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Wii 2 Unlikely For 2011, Maybe In 2012
An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot earlier this year, the lack of a next-generation Wii may be hurting Nintendo. That doesn't seem to concern the company's US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, who said this week that a Wii 2 might not appear until 2012. He wants to sell a few million more consoles before a successor is launched. So, no Wii 2 for 2010 or 2011 — meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox consoles get motion control support and other content enhancements. What does that mean for the success of Nintendo's gaming console business? Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"
Ok. Great. Now, how about a few more words, because the one doesn't really help much.
Nintendo has been in business for a lot longer than almost any company you can name (1889!) and have seen off some enormous rivals several times (Sega, Atari, etc.).
Nintendo make profit on almost everything they release.
Nintendo make big releases every now and again, stringing them on with life support in the form of games that turn out to become famous in their own right.
When Nintendo do plop down a new console it's invariably innovative and top-of-its-game (not necessarily the best hardware, but definitely better in gaming terms).
Nintendo is an inventor. They toil away in their little sheds for years in complete secrecy until one day they walk out, plop something into a business person's hands and blow everyone away. Then while the market are still reeling from that, they just wander quietly back into their shed and aren't seen for another few years when they rinse and repeat.
Precisely BECAUSE they aren't saying "Oh, no, our competitors have something new, we have to copy it in our own way and get back into the game" is why they are able to do what they do. They don't really care about Kinect, or anything else - they have money enough to last a decade, and that gives them a decade to make something even more spectacular without having to worry about the day-to-day running of the businesses. Wiis are still being sold but they have enough to go back into their shed and devote the next few years to R&D and playtesting which the other rivals *cannot*. They will have their own ideas, which might work (Wii) or might flop (VirtualBoy) but will be away from the conventional elements of the time that are competing in the market. And when they deliver their next invention, people will give them millions and, because of using their brains and not just throwing expensive hardware at a problem, they will invariably make profit on every unit sold.
It's also true that they decide what they want in the next, say, Mario game. They decide what they want to be able to do. Then they build a console around that, not the other way around.
You can try to make Nintendo look foolish and show how "you know better" if you want, but invariably you will end up with egg on your face. Nintendo know their market better than anyone - they almost single-handedly invented it. Leave them be. The "Wii 2" (which it will almost certainly NEVER be named) will be to the Wii what the Wii was to the Gamecube, or the Gamecube to the N64, or the N64 to the SNES, or the SNES to the NES, or the equivalent trail in the handheld markets. It will take years to arrive - you'll have just about forgotten about your Wii and Nintendo will be absent from the market for a year or so - and then it'll blow your socks off. After a few months people will complain that it doesn't do X or Y or that it's "outdated" or "underpowered" while Nintendo will have another decade's research money under their belt and be working on the next one.
Nintendo know what they are doing. Sod Wii 2. I want whatever the next stage is - which will be more advanced gameplay-wise than anything on the market in the next few years.
I disagree.
As far as Move goes, I don't see that as out-innovating the Wii. From my point of view, the PS3 is several years more advanced than the Wii (in both the base hardware and the motion control hardware), they've had years more of research to benefit from (both their own research and what others in the industry and academia have researched and demonstrated), they have the benefit several years of sitting back and learning from the Wii's mistakes and shortcomings, and with all of that benefit they've managed to brute force a solutions that is only slightly more capable than the Wii, and looks stupid and inelegant in the process.
As far as Kinect goes, I have a lot of respect for what they've done there. Rather than just tracking the position of some sex-toy-looking orbs, it actually analyzes the scene to extract skeletal structure information from the players movement. It's quite technologically advanced. Very impressive in the way it operates and the capabilities it provides. Yet the one thing that REALLY bugs me about it is that it is a purely controller-less design. Being able to play controller-less is pretty cool, but a lot of games will suffer or be impractical without buttons to press. Using an existing controller 2-handed kind of defeats the purpose of Kinect's advanced capabilities, the existing 360 controllers aren't conducive to single-hand use, and releasing a future add-on-controller-for-the-add-on-kinect is just completely out of the question.
So no, I don't really feel that the Wii has been out-innovated much. Move is pretty pathetic and uninspired considering how much later it came than the Wii, and Kinect is really impressive and innovative in ways but has a fatal flaw. I think it will take until the next generation before someone truly outdoes the Wii (when they can combine the Kinect's sensor technology with the Wii/Move controller system)
Exactly. I'd say it's more of a case of the competitors closing a gap on the Wii, while the Wii is still significantly cheaper than either.
Plus you have to consider that since every single Wii ever sold has motion control out of the box, every single game can be developed with motion control as a standard feature. For the PS3 and Xbox... developers have to consider developing games for consoles that may or MAY NOT have motion control capabilities. Remember folks, this is an EXTRA COST option on PS3 and Xbox... it means you can't take it for granted that motion control is available. As a developer you have to support both non-motion control and motion control controller interfaces for your games on those platforms.
From a dev point of view I'd much rather develop for the Wii than to have to take this into account. For the Xbox and PS3, the early adopters have already bought the "upgrades"... where does the growth then come from now that the honeymoon is over? I'd be interested to see the installed-base numbers of consoles vs. motion control devices sold separately. Probably not a pretty picture.
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Counterpoint:
No.
Nintendo pretty much has a different market segment of casual gamers. Younger kids who are into the franchise (Pokemon, Mario, etc. and other exclusives are all over the elementary schools... never heard anyone there ever mention Halo or even Final Fantasy). Kids don't care about system specs... hell, they won't even watch TV if it's not a cartoon, so I surmise they actually expect the cartoony "8-bit look" as a sign that a game is actually "for them".
Finally, the hardcore gamers will have a Wii anyway just for the heck of it.
Nintendo can milk this cow, the Wii teat, for a while longer. Then once publishers actually start releasing interesting games for the PS3 and Kinect motion controls, they can come out with the next big thing out of cycle.
I surmise it would be some kind of augmented reality thing, so they can sell more cheap widgets with each game, that the kids will bring to school and lose and have to be replaced.
Aside from the multitouch phone, that describes pretty much any Nokia smartphone in the last 5 years.
Wait, are you using Nokia as an example of 'great smartphones we had before the iPhone was released'? Nokia, of all cellphone manufacturs?? You mean NOKIA, which is now struggling to stay relevant because they didn't have a single real touchscreen smartphone worth a dime until the N900 came along? Nokia, who only introduced their first decent touchscreen phone less than two years ago?
That's hilarious... I've owned at least 6 Nokia phones over the last 10 year, and if there is ANY phone brand that has missed the smartphone boat completely, it's Nokia. Their dumbphones and feature phones are great and I loved them, but please, if Nokia is what you first think of when someone takes the first iPhone as the benchmark for all later smartphones, you either don't know Nokia, or you don't know the iPhone. The last Nokia I bought was a 5800, which is only 1 or 1.5 years old, and while it was a pretty decent phone for calling and texting, it can't hold a candle to even the first generation iPhone. The browser was near-unusable (slow, buggy, didn't render many sites properly), the touchscreen was pretty unresponsive (resistive) and there were almost no applications available that used the touchscreen properly (which wasn't surprising because it was the first S60r5 phone, which was the first symbian version to even support touchscreens in the first place).
I have to concur with the PP, people get used to revolutionary products so fast they assume there was nothing revolutionary about it in the first place. The iPhone is a good example, but there are many more.
I'm _glad_ that Nintendo decided to take a step back from the graphics arms race this generation and focus on the control scheme. It has forced them to really remember that what matters is the game itself, not how it looks. You're taking potshots at Wii games that you don't like, but that is only your opinion. I've been a Nintendo fanboy since 1985 and I can tell you that I fucking love Metroid. Always have. I also love Super Mario Bros, and I think that the New Super Mario Bros game is fantastic. Nintendo made some really smart moves with this console, aiming it squarely between the eyes of early 30-something parents, people that have been playing Nintendo from the start and have kids. You know what is interesting? My 5 year old daughter loves to play the Wii more than any other game console in the house (I have a few... Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/2 360's/PS1) and what does she play on it? Sidescrollers. She loves the sidescrollers. and she beats them! It was pure genius on the part of Nintendo to make the Wiimote into a sidewise NES controller, and pure genius again to offer the classic NES games for impulse buy prices. After a few beers, $5 Mike Tyson's PunchOut sounds like a great idea! To summarize, The Wii is not competition to the 360, and I'm glad. I own both, and play both.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.