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Nintendo Could Base Comeback On Improving Peoples' Health
Nerval's Lobster writes: "It's no secret that Nintendo faces significant challenges: revenues are down, rival platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4 are attracting a lot of buzz, and iOS and Android have made significant inroads into mobile gaming. Rather than double down on its core business, however, Nintendo reportedly sees its salvation in new, nongaming segments such as... monitoring your health? 'We have now redefined entertainment to mean making it fun for people to improve the quality of their lives,' Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata told a company strategy meeting, according to The Wall Street Journal. But he refused to part with more detail about Nintendo's plans, except to claim that whatever's in the works isn't a wearable device along the lines of Nike's FuelBand or the FitBit, and it isn't an iteration of the Wii Balance Board, an accessory that measures the user's weight and center of balance while playing games."
It urges you to go out for a walk and then turns itself off.
Nintendo released Wii Fit about five years ago, Walk With Me for the DS about four years ago, the 3DS with a step counter three years ago, were discussing a Wii pulse reader until two years ago, and just last year released a new version of Wii Fit that incorporates an upgraded version of Walk With Me.
I know that's a bit much to go over but you've been so spectacularly counterfactual that I have to wonder if you just hid away from gaming entirely for the last half decade to have drawn the conclusion that it was "the latest bandwagon" for the company.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The WiiU's performance has little to do with it launching 18 months before the PS4 and Xbone. They could've launched a system maybe 80% as powerful as either of those using the parts available, as opposed to something that's 120% as powerful as a PS3 or 360. The low performance is a design trade-off that was necessary if they wanted to have that touchscreen controller in the box and a price south of $500. Nintendo did well betting on low prices, new input methods and low performance on the Wii; unfortunately, they bet wrong by attempting to repeat the trick in an era where mobile pricing has put cheap gaming into a "race to the bottom".
They should've staked out the high end with Sony and MS where mobile is less disruptive, but the WiiU would have been too far along in development by the time that issue became clear. (Sony have recently remarked that they could tell the Vita was going to have problems with mobile well before it launched in 2012, and have had to try to change the console's goals without the opportunity to change actual product.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Still not quite on the money. They fucked up, yes, but it has nothing to do with where they positioned the console on price and performance. Their main issue, which has been an issue for every single Nintendo console since the SNES, is the timing of their first party games, combined with their third party developer support. Nintendo has a history of weak third party releases, with games that aren't quite up to par on their console and general lack of releases, which means they rely heavily on first party development. However, where's the first party support for WiiU? It was there for Wii and heavily pushed consoles out the door, it was there for the 3DS and outright saved the console, and on and on. On WiiU, excluding remakes like Winwaker HD, they're lacking games from many of their major franchises right now, with no release dates in sight. There's no Mario Kart, no (new) Zelda, no new Metroid, no new Donkey Kong, no new Smash Bros., no Pokemon, and I could rattle off many more franchises that just don't have games for the new console, and don't have any announced entries with a release date to fill the void. Nintendo has this terrible habit of releasing a console with weak first party support when that's what sustains their entire business model, and with WiiU, the future doesn't look bright specifically because of their lack of announced titles with release dates.
Given all this news about Nintendo lately, I bet their stock is tanking. If I knew there was a Pokemon coming in the next year, I'd buy as much stock as I could, because everyone knows that Pokemon alone outright sells consoles.
Nintendo's problem is and always has been they put the bare minimum spec hardware in their devices, make a big fanfare of some gimmick, charge an arm and a leg for it and hope they can coast far enough for the next gimmick to show up. ...
Actually, you are very wrong. Nintendo put out a bunch of successful consoles, without gimmicks for decades. NES, SNES, Gameboy, N64, Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, Nintendo DS. During that time only 1 gimmicky item, the Virtual Boy. I wouldn't call most of those consoles bare minimum hardware specs either.
The Wii was the first "real" console with a gimmick, the wiimote. And underpowered hardware. And it did well. And Nintendo has been behind the curve since then.
IMO, Nintendo needs to get back to it's roots. A lot of it's fan base is older now. We don't want to jump around, or wave our arms to play games. We want to use a controller and have fun. We got big TV's that can really support 4 way and 2 way gaming at the same time. So you know, our kids (not that I have any) can play with us, and have fun with us.
And I'm going to keep saying this, where the fuck is my Pokemon MMORPG? The fact that there hasn't been one only shows how Nintendo doesn't understand the gaming market anymore (IMO).
Be seeing you...