Nintendo Admits They May 'Lose Some Purists'

njkid1 writes "GameDaily has up their full E3 interview with Nintendo of America's George Harrison, SVP of Marketing and Corporate Communications. Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience, and he doesn't rule out a Wii revision: 'It's interesting, console hardware has always historically been on a sort of fixed, sequential pattern almost every five to six years and it takes you about five years to develop a new piece of console hardware. The handhelds and portables, like Game Boy and now DS, we've always been continuously innovating, and whenever we feel like it's time or have an upgrade, we'll do it, whether it's an improved screen for the handheld or slimmed down like the DS Lite - those types of things. So it's not out of the question on Wii, but we're not even to our second holiday yet, so it's kind of premature to talk about any revisions to the hardware itself.'"

Comments

A Good Deal

[AKAImBatman]

Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience

If you lose 100,000 purists but gain 50,000,000 new customers, then I'd say the tradeoff is a pretty good deal!

That being said, I haven't seen any sign of the Nintendo faithful ditching Nintendo. Everyone who was going to leave already left during the Gamecube generation. Now some of those players are coming back, and some of them are ranting about how they're "too grown up" for Nintendo now. I imagine that Nintendo will just shrug its shoulders and move on. They're creating a large enough NEW market that they don't need to worry about a vocal minority.

Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.

When people use the term "too old" for something, they usually mean that the item in question can no longer support the person (e.g. a playground) or that it does not challenge the person at a level commiserate with their age. (e.g. Leapfrog Leapster) Thus the only argument I could see is that the storylines are too simplistic to hold an adult's attention. Which would be a good argument if we were talking about My Little Ponies. But half the games don't actually have storylines (e.g. Excite Truck, Metal Slug, Smash Bros., Strikers) and the majority of the remainder are anything but insulting. (e.g. Zelda, Super Paper Mario, Metroid, Red Steel, etc.)

The truth is that the Wii simply does not appeal to some people, regardless of the excuses they make up. Whether they used to be or not, these people are NOT Nintendo's customers any longer. Nintendo would be foolish to try and chase them around when the truth is that these customers are better satisfied elsewhere.

Re:A Good Deal

[meringuoid]

Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.

It's a quirk of language. Adult content very rarely means just that; it usually means juvenile content. Gratuitous boobies, exciting gunplay, lots of blood, the typical action-movie recipe targeted at teenagers. Same goes for games. The core market right now is the Playstation generation, mostly boys who began gaming in around 1995 but who, twelve years on, are late teens and early twenties and want games that reinforce their image of themselves as manly men.

Nintendo's core market on the other hand is slightly older, NES and SNES veterans from the late eighties, early nineties. And as CS Lewis said, when I became a man I put aside childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be seen as being very grown up. The nice thing about having that as your core fanbase is that you can easily recruit the new generation of little kids with the same games you're selling to your base of gamers who are pushing thirty.

At any rate, Nintendo have never made bloodthirsty games. All the hardcore action games on the NES and SNES were made by the likes of Konami - I'm thinking Gradius or Contra here. The ultra-long JRPGs were again usually third party jobs, at least until the Pokémon era. I certainly can't speak for the whole demographic, but as a NES-era Nintendo fanboy who defected long ago to PC gaming, well, in this generation Nintendo have won me back. I said before that I was proved wrong in my traditionalism once before, insisting that Mario should be 2D, that Zelda should be top-down, right up until the moment I got hold of an N64 and played two of the greatest games there've ever been. What Nintendo are doing now... well, the third parties are making a bit of a hash of Wii at the moment, too many PS2 ports with poor Wiimote implementations, but going by the record of the DS they won't take too long to catch on.

Hardware revisions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell I want some SOFTWARE revisions. WarioWare on the Wii shipped with a show-stopping bug. Despite the fact you can have up to 12 players in a multi-player battle, it only supports...one wiimote.

Seriously, Nintendo. Who let that one slip through QA? Are we supposed to chuck the thing around the living room when the game speeds up? Launch title or not, there's not even an option for more wiimotes to be used. So, ironically, I went through hell getting enough wiimotes and nunchucks for my roommates so we could all have some roaring fun times, and now we just use 1 wiimote for starting up GameCube games.

Or maybe we can talk about Super Paper Mario, the Game That Gave Up somewhere about mid-point. When you ran out of ideas for level design and thought it would be keen and edgy to literally make a pure white level with a black line for ground, and make the player run it for a few minutes. When that one got the OK, you started making a lot of levels that were simply backtracking everywhere. Feels like an RPG, except the RPG-ish item system was superfluous. I used more items just to see what they would do than having any actual need for. There was a lot of wiimote shaking involved. Zero replay, sold back to Game Stop after a week.

I don't give a hang for hardware revision. If I want graphics I'll buy a PS3. I want the quality software that I supposedly bought the Wii for.

Also I hope that every game that comes out strains mightily to use the fabulous motion sensing controllers, and think it's unique. Until every game that comes out wants to use it in a New and Exciting way. I already paid for Tiger woods 2005-2007 on the GameCube, and near as I have heard, the 2007 polish job for the Wii is somewhere between stillborn and stagnant.

I'm sure everybody loves to hear a whiner, but nothing has really sold me on the Wii as a gaming console so far. Regardless of Nintendo wanting to go after a different demographic, I'm still in the one that wants to play fun games, and not the one that surfs the web from my couch. I bought a DS 2 weeks ago and have had more fun with the games on it than I've had on the Wii. Why does the DS have more Netplay functionality than the Wii? Where the hell is all the potential of the Wii being siphoned away to? I can't be the only person disappointed with it.

