Sean,
I must say, I am quite disappointed with your blog post about the Zelda patent. You started out well, noting the similarity to warp zones.
Then you went off the tracks.
I won’t go and pick out every single error, but here are a few larger errors in your reasoning:
1. “Nintendo should go back to its roots” – that’s not what they did with the Wii. With the Wii, they found ways to make things new and different. Saying that they should go back to a previous value system is an absurd suggestion that is basically counter-intuitive, especially for someone who espouses disruption so much.
Aside from the Wii, NES was the last time Nintendo put out a disruptive product. Do not forget Reggie said, at the closing of 2006 E3, “We were the disruptors twenty years ago, and now we are so today.”What’s more, gameplay design comparable to that seen on the NES and SNES have their home on the Wii – in the form of WiiWare. Such gameplay styles and “production values” are a perfect fit for WiiWare, and I have no doubt that a “New Super Mario Bros“ type game will make an appearance on the service.
This piece of flawed logic is best demonstrated with your example of Super Mario Galaxy vs New Super Mario Bros. You correctly observe that NSMB has sold far more copies, but you attribute it to the wrong thing. If you determine the percentage of the install base that own each of the two games, you quickly discover that the difference in this percentage is rather insignificant – 17.28% vs 17.85%. In other words, the reason why NSMB has sold so many more copies is that there are far more DSes out there, thus meaning a larger existing market for the game to sell to.
More importantly, we are talking about the video game product which is very different than the overall console strategy. The two are not the same. Making Twilight Princess had a very different goal than making Wii Sports.
He responds to a quote I said:
No. In the console market, people buy software to get to the hardware. Software is the prime mover. People often label these titles ‘killer apps’. My point is that New Super Mario Brothers ended up becoming a killer app. It was causing people to buy DS systems. While the DS skyrocketed in America when the DS Lite came out, that is also the exact same time NSMB came out. With the long, long sales of NSMB, it shows that new DS owners are picking up the title. Super Mario Galaxy was clearly not the ‘killer app’ for the Wii especially in Japan.2. “Super Mario Galaxy failed to create any substantive phenomenon. Ditto for Twilight Princess.” – this is untrue. Before I say more, please note that Galaxy has received critical acclaim, which in itself is substantive (but of course, you didn’t mean that sort of substantive, did
you?). It is true that there wasn’t that much of a “splash” with Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine, but both of those games were considered to be relatively weak entries in their series (although still very good). And the difference between Galaxy/Twilight Princess and
the “evergreen”-selling action titles on Wii (Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros Brawl) is that the latter are multiplayer games, thus producing better longevity. When someone has beaten Galaxy, they’re happy to hand it to a friend, for them to play it on their system. It is not
a design flaw, it is a difference in game type… plus the fact that they were released earlier, and games released earlier in a console’s life have to struggle harder to sell well than games released later.
Mario is THE greatest video game franchise. What Mario was during the 8-bit generation cannot be compared to anything today. Super Mario Brothers didn’t need an install base to sell. It SOLD the NES. Super Mario World SOLD the SNES… at first. People did everything they could to buy the new NES Mario game.
Since the 8-bit and 16-bit generation, Mario has become increasingly less popular. Much of this is likely due to 3d Mario gameplay that is not striking the same chord as the 2d gameplay. Miyamoto recognizes this and has publicly stated that Super Mario Galaxy was intended to fix the errors of the 3d gameplay and get the zeal of the old 2d gameplay in this 3d game. This is why the camera has that fishbowl, why the game often turns 2d time to time.
Super Mario Galaxy is nowhere near the success of the 2d Mario games, NSMB included. The large install base of the Wii will obviously save the game from mediocre sales (mediocre meaning less than Nintendo’s predictions). But Super Mario Galaxy clearly failed to create the same ‘excitement’ for Mario that the old school 2d games once did. This is why you will often see Super Mario Galaxy on sale from various retailers. You don’t see Wii Fit on sale. You don’t see Wii Play on sale. There is a reason these things.
