem to be the same for both (not asking for a feature battle there, I know the differences).
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.
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...
It's also worth noting that the article about the PSP was submitted by its own author and blatantly ignored the complaints about the system, whereas this article was written in October and ran on IGN, where most of the readers of this section of Slashdot had a chance to see it.
Am I the only one bothered by this?
Goo goo g'joob.
No, nintendo went for exactly the right market when they first started making video games. The NES became what it is because of kids. Over time, the demographics have shifted, and a lot of those kids have become teenagers/young adults.
But you have to remember a couple things. First off, there's still plenty of kids being born every day. Which means that that market that Nintendo still has a grasp on is just as lucrative now as it was in the late 80's. Probalby more so.
Also, the teenager demographic that's so big now is going to continue to get older. And they'll still want to play games as the become more mature. I'm 24, and I don't find mario games to be insultingly childish. I don't find them childish at all really. I do feel some nostalgic connection with mario and link and whanot, but that's hardly a negative thing.
And let me also mention that I've got friends my age who are having kids of their own now. If I currently had children, I can think of a lot more nintendo games that I'd sit them down in front of than PS2 or Xbox games. When the day comes, I'll be happy to give Nintendo some more money in exchange for some fun games to play with my kids.
And your whole argument loses a lot of ground when you consider the fact that Nintendo's games aren't all aimed at the youth market. There's stuff like metroid (which came with your DS) and resident evil and whatnot. Plus if you pick up a controller and play most of their other games for more than a minute, you'll find some pretty deep and cool gameplay. Mario Tennis for example. Do you honestly think there are many seven year old gamers that understand the difference between top spin and back spin?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.