Real 'Purists' aren't going anywhere

[alvinrod]

The first video game system I ever owned was the original NES. I still vividly remember the first time I ever played one and it's an interest that's stuck with me to this very day. I had all of the games that are generally considered Nintendo classics: Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and a myriad of other games. Eventually I upgraded to an SNES and picked up the 16-bit versions of those games and many others. I never purchased an N64, but some of my friends had them and I got my fix over at their houses, however, I still enjoyed Mario Kart and other SNES games and played them excessively.

The next game system I bought was a PS2, but a while after that I purchased a GameCube to catch up on all the new games that Nintendo had brought out. I eventually picked up an Xbox as well and even a used Dreamcast to complete that generation. I enjoyed all of them for different reasons and like every other generation there were some incredible games that were produced that you couldn't help but enjoy.

Last November I decided to camp out in front of a Wal-Mart and freeze my ass off so that I could get a Wii on launch day. After playing some of the latest incarnations of games (Zelda) and seeing what's in store for others (Mario, Metroid) I don't feel any differently about them than those old classics I played on the NES and SNES. As someone who's grown up around these Nintendo franchises I don't understand how people who claim to be long time fans can be disappointed in the Wii or the latest versions of their old favorites. I'm wondering if they really ever played and enjoyed these games or if their tastes have simply changed over the years. If you want bleeding edge graphics in your games, I suppose that's fine, but please don't try to pass yourself off as a purist if that's what you really want.

I'm quite glad that I grew up experiencing those games so that if I go back to play them today I'm not turned off by the lack of powerful graphics like some people are today. As cool as the graphical powerhouses that games such as Crysis and others like it with brilliant graphics are, will they ever be able to claim the same level of interest as Pac-Man ever commanded?

I don't think that purist should be confused with graphics whore, or whatever term would be most appropriate. I would think that purists play games to enjoy games, whether they're made using 8-bit sprites or ray traced using the powerful hardware we'll likely see in the future.

Re:Real 'Purists' aren't going anywhere

[shoptroll]

I've been playing Nintendo games since I was 5 on the original NES. I've grown up with this industry. Honestly though, once I hit college I started doing other things and I really haven't had as much time as I used to for video games, and that's been the case since sophomore year of high school when I got onto the advanced college track of courses.

Anyone who considers themselves "hardcore" and rails against the Wii really need to re-evaluate why they game. I game because it's fun. Good gameplay is fun for me. If graphics were fun, then I'm pretty sure I'd be content just to watch a movie or my computer eek out 3D renderings in povRay or benchmarking utilities like 3D Mark. I've had a lot of fun with my Wii, and honestly I don't see a reason to shell out $600 for a PS3 if I'm content with my $250 investment, despite my long-running relationship with Final Fantasy games. I just finished Zelda a couple weeks ago after buying it in January and eeking out hour long play sessions when I get the hankering to do so. The drought doesn't bother me because I know the industry misjudged the system and is scrambling to put out quality software. Also, more time between releases that interest me is good because that gives me more time to finish stuff like Zelda in time for Prime 3 or to go out and get Super Paper Mario without feeling pressured to keep up with the Joneses.

I'm the type of player who still keeps his NES and SNES hooked up to the TV because there were just a lot of great games for that system. Sure Mario looks pixelated in HiDef but it's still a great game and it's a fun way to kill time with friends even if they don't normally play games.

I'm still interested in stuff like Unreal Engine 3, but what matters to me most about Unreal Tournament 3 is whether or not the game plays better than UT2004.

I wholly agree with Nintendo's strategy this generation. I've played Brain Age and it's a lot of fun if mental challenges are your cup of tea. If not, oh well. I don't get the complaints fired at Nintendo after this E3. Nintendo has been saying from day 1 that the Wii was going to target a different audience, and here we are a year later and everyone... correction, a very vocal minority, seem to have finally read that memo.

Unfortunately, this is the crisis the hardcore gamers face. They are quickly realizing that they are NOT a majority in this industry. These are the same people who cannot comprehend how games like The Sims (eeewww it's dolls!) or Myst (where's my f***ing gun?) were able to become the #1 selling games of all time, beating out beloved favorites such as Doom or Zelda. These purists are stuck in the same situation of the 10 year old kid who suddenly has a younger sibling and is losing the attention of mommy and daddy. Temper tantrums ensue.

Video games are an industry. The whole point at the end of the day is to make money, not please a vicious fan base which at times is not the most logical crew out there. If you can make more money by catering to a much larger audience than your traditional fans, damn straight these companies are going to do it. Especially when the casual market is a hell of a lot easier to awe and keep happy.

Re:What's a purist?

[badasscat]

Videogames are still a new and rapidly evolving artform.

So is film, so is recorded music... hell, in the grand scheme of things, so is literature. These things have been around only a fraction of even human history, let alone the history of the world, and all of them are still rapidly evolving.

If your argument is that there can be no "purists" unless the art form is no longer "new" or "evolving", then there really cannot be purists of any art form.

I don't think it's a stretch to think there could be video game purists at this point. There are people who were there at the beginning and who have grown up with video games, knowing them a certain way. If they have developed a set of expectations based on those experiences, that would make them a purist.

You may not be one, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. It further doesn't mean that your opinion is superior to theirs.