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BusinessWeek Interviews Miyamoto
TecnaDigit writes "This week, BusinessWeek Online features a short but sophisticated interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto discusses the past, present, and future of gaming (concerning both his games and games in general) as well a few interesting tidbits of his personal life." From the article: "Whether it's a new game or a sequel, we want anyone to be able to play right away. That's why I think Rubik's Cube was so brilliant. I saw it for the first time at a toy convention in Japan in the early 1980s. The moment you see a Rubik's Cube, you know you're supposed to twist the pieces. And it's beautifully designed. Even if you've never handled one, you want to pick it up and try it. And once you do that, it's hard to walk away until you've solved it. "
The only thing I disagree with here (before I trailed off and clicked Reply) is that people seem to think that Nintendo has decided to stop compteting for the "top spot" of the console wars or that they've abandoned the hordcore/traditional gamer.
No, the only thing Nintendo has abandoned or stopped doing is playing Sony's game. They're going for the same market and more and they have their sights set on the #1 spot, only they're going after it from a different angle. I think it's refreshing to see Nintendo thinking up a completely new and original mentality to use in approaching the next generation of consoles to match with whatever new and original content they come up with this time around that the other guys will no doubt copy next time around.
"This is considered plagiarism."
I was wondering about that too. One thing that came to mind (although I'm not certain it was what he meant) was a technology I saw in a video on the web recently. I can't find a link, but basically this company had technology that could get a lot of information from (multiple?) cameras in a room, and then insert moving 3d objects in real time. They said that with a HUD display, you could basically superimpose renders over real life (assuming you had the cameras in place, I guess).
I thought that would make an excellent, fairly-cheap VR experience. It could only occur in prepared rooms (holodecks?) but still, it would be really excellent for gaming, especially if you could do it with cheap cameras in your living room.
Does anyone have a link to the video I'm talking about?
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
It's not that Nintendo doesn't want to compete - it's that they're not playing cat and mouse with Sony and MS. Honestly, all this talk about specs, throwing out random numbers people are woo-ed by but don't mean much to them in reality (ooo my machine has 3 cores, ooo well mine has 1 core +7 spe thingies, beat that!)
Honestly, all the theoretical numbers, the teraflops, the floatingpoint-operations-per-second's, it mean's nothing. Well okay it means somthing, but remember the GCN launch? Nintendo didn't go into the nitty gritty about the hardware because the consumers don't need to know. Developers don't even need to know. Why? Theoretical limits are just that: theoretical. When Nintendo released benchmarks of the GCN, did they do what the ps2 and xbox did, for example releasing a polygon-per-second count of just rendering nothing but flat triangles? No. They released numbers based on what you could achieve in a game, with AI, sound, texturing etc, i.e. realistic numbers. The hardware platforms are so different, that one measure means virtually nothing. Sure, the PS2 can kick all the consoles and pretty much any PC at flat polygon fillrate, but it has pretty shitty graphics compared to the gamecube (metroid prime, or for a crossplatform example, RE4)
Nintendo is simply better at engineering things anyways. The GCN had something like a 400mhz cpu, and probably the lowest "numbers" of all the consoles, yet it is equal to the xbox (well, some parts not so much (shaders), but other things its better at (particles is a good example, but thats based on a lot of factors, namely its FP performance)) It's also in a much smaller housing, and doesn't sound like a windtunnel like the xbox. How did they manage this? They engineered it better. Microsoft took PC parts, threw them in a black box and called it a days work (hell, the controllers are USB, the connection has just been physically changed to not fit into normal USB slots)
Sony and MS are going for the whole shebang, all of digital entertainment. Sony has their music and movie divisions influencing it, and their consumer tech (mp3 players etc) all fighting to make the ps3 a super DRM convergance machine. Microsoft has their Windows Media Centre to sell, and whats to be the software king (things like their music store, the xbl store etc) What does Nintendo want to do? Make games. Their online model doesn't have a music store. It has demo's you can download for your DS. Old school roms you can buy (please let them be cheap) etc etc. Nintendo is focused squarely on games. The Revolution won't be a multimedia powerhouse. I doubt it'll play DVD's out of the box. Nintendo is appealing to developers, by offering them a new (awesome) method of control, but letting them use the old one (the classic controller shell) if they are too afraid. The devkit enviroment is supposedly nearly the same as the GCN, which if you've ever programmed for a console (I did a bit of DS) you know is a very good thing. The PS3 and xbox360, with their new architectures supposedly are hard to develop for (and to add to that, the current devkits for the ps3 are supposedly horrid, typical Sony style)
So, is Nintendo backing away from competition and trying to find a niche market, or find a new group of consumers? No. Although they still want the new consumers, they want the old crowd too. They just are more focused on the gaming aspect of consoles than their competitors, which I believe will let them win out in the end.
There is a growing realization being made by many third party publishers and developers that may end up helping Nintendo attract a decent ammount of development. What developers have realized is that there is essentially two strategies that you can use to make a successful game, you can produce a conventional (standard) genre game (FPS) and throw money and development resources at it to simply make a better game then your competition, or you can make a far more unique game (either through making a new genre or making a hybrid game) at a lower cost with less development resources; the conventional game will usually generate higher revinues and larger profits when measured in dollars, the unique game will generate a much higher return on investment.
What does this mean?
Well large developers (like Sega) will attempt to balance their risk/returns by making both unique and conventional games; the conventional games will likely be multiplatform whereas the more original games may be exclusive to a given platform. How this could benefit Nintendo is that (because development costs are so high) a large number of conventional games will still probably be ported to the Revolution (at least as many games as there is on the gamecube, probably more) and at the same time they could attract the lion's share of the unconventional games (because the controller opens up possiblities).
Ultimately, how this benefits Nintendo is that even if they don't have as much third party support as Microsoft and Sony they may not need it; a person could look at the Revolution line up and see that they don't have Metal Gear but they do have Spliter Cell, at the same time they would notice that neither the PS3 nor XBox 360 have anything like 'Kirby's wacky Revolution Adventures' or 'Monkey Ball Revolution'.