Critical acclaim means nothing. Customer reaction is where everything counts. We measure customer reaction by them exchanging money for the game. This indicator we use is ‘sales’. A long and consistent showing of large sales means the game has great traction with the customers. The purpose of business is to create customers.And it’s worth noting that between the Wii and GC versions of Twilight Princess, more copies have been sold than were sold of the original Legend of Zelda, and the Wii version alone has outsold A Link to the Past. Indeed, despite being the first Zelda to be a launch title for a
system, Twilight Princess is the second-best-selling Zelda title ever, beaten currently only by Ocarina of Time. Funny, that – you consider the “linear” style of Ocarina and the other 3D Zeldas to be worse than the “non-linear” style of earlier ones, yet Ocarina is the best-selling
title, and most people name Ocarina to be the best one, edging out Link to the Past. So it seems that your reasoning is flawed here, too.
The problem with Twilight Princess, and to an extent, Mario Galaxy, is that they don’t appear to be selling to new customers, only to previous Mario and Zelda customers. Selling to old customers isn’t sustainable in the longterm.
Multiplayer is not the cause behind evergreen titles. Hello Nintendogs and Brain Age.
When comparing today’s consoles to systems twenty years ago, you have to factor population growth as well as additional territories. When Reggie did a conference explaining Nintendo’s thinking back in fall of 2005, he had to make this point when he presented the case that console gaming was not growing in popularity. Yes, the PS2 sold more consoles in the United States than the NES. But when you factor out the additional territories (Nintendo was tied up in court battling Atari and wasn’t able to push NES as it should in Europe as well as many other territories. The world of 1988 was nowhere as global today as well), the PS2 was not increasing the popularity of game consoles since the NES (and the NES expanded on what Atari had begun).There is another example that comes to mind regarding non-linear vs linear, and that’s Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2. FFX was highly linear. FFX-2 let you go anywhere from the beginning of the game, and you just needed to do specific things to activate the continuation of the story, much like “old-school” Zelda games. FFX was by a significant margin the more popular game, even though it was practically a launch title, while FFX-2 was released much later.
Many hardcore gamers couldn’t believe what Reggie was saying. After all, wasn’t gaming growing by leaps and bounds? Hardcore gamers, licking all the Sony and Microsoft advertising, believed it and that the future of gaming was ‘adult gaming’ (meaning hardcore). While what Reggie says can be written off as ‘company spin’, Nintendo’s billion dollar investment into the Wii direction cannot. Nintendo literally did believe this. Years later, we know now they were correct.
Twenty years from now, I very much hope a console outsells the Wii and DS. But this shouldn’t be assumed to be more popular unless population growth and additional territories are factored out. Sony made the tragic mistake (if it really believed its PR) that gaming was growing because it sold more Playstation consoles than previous systems. Sony did an excellent job in selling the console on a worldwide basis. And population has increased prior to decades ago. But in real terms, gaming was not getting more popular. Even the console to home ratio isn’t reliable since that didn’t tell us the number of gamers in that household. Often, it was just one gamer who had the console. Contrast this to the Atari 2600 and NES where they were more family machines. And, no surprise, Nintendo aimed the Wii to be a ‘family machine’ to duplicate the success of the NES.
Since the NES, every proceeding Nintendo console had sold less than the one before. So it is no wonder Nintendo looked to the NES as a guide. There are various Iwata and Miyamoto interviews pointing out the NES and how they got away from that original vision with succeeding consoles. With the Wii, they felt they were getting back on track.
As for Ocarina of Time, I have always said that I understood Nintendo making 3d Zeldas since those are the best selling ones. The big change with Zelda games have been the audience. Girls did not regularly play the 8-bit and 16-bit Zeldas but have been drawn toward the 3d ones. The big problem with Twilight Princess sales is how it went ‘thud’ in Japan. Nintendo wants to keep Zelda popular in Japan.
Don’t know as I haven’t played those FF games. Nor do I care to.3. “Funny how this doesn’t apply to Mario Kart, whose sales shot up when Mario Kart DS was designed to return to its SNES roots” – not true at all. Mario Kart DS isn’t like Super Mario Kart, it is like Mario Kart 64 – all of the features from Mario Kart 64 made a return. The style of
play matches that of Mario Kart 64, as does the level design. It should not be surprising that Mario Kart 64 was the best-selling Kart game before Mario Kart DS came along.
The producer for Mario Kart DS, Hideko Konno, disagrees:
Konno reckons Mario Kart DS is the best game in the series so far – even better than the legendary SNES version, a particular favourite of his.
“If you look at the volume of Mario Kart DS, in every aspect of the game… I think we’ve done it. We’ve surpassed Super Mario Kart,” he said.
To put in greater context, the Mario Kart series was in decline. Mario Kart DS, as Konno says himself (I actually look these things up, I don’t just spew out opinion as fact unless noted), was designed to get back to the roots. This meant capturing the magic that made Super Mario Kart great (SMK sold around the same amount as MK64. Much of the N64 and Gamecube Nintendo titles are a little inflated in sales due to little software competition on those systems).
4. “The save data of Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Brothers Brawl cannot leave the Wii. This means Nintendo is ‘forcing’ people to unlock it if they want it unlocked. Nintendo defends this by saying it is protecting the value of the unlockables.” save games cannot leave the Wii for a much more sensible reason – those two titles are both online titles, and if people are able to edit the save games of online titles, they can potentially affect the experience that other online players of the game have. What’s more, while people can’t easily unlock the content for local play, all content is available in online play – you don’t have to unlock all of the courses in order to play them online in Mario Kart Wii, and you can play on any level in Super Smash Bros Brawl.
– Just plain wrong. Those
Nintendo themselves responded to this complaint saying they had to protect the VALUE of the game. With Excite Truck, many people just downloaded a save that unlocked the entire game. SSBB is very much dependent on the unlockables for its ‘value’ and Mario Kart Wii to a lesser degree.
There are online Nintendo games that don’t demand locking the save game. Super Mario Strikers Charged is one of them.
Plus, in spite of your argument that they’ve done something wrong with these titles, they are selling exceptionally well – Mario Kart Wii is about to beat Mario Kart DS for best-selling Kart game ever, and as far as percentage of install base is concerned, it is already the winner
by a large margin (it is beaten slightly by Mario Kart Double Dash… although that can be attributed to the much less varied install base on the GC).
Are you crazy enough to suggest that locking the save files is the reason why they are selling? By how you are talking, this is how you are framing it.
As I said before, and as the producer for Mario Kart DS himself said, the reason why Mario Kart Wii is the only real healthy Core Nintendo franchise (healthy meaning that it is selling in a ‘killer app’ sort of way) is because they tried to get back to the roots of what made the series fun to play in the first place.
And in the case of Super Smash Bros Brawl, in much the same way as in previous entries in the series, you can unlock most things simply by playing the game, not by doing anything difficult – you can unlock every character simply by playing enough matches, and anyone who
enjoys the gameplay can do that without issue. If someone doesn’t like the gameplay itself, then the game isn’t really for them, anyway.
This is similar to how modes in Wii Fit are unlocked by using Wii Fit for a certain length of time.
Hence, this is why Nintendo is protecting the ‘value’ of the game. If I can just download a save file that has all the Brawl data unlocked (which would be very tempting to do), I would not have to put in the man hours ‘just playing’. Nintendo fears its customers would lose appreciation for the game if this were to happen.
My argument is that forcing a time sink to create ‘value’ really means no value exists at all. I’m the customer. I define the value, not the company.
And to address the overall argument you used, you are actually wrong in claiