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How Can Nintendo Recover?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Nintendo's revenue and profits are tumbling faster than Mario into a bottomless pit. Company executives recently suggested the next-generation Wii U console would sell 2.8 million units between April 2013 and March 2014 — significantly below the 9 million units predicted in previous estimates. Contrast that with Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, which sold 4.2 million and 3 million units, respectively, in their first six weeks of release. In lowering its hardware and software estimates, Nintendo also expects to take a loss by the end of its fiscal year in March. Nintendo's attempt to carve a niche for itself as an ecosystem for casual gamers has also run into a massive obstacle in the form of smartphones and tablets, which quickly developed into popular gaming platforms. Nintendo is reportedly considering a 'new business model,' according to Bloomberg, with its CEO telling a gathering of reporters in Osaka: 'Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It's not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.' While Nintendo could probably made some good money off legacy gamers by bringing its (much loved) portfolio of older titles to iOS, Android, and other platforms, that move to mobile might further weaken its hardware sales. So what do you think? If you were in charge of Nintendo, how would you turn it around?"
is doing fine.
Just keep pumping out decent games and don't fuck up the next major console. The 3DS is their lifesaver until the next refresh.
I'd enable Mario on a smartphone.
Its overpriced. Nintendos market is for those who want a cheap and cheerful video game system for the kids
not the people who want to pay $60 a game. If they had released something like an updated wii with a regular controller
for $100 less it would have sold like crazy. Basically their target market wanted an updated WII not the montrosity that
was the wii U.
Seriously Nintendo, upgrade your compilers! We're sick and tired of CodeWarrior.
If Nintendo want to get bigger they should eat some of those red and white mushrooms!
Where I once saw kids play Mario on a Nintendo DS, today I see kids play Minecraft of iPads.
Apple crushed Nintendo by creating iOS devices and opening up it's platform to indie devs for a minimal fee. If I wanted to start coding for Nintendo.... how would I do it, and how much would I have to pay in licensing? I have no idea, and I wouldn't know where to look.
It would seem easier to go for the tablet ecosystem that most people have and is more easily accessible. I think not only did Apple destroy the Nintendo casual market with iOS devices, but also through leeching potential developers.
Also, if I were Nintendo, I would be grovelling to get Mojang to port Minecraft over (Mojang says that they're "too busy"). So far..... nothing... and it's so stupid as to why not because the game is really something Nintendo should have been able to create, and it's a perfect fit for the system. It's just a shame too that with all Nintendo's game dev talent, this something as much fun hasn't eventuated from them, and it's been Mario after Zelda after Donkey Kong.
Nintendo is also locked itself out of the hardcore market for this gen too. So unless they want to make a Super-Duper Nintendo like in the 16-bit war days and compete again, they're going to lose gamers there.
All Nintendo has left is good game devs and some great IP.... and perhaps more trust with parents than the Apple kids-ingame-payments-debarcle has done to Apple's platform.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Nintendos market is for those who want a cheap and cheerful video game system for the kids not the people who want to pay $60 a game.
Nintendo's problem is that this isn't Nintendo's market anymore; it has become the App Store and Google Play market. The big advantage of a 2DS/3DS over an iPod touch or iPad mini is that iPod touch and iPad mini ship with only the positional control (a multitouch screen), not directional or discrete trigger controls (the Circle Pad, Control Pad, and buttons). And not everyone wants to buy a $40 Bluetooth controller that clamps onto a tablet just to play a $10 or cheaper game.
odnetniN.
Short term #1 slash the price of the WII-U down to $149 with a AAA pack-in game. #2 Launch a monthly sub service as a sort of virtual Netflix/game fly You get X game credits depending on price of sub running from 5.99 to 29.99 a month. The credits can be used to rent games from everything that can get licences form and emulate nes all the way to current WII-U titles. nes games being low # creidts and WII-U games being so many that a user needs to be on one of the higher tier plans to get even one. Once you "Rent" the game its your till you release it that unlocks the credits to be used again with say a 1 week min timeframe to keep people from constant cycling and to make the higher tiers worth wild. Nintendo pays the publishers a % of the sub fees depending on how many rentals are active at a time. Nintendo will louse money on hardware but will make it up in sub fees in theory and people will buy disks of WII-U games the want to keep long term (or just buy like current e-store works) Long Term Accelerate work on the next gen. aim for a 4-5 years for now for the next Home console. Work with EA, and other game devs to make a machine they want to work on. The next Xbox PS are 6-7 years away most likely So in 4-5 years would be a great time to keep a jump on the cycle. Aim for 60+FPS and 4k. 4k is showing promise now we already are looking at sub 1 grand 4k tvs now in 4-5 years they should be generally adorable and will make 720p/1080 Xboxone and PS4 look like dog food by then.
Disagree. There are far too many permutations of phones out there. Also, they've branded themselves as family entertainment. They still need a console platform for the TV as the family room is the venue of choice. AppleTV is such a platform. Question is, can the licensing cost to Apple more than make up for not having to develop and manufacture a console of their own?
Life is not for the lazy.
Marketing is where they failed horribly with the Wii U. I wasn't even entirely clear on if the Wii U was a brand new system or some new add-on up until recently. The idea of *why* anyone needs this in their home is being entirely ignored it seems. I love the Nintendo brand and I'd hate to see them go the way of Sega. However....that time seems to be quickly approaching.
Stop treating your consumers like dirt
And your developers, allegedly. The 1- to 3-man home-based family businesses that helped Apple's App Store eat away at much of the casual market are something Nintendo wouldn't even consider courting three years ago. Only very recently did this begin to change, and unfortunately, my citation about this ("Tales from the trenches: how Microsoft is losing the battle for indie developers" by Ben Kuchera, March 2013) has become a dead link.
Stop making mario based games
That'd be like telling Hasbro to stop making My Little Pony based toys.
Phones/Tablets right now don't have a standardized controller. I know it is a stretch for Nintendo to make a classic controller like XBox or PS has, but if they did make controllers for tablets/phones, they could then make a series of games for Android/iOS. Then phones would have a standardized controller for other people to develop on too.
Most Nintendo game IP doesn't need expensive hardware to run, so cell phone/tablets is fine to go to. Phones/tablets can even be plugged into televisions to work like a console. The only thing missing is a standard controller. I haven't got a Nintendo since the SNES mostly because I find the controllers strange. Stop treating the game hardware like a toy in itself, go standard hardware minimum requirements and make your games good.
Now not everyone will be carrying a phone/controller around outside, but for the home, it is doable. If you work on manufacturing, you can get your controllers cheap. Then you're just selling people games.
God spoke to me
I'm a casual gamer 'dad' interested in fitness with several home schooled kids. I'd expect my family to be the ideal target demographic for the WII U - and indeed, we purchased one since the playstation/xbox were essentially banned - we don't want to feed FPS and junk games to our kids.
Still, what does WII offer us in terms of quality games?
- Wii Fit Plus (just a modest bump over the older wii fit, should have been better).
- Wii Sports Club - OK, took forever for them to release it, some of the sports (e.g. bowling) do not simulate as well as they should. The best game seems to be golf...but come on, it isn't that much better than the old wii sports game.
- Legend of Zelda - Finally released, kids are interested in it...we'll see.
- Mario Junk...no, not interested
- Not much else...
So, basically, the WII U is a decent platform hampered by a lack of quality games for its target market, and the few good games took forever to be released...
I might feel better if I knew Nintendo worked well with third parties and was planning to release a large set of good games over the next year....but I think Zelda and Wii Sports Club have been taking nearly all their resources and it doesn't seem like the relations with third party devs are that good at the moment...
Dr. Mario Vs. Proctologist Simulator 2013
It's a winner no matter which way you look up it.
Silence is a state of mime.
"did great for them" really?
Look at Sega games in the Dramcast era and look at them now. Getting out of the hardware business killed Sega. Nintendo needs to hang in there. :(
I would argue that Nintendo's problem isn't that its market has moved to mobile, the problem they face is that the market they want and need (console gamers) has moved on without them. I can't think of a single third-party developed game on a Nintendo console that excited me since Capcom put a bunch of Resident Evil games out on the GameCube. Nintendo itself owns a nice catalog of IP but you can only make so many Mario and Zelda games before the golden goose stops laying eggs. They need other developers making new titles, and good ones. They need a 'killer app.' People stopped buying Nintendo consoles for Mario after the GameCube and quit buying them for Zelda after the Wii. Nobody has bought an N console for a third-party game since the '64. Frankly, the last one I owned was a Super and now I play the remakes of the great games of that console on Sony and Microsoft systems, or emulate the originals on my PC or mobile. Nintendo is not Sony or Microsoft; their problems will not go away eventually by propping up their game division losses with profits in other sectors. They need good games or they are done in a few quarters of bad losses.
Didn't even realize that Wii U was substantively different from Wii. In fact, based on this story and the context here, still can't tell.
What would have been wrong with "Wii 2" which offers a much clearer indication that it's a next generation console? (If, in fact, it is a next generation console.)
First thing that comes to my mind with "Wii U" is that it's the educational version of the Wii.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Just an iOS slave, shackled to Apple like Zynga is to Facebook?
If Nintendo does exit the hardware business, they need to start working on multiple platforms, iOS is just one. Android has a large marketshare.
However, the reason Nintendo stays in business is their hardware. If they don't have the user lock in to their consoles, they will disappear, since they would have to compete with EA, Ubisoft, and others... on their turf.
Sega's mistake was not having good hardware, it was having too much hardware. They were told that the Genesis was great, a few years later it was the Sega CD, then almost immediately after that was 32X, then almost immediately it was the Dreamcast. Customers who liked Sega had the original Genesis (not talking Master SYstem), but then two quick updates then a new console. Frankly, Sega broke the bank on the DreamCast by asking their customers to buy too much too fast. Too much hardware. That is a good reason for the Big N to stick with the U for a while, develop it, make it cheaper than the PS4 and the XBox One, still get 1080p @ 60fps, release some exclusives, wait several years in order not to burnout their core client base like Sega did. They can't bail on the U for financial reasons and for the games already in the pipe, and they can't make a U2 because it will burn current customers. Once Mario Kart, Zelda, Smash Bro, etc come out, it will be comfortable again... you doubters and haters
The fact that a vocal segment of the gaming community believes that the best way to play games are using tools designed to drive spreadsheets and word processors means that maybe the common wisdom isn't so wise.
Just focus on building something amazing.
Alan Kay once said, if you're serious about software, you build your own hardware.
This applies double for gaming.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It's time that Nintendo start porting their properties to other consoles. I'd love to play the next Super Mario game on my Xbox One. I'd love to play Mario Kart on my PS4. Don't even license out the games, create/produce them the same way you've been doing for years, but just start porting them to other platforms and get out of the console business.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Stop making the same Mario game over and over and over and over..... Make some new games.
I like playing on my big screen with my kids, our handheld devices don't facilitate family interaction. Nintendo effed up.
My parents are playing games on iPads, my brothers in law, my sisters, niece .. the market is exploding because people aren't having to buy custom hardware.
The Nintendo name stll has a whole shedload of trust and their game designers are really very good at innovating. Quit worrying about canabilizing hardware sales and start focussing on software sales. The hardware ship has long since sailed and Nintendo missed the boat.
Failing to accept that reality and trying to push hardware will only lead them down the monopolistic failure route of Kodak. Too little, too late.
I think you overestimate how quickly consoles sell. You point to the 4.2 million and 3 million figures as evidence of declining console sales, and yet, the PS4 and Xbone had the best launches in the history of the industry.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
And schools are feeding this full-force, many schools are moving away from computers to iPads in the USA (Lucky Apple and schools, because it isn't moving to tablets but specifically iPads).
Nintendo always had games very well targeted to children.
The current crop of kiddies see tablets as part of their identity and there isn't any reversing this for Nintendo. It is over for Nintendo.
The XBox is a different story because it is a "serious" casual gaming machine and not being devoured by such a market change. [But will probably succumb to a future market change, in 3 years or less smartphones will happen to have full-fledged game console capabilities, many efforts underway even 2-3 years back heading that direction particular with Android.]
In the end, only one device can win and it was always destined to be the smart phone due to portability --- laptop/desktop sales are falling very quickly which is a bit disturbing (Tablets +69%, computers 14% drop in units sold).
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Apparently Nintendo has been opening up to indies quite a bit: For instance, the requirement for an actual commercial address is gone. However, you'd have to be mad to make the WiiU your main platform, if just because as an indie, you will not get enough exposure to warrant the gamble. That's why everyone and their mother tries to develop for PC: If you get on Steam, you will get plenty of visibility.
I'd go one step farther, and say that what's killing Nintendo is their tight-fisted control over their platform. If Nintendo made it easier and cheaper to develop for their platform, as opposed to (reportedly) charging thousands of dollars for an SDK under NDA, they'd be in much better shape right now.
All those potential developers who they've turned down over the years have moved on to develop games for iOS and Android, and are now Nintendo's competition. It's what I've been saying for years—the strength of a platform is entirely dependent on the size and vigor of its third-party developer community. If you don't have that, you don't have anything.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The answer is adult content.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What Nintendo does better than any other system is make games that pre-teen kids want to play. Mario/Kirby/Pokemon are all powerhouses that Xbox and PS4 do not have; if Nintendo can release a QUALITY game from one of those IPs every 6-8 months they will be fine. Fixing the social aspects and tying everything together through the 3DS would take them from "surviving" to "thriving".
Once Xbox came to be, they filled the void once occupied by Nintendo. There isn't room for a 3rd player in the home console field - or at least I don't think Nintendo could even make a dent versus Xbox and Playstation.
OK but if I wanted to save Nintendo.. (hang on, I have to look up what a WiiU is - omg it looks like total shit)
I'd go back to the roots. Create games reminiscent of what worked in the 80s and early 90s, but with a little more flashiness and multiplayer. Not everybody wants 3D (personally I was over it after I played super mario 64)
Nah there has always been a tri force, if you will, of consoles;
Atari Sega Nintendo
Nintendo Sega Playstation
Nintendo Playstation Xbox
Unfortunately for Nintendo being the lowest profiting of the three and having no other markets to support them unlike Microsoft and Sony and having mobile gaming from android and ios, smart tvs and apple and google tv boxes as competition as well as from the me Steam box, Nintendo looks like it is about to lose its place of dominance.
We can see that the former consoles manufactures have shrunk to but a former shell of what they used to be Atari is facing bankruptcy, Sega turns out the occasional game for the other three consoles and farms out sonic the hedgehog to pay the bills. Nintendo does not want to turn into Sega and most definitely does not want to become atari. So as I see it they have to option at this point
Sell out or Buy out.
They could sell them selves to apple google amazon or microsoft for the ip and maybe they will keep the devs and writters, or they could merge with or buy out valve and support pc gaming.
As I said in another post higher up
A Microsoft buyout would bad but at least the game might someday see a official pc port.
A merger with Valve could be interesting to see and shake everything up for the gaming industry, as long as they kept the game development team separate have Nintendo focus on family gaming and peripherals and Valve on PC and hardcore gaming and co operate together on consoles.
A Google buyout would be great for mobile and give Google TV some teeth in the gaming market and could quiet possible see a release nintindo apps for other platforms such as windows 8 and iOS like they have for other core customer facing services
Then there is the Apple buyout where hardware would probably cost more and merge with apple tv and iP(a||o)d for console and mobile gaming respectively, the have similar styling but other than that I don't see it being a great match for costumers & fans especially.
If they have to sell or merge I would hope for either google or valve buy/merge.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Nintendo has a kill app waiting to be made and it's called Pokemon MMORPG.
Be seeing you...
You mean do more besides the whole "Japanimation" thing correct? Unless you seriously meant they should just ignore their core demographic in Japan...
Zelda, Metroid, Kirby, Excite Truck, Mario, Kid Icarus, Dr. Luigi, etc are not Japan-themed, and the only series that looks like anime is Fire Emblem and Pokemon, but the market seems to love those, especially Pokemon, and it has an actual anime attached to it! I think your theory is more than a little off.
Twinstiq, game news
The Secret Developers talk about how difficult it was developing a title for the Wii U.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
I don't think that "doing a Sega" is the answer for Nintendo. There's certainly plenty of evidence that it wasn't the answer for Sega themselves.
I think there might, however, be something of a middle way for Nintendo here; but to get to that you've got to look at the company's strengths and weaknesses.
Nintendo is a poor console manufacturer. I don't necessarily mean that it makes poor hardware (though the Wii-U would seem to imply their powers here are in decline). Rather, I mean that they are poor at doing the other things that a console manufacturer needs to do. They are terrible at building industry links; while you can blame the lack of third party support for the Wii-U on the poor installed base. But the Wii? With its vast installed base? That was almost entirely because Nintendo are just plain nasty to deal with for other parties. Their licensing fees are high, their certification process is difficult (and often ineffective) and they don't make life easy for people they as in competition with their own first party titles.
Nintendo is a middling games developer. They do have some valuable franchises, but with the exception of Pokemon (which bizarely remains a handheld-only experience), these have a fairly narrow appeal. And contrary to popular belief, that narrow appeal isn't aimed at kids; it's more at the jaded 40-ish "ex-gamer" market (a market which does include a lot of game-reviewers). However, in many genres, their games are no longer really top of their field (hate to break it to you, but Mario Galaxy 2 isn't a patch on Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time). Without the benefit of being "the only thing on their platform worth playing", I'm not sure that Nintendo games would be all that successful commercially (the company has almost certainly lost a lot of money on Mario 3d World in the last couple of months).
What Nintendo are extremely good at is making toys; hardly surprising as they've been making toys for much longer than consoles or games for them. Their biggest successes - the Wii Mote and the handful of titles that accompanied it, the 3DS stylus, the odd peripherals they used to do back in the Gamecube generation - have basically been toys. Fun in short doses, able to be sold with a high mark-up and with a short-lived mass appeal. When they deviated from this with the Wii-U gamepad (which is absolutely not a toy), they went horribly wrong.
So perhaps the future for Nintendo is to work with platform holders (one or more of MS, Sony and Valve) to develop a series of mini platform-within-a-platform experiences. Relatively small scale agglomerations of a handful of games based around quirky and different toy-like peripherals.
By the end of the Wii's lifespan, everybody was heartily sick of motion controls (the Wii was wildly popular for its first 2-3 years then essentially stopped making money). But a shorter-lived, cheaper mini-platform based around the Wii-mote technology, compatible with both the 360 and the PS3? That might have been a more appealing proposition.
requiring an internet connection, thus ruling out putting it in the living room with the TV
If only there was some way devices could communicate wirelessly. It could be given a cool-sounding name like Redfang or Wiffy.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun