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Nintendo Posts Yet Another Loss, Despite Mario Kart 8
redletterdave (2493036) writes Nintendo posted its third loss in four quarters on Wednesday. Even though Mario Kart 8, its big first-party game released in May, shipped more than 2.82 million copies by the end of June, the Mario-themed racing game was not enough to help Nintendo's struggling Wii U console perform in this particular quarter. The company said it lost $97 million between March and June. Nintendo shipped 510,000 units of the Wii U in the June quarter, bringing the total to 6.68 million consoles sold — it's a big jump from the 160,000 units it sold in the same quarter a year ago and a small improvement over the 310,000 units it sold in the March quarter. Still, the Wii U is still lagging behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, and Nintendo must also contend with mobile games available on Apple and Google's app stores, which cost but a fraction of a Nintendo game.
Open up your platform so that anybody who wishes to can program for it, that way you aren't dependent on just a few titles.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
If that sells more Wiis, and more Wii games, why not?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
As the summary says, their market, the casual gamer, can get their fix on their cell phones. Candy Crush did more damage to Wii U sales than the PS4 or Xbone could do.
Most people I know are still holding out until the next Zelda game, which might finally be the killer app Nintendo so desperately needs.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
With the Wii they realized they couldn't keep up with the PS and Xbox. Instead of trying to get people to buy their consoles for their games they should switch to just making games. Even if they required custom controllers for some of their games I doubt it would be hard to come out ahead.
Again, I'll say it that I think Nintendo would have a lot of success in Android/iOS/PC markets just making games and controllers. I mean what they could do easily is have their old games available on Android/iOS/PC through some sort of official emulator instead of the underground doing it. Then they could use Steam and people could buy old Nintendo games for whatever discounted price they wanted to sell them for. People living today can't get all those old games easily unless they go the illegal rom route, and not everyone feels it is right to use ROMs they didn't pay for. Sure some don't care, and I have nothing against piracy, but some do. I bet there would be a bunch of money in either: A: releasing those old games on other platforms, or B: Lowering the price drastically on the WiiU on those old games so they're not 30$, but maybe 1$. If people knew they could buy a WiiU and a ton of old games on the cheap, they would be buying the WiiU.
So yes, if I was CEO of Nintendo, I'd have as many old games to buy on WiiU for as cheap as possible: like 30-90 cents. If your WiiU system had such legacy dominance that people could know they had all the old games, more people would be buying WiiU. I bet they'd fly off the shelves. Then once having paid the overhead of having the system, they'd buy more premium games. It is time to stop pretending pirates aren't out there, and competing with them for your legacy software. Every sale of legacy software is one more than you'd have otherwise. Not every 12 year old has been around for the past 30 years or has parents who have been video gamers. You start giving kids the ability to play video game history on the cheap, and your system will be loved.
In fact I'd make it a selling point of every Nintendo system from here on out to provide an online network to buy legacy titles at the appropriate price point. There's a point where you don't want to sell the last generations titles which are still around for too cheap, but the general concept to allow legacy titles to be purchased on future Nintendo systems, and this could be a way Nintendo not only dodges today's storm, but sures up an unsinkable ship moving forward. It would be almost similar to a homebrew Steam store... Nintendo could even swing license deals with people who made old games to get them on there.
God spoke to me
The leap from SNES to N64 controller definitely took some brain rewiring, but the move to analog thumb controlled joysticks is a move that the other game developer consoles made as well. It freed up additional fingers for more buttons. I get what you're saying with regard to the inability to access every button without changing up hand configurations, a problem Xbox and Playstation never had with their models. Newly positioned buttons and motion sensors don't have to be distractions once you've reprogrammed your premotor cortex and cerebellum to deal with them. I think there is an aspect of timing that was integral for many older system games that may be less important for some games now. When you look at the feature space of games in the 8 bit era, there were very limited interactions you could have. You were relegated to 2 dimensional environments and games like side scrolling action were quite common and relied on incredibly precise timing to pull off. How many people made it past the damn rocket sleds on Battletoads consistently? But newer games with immersive 3D sandboxes to explore don't have to rely on tight timing to hook a gamer. These tight timing aspects are probably what attracted many gamers to action games, and continue to make first person shooters so appealing.
As a researcher in brain computer interfaces (BCI), I have to disagree with the more literal interpretation of your statement that the best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to gameplay. I think you're getting at very quick sensorimotor contingencies, where you get 'in the zone' but there is a huge amount of somatosensory/tactile feedback that goes into these sorts of interactions that are currently missing with direct brainwave interfaces. Let alone the fact that even the best BCI algorithms can classify a handful at most different responses, you have access to more combinations of discrete input with your fingers for now than reading brainwaves.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
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I'd just like to point out the WiiU changed significantly after the launch. The procedure nowadays is:
1. Grab Tablet.
2. Press home, click game from menu (in *under one second* if it's one of your eight most recent picks or the disc in the drive - Even many smartphones are slower than that).
3. Modest load time (shorter than what it was at launch, comparing Nintendoland then versus Nintendoland now), and play.
Pointedly, Nintendo's quick-in element is something that the PS4 and XBox One cannot emulate (since it relies to no small part on the screen on the controller, which can turn on faster than most modern TVs).
That said, it's not like the PS4's short on good stuff either. Overpriced demo though it may be, Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is quite lovely.
I just went to a major game review site, scrolled down the ample front-page list of recently reviewed games...not a single one for Wii-U. Every other platform had multiple games reviewed in the last few weeks, not a single Wii-U title. Imagine saying that for any previous Nintendo platform - it's unthinkable.
Why keep paying 30$ - 50$ for each game the kids may play for a few hours to a few weeks at most. They can download tons of free to 3$ games on their tablets or phone.
FWIW the biggest problem in porting isn't the CPU architecture. It's not like you can share binaries between the platforms, and most of the code is not written in assembly anyway. The biggest time-suck tends to be different APIs
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's been software updates recently that change that quite dramatically. There's no more waiting for the disc and there's no requirement to pick up the Wii U controller.
With a single click on the controller the Wii you will power up and start the game. Just grab your controller of choice. If the game disc isn't in then it will ask you to insert it. I haven't seen the home screen of the Wii U for a long time.
Who cares about the architecture? You're talking as if people didn't port games between consoles on the XBox 360 and the PS3 the latter which was also a Power based architecture.
People program in high level languages and then compile for different systems. The only thing really left then is optimising, and that is still an incredibly complicated task because while the remainder of the systems are x86 based, they are actually very different hardware architectures. Arguably the most portable is the Xbox and the PC since programming for either can be done using DirectX, however even then there are some massive differences between optimising a game for a PC and the Xbox, which has lead to some horrendous experiences on both platforms due to poor porting.
All of this doesn't really matter for Nintendo, just look at the titles they have released. They have always played their console hand very close to the chest and the vast majority of hit titles on their console are actually their own titles.
Slashdot... it's a lot like Central Park... except PhDs may stop by at any time to painstakingly pick-apart the logical and factual errors in the rant of the crazy homeless guy that's yelling at the pigeons.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But what makes it worth while is that the pigeons often win the argument!
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Call of Duty and Halo don't make an impressive library. What the other two consoles have is diehard brand loyalty(fanboism), which cause cause sales of their consoles despite having an unimpressive game library.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I dunno, my 5 year old daughter often uses the game pad on the Wii U and she gets more active jumping around than she gets on the playground sometimes....
The reality is that you can build a decent set top box for casual gaming for under $50.
If it is so easy then why haven't you or anyone else done it? Sure you could probably come up with a cheap piece of hardware that can play simple games, though $50 is probably pushing it a bit. You'd have to do some serious volume to get to that sort of price point and to get that volume you'd have to have the software ready to go on day one or else no one will buy it. Chicken meet egg. Furthermore people already have a device they carry with them for casual gaming in the form of a smartphone. Why would they spend an extra $50 plus more for games to get something they already have in less convenient form. FDevices like Roku (which are close to that price point) could fill this function but pretty much nobody uses it for that even though it is possible today.
The reality is that the economics of that business are more complicated than building a cheap box and then hoping developers will flock to it. "Build it and they will come" is a pretty shitty business model in most cases.
iOS and Android games don't share the same market as the Wii U, it's dumb to compare them just because they're games. PS4 and Xbox One, sure, but mobile gaming is its own ecosystem. 95% of the iOS and Android games available don't even come close to major release titles in terms of scope and depth, and their prices reflect that. A person is extremely likely to own both a smartphone/tablet and a gaming console, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to have to weigh a purchase of a console game against that of a mobile game. It's like comparing Wii U games to board games just because they share a word.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
If there's both Zelda and Metroid made for the Wii U, I'll strongly consider buying it.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I've heard of lazy, but this takes the cake. Or maybe, in your case, has the cake delivered, not to your front door, but to your sofa.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
A single title like MarioKart is a shot in the arm but it can't turn the ship around by itself. Nintendo will have to hope they can keep throwing out good titles for long enough that sales pick up and some 3rd parties come back.
Worked for Sony. Remember for the first 4 years of the PS3's life, it was a joke. Horribly expensive, almost no games worth playing, and it took developers years to finally figure out how to make game on par with the 360, much less better. Then there were the cries that Blu-Ray was just a gimmick and that they should have gotten rid of it. After a few price cuts and once Sony stepped up their game with first party and indie titles did the PS3 finally gain steam. And this was against a console with paid subscription multiplayer, a start screen full of ads and the worst quality control blunder in the history of consoles!
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