Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Unconcerned By Motion-Control Competitors
The Guardian's games blog reports on comments by Nintendo discussing why it's not worried about competition from Microsoft and Sony after their recent motion-control announcements at E3. Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime said, "The only thing I'll say is a rhetorical question. Is it fun? If it's fun, then I tip my hat and say, 'Well done.' But what's happening sounds to me a lot like, 'Who's got the prettiest picture. Who's got high-definition. Who has the best processing power?' It sounds like technology, when the consumer wants to be entertained. Our focus is how do we take active play and make it entertainment. And that's what we're going to continue to focus on."
And thats why nintendo kicks the crap out of the competition every generation.
Because they rely on making FUN games ppl want to play.
And not just having the latest greatest technology metoo buzzwords in their product.
They win because they're not trying to win. Or even compete with the other offerings.
Thats sure gotta piss off ms and sony tho. :D Who just don't get it.
While technologically impressive I have one problem with it, missing force feedback control and no additional controllers outside of behaviors. I cannot see this thing going anywhere except for some sports (especially fitness) games without it.
The sony technology was very close to nintendo however, but there at least force feedback probably will be possible, but additional fine grained controls like nintendo has it on the wiimote also still are missing but could be added theoretically!
However Nintendo should be worried, because of the lack of HD support and their absymal performance in the games area 2008 (which slowly is changing this year).
Anyway, where are the good wii games anyway? I walk through the store and look at the Wii releases, and it feels like I'm in the kids section. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I guess. There is no reason not to offer them if that's what your consumers want, but why Nintendo (not Nintendo in Japan apparently) won't you release your high quality games over here? Will it ruin your family system image that for whatever reason you're doing your best to keep? It still makes no sense, there are already other more violent games out there!
Yeah yeah, the internationalization process... Tecmo has not had an issue, like I ranted earlier with the previous 3, and they were interested in having the 4th come out! Why is Nintendo sitting on it's hands? Why is Nintendo sitting on it's hands when people are willing to give them money? Especially when they have a couple of gems just sitting in their laps! They have so few 3rd party developers making quality games [most will max out their gfx capability on the PS3 or 360, at least when it comes to the AAA class titles, and many get exclusive with a certain console, Nintendo cannot afford not to support it's few quality 3rd party developers!
There's a petition to get the game moving forward [I guess to show there is potential for sales]. I guess I should go sign up for it.... actually I forgot which one I saw first, there's at least 6 going on out there! so I won't link any specific one...
Well I guess if they don't want to compete, and earn money, eventually economics will catch up with them. The NES/Super NES will remain the period in their legacy I guess. Minus the few gems out the 64 crowd, it has really gone downhill for Nintendo. I can't think of a spectacular game since the gamecube came out. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Point being I think they should be marketing everything they have, unless they realize, that they are really just shoveling garbageware for the first few years, and only plan on releasing decent games after that phase has passed [if there were the must have games, people would not bother with the junk, at least most wouldn't.]
Final warning to Nintendo: Compete or die. It's the law of economics... Unless you're GM...
Microsoft is unlikely to recover from their E3 motion control demo fiasco.
To have people participating in the demo give interviews immediately afterward where they either admitted or made it clear the demos shown off were faked was devastating. The fact that Microsoft had nothing that was able to be shown or tried out on the E3 floor like Nintendo did back when they introduced their Wiimote should have been the first warning sign that Microsoft had nothing but vaporware.
Plus the late 2010 date is far off enough to make anything they demoed irrelevant to everyone in the console market.
If Microsoft had:
1. Immediate motion control hardware for sale on store shelves
2. At least a handful of Wii quality games with the same mass appeal
3. New and reliable and cheap hardware to replace the absurdly defective Xbox 360 hardware
perhaps they would have a slim chance of having a fraction of the Wii market due to not having anyone of Miyamoto's caliber to create games in any of Microsoft's tiny first party studios.
After having lost some 7-8 billion dollars on console hardware over the past 8 years and huge cost cutting going on at Microsoft obviously giving up on the traditional console market and jumping into competition with Nintendo was a logical move for Microsoft. One that they botched terribly in execution.
That's of course up to perspective. I've been an avid console player my entire life, and have owned most of them (remember the Atari Lynx? yeah, that one too). But when the Dreamcast came out I waited quite awhile before buying one, about midway through it's life. Why? None of the games at launch made me care at all. Perhaps that's one of the real problems the Dreamcast had, despite the vocal, the majority of gamers just weren't finding that much to play on it.
And the PS2 kind of proves Nintendo's point doesn't it? It was where the fun ended up, so did the players. Dreamcast was indeed much better hardware, but the reality is any suggestion that it's game library was better is simply myth. It had a few gems, but that was it. Anyway, just a differing opinion :)
It's ironic that you mentioned the DVD player. Really, it was one of the reasons that the PS2 was so successful. I remember people were buying the things for watching movies alone.
Years later, PS3 comes out with Bluray and it nearly kills Sony. They had huge losses last year. People aren't flocking to Bluray like they did with DVDs.
More interesting though is: what will happen next generation? Will there be another disc format beyond Bluray, or is it all digital from here on out? Sony has used their consoles as a means of promoting their formats (DVD, Bluray, UMD) for a couple of consoles now. Now the PSP Go goes digital. Will PS4 be digital as well?