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

What's a purist?

[meringuoid]

Videogames are still a new and rapidly evolving artform. So what's a purist? A traditionalist, perhaps... but then I remember being extremely unhappy when I heard that my two favourite 2D franchises (a popular side-scrolling platformer, and a popular top-down action/RPG series) were going to be made into 3D games.

Until I played them.

Now Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are considered all-time classics, even by 'purists', even by old hands like me. Should Mario have stayed true to his 2D roots to satisfy purists? Should Zelda have stayed top-down? Certainly not. Purism of that kind leads to stagnation; while the occasional throwback like New SMB is wonderful, games have to evolve or become stale.

Re:What's a purist?

[moogaloonie]

There are certainly 2D and 3D purists, who especially balk at seeing one mixed with the other. I think in Nintendo's case it's concerning a type of player. The purists are the gamers who've beaten insanely difficult games, find secrets and glitches, master 5-10 button combos (kombos?) and complain that a 40 hour game is too short. Nintendo, in trying to appeal to a larger market, are making easier, more immediately satisfying games which often don't even have endings in the traditional sense.

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.

Re:What's a purist?

[Chris Burke]

But in terms of human civilization and culture, which have both been around for a lot less time than humans themselves and move much more rapidly than our species itself, literature is very old and does have a very well established tradition on which to base your notion of "purity". Recorded music is just a way of experiencing music, and music is even more ancient than writing, and again has established traditions and parameters and a codified way of talking about it. Painting is ancient. And while neither of these things are static and unchanging, any new development can be discussed in terms of the history.

Movies? Relative newcomer. Movies are still in their infancy as an art form -- compared to other human artforms, not just geologic time as it seems you were doing. Movies are starting to have a significant history that would inform anyone calling themselves a "purist", though I've never heard someone doing so.

Video games? Not even three decades of existence, and founded on technology known for doubling its operational parameters in only two years. This isn't even comparable to the other art forms as far as having an established history, a canon to which one can wish to remain true as a "purist". In the grand scheme of things we're at the "discovering that banging a stick on a hollow tree stump in a regular beat makes a pleasing noise" phase. Acting like their is an established way for banging ones stick against a hollow tree stump against which new stump-stick-beaters should be judged is foolish, because there is an ongoing explosion of people trying various beaters and various objects upon which to beat and nobody has found a "good" way to do it.

Call me in 50 years, when we can look back on this period of infancy in video games, assuming we are not yet even in it, and we can discuss what "purity" means. In the meantime, there's no point because there simply isn't enough history, and yes that's different than other art forms.

Re:What's a purist?

[Carrot007]

Where are these sort of purists?

Todays generation did not grow up with the old games so did not play them.

As someone who grew up with the older games I welcome the newer games because as an adult I can not afford to play games non stop for X hours.

Nintendo seems to know where things need to be if you ask me.

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.

Re:A Good Deal

[meringuoid]

St Paul originated it, but Lewis's version is more relevant here:

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

Now if you'll excuse me, I've neglected a certain long-running saga of magicians and so forth since around 2002, and have three rather large volumes to catch up on before some git spoils the ending for me ;)

Re:Hardware revisions

[meringuoid]

I just get the impression we're going to end up throwing yet more electronic hardware away if this becomes a common trend, particularly if the upgrade is such a big jump as the DS to the DS Lite was that it does make a large difference getting the new kit.

What was the jump from DS to DS Lite? Physically smaller, brighter screen, longer battery life. Great for a portable. Utterly irrelevant for a home console. Nintendo might come out with a smaller Wii, as Sony did with the PS2, but that won't exactly obsolete the old ones. A hardware upgrade is a poor idea; you end up with Wii1 and Wii2 in the market at the same time, and developers who use the capabilities of Wii2 cut themselves off from the already enormous installed base of Wii1.

The obvious Wii upgrade would have to be a software jump: specifically, multimedia. I'm on record from last November as saying that DVD playing doesn't matter to me, because everyone has a DVD player already. I've cooled on that. The Wii is on, it's connected right the hell now, I can't be bothered messing with switches, the damn thing's got a remote control, I want to play a DVD in it. And since the Wii's a device on my wireless network, I'd be awfully happy if it could play video files from my PC over the network. I've an awful lot of anime I'd love to watch on the big screen downstairs. If they'd just get the mplayerhq.hu guys to produce a version for Wii that they could put out for download, that would be just great ;-)

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:Time Measurement

[AKAImBatman]

Did you know that prior to the Atari 2600, video game systems were ONLY sold during the Holiday Season? 'Tis true. Atari themselves started the trend when they manufactured their home Pong console for only the holidays. Sears (the only store that sold the unit) experienced long lines and stock sellouts very similar to what was seen with the Nintendo Wii. The only catch is that once the stock was sold, there were no more on the way until next Holiday Season.

Atari's primary competitor at the time, the Maganvox Odyssey, was sold year-round. However, its sales were relatively poor in comparison.

And there is your useless bit'o'trivia for the day. :-P

Tourney bastards?

[RyoShin]

Does it include those retarded "hardcore" tournament players for Super Smash Bros. that demand you only ever use Final Destination, no items, and only allow half the roster? If so, I would like to say that not only do I hope the door hits their ass on the way out, but it also knocks them on their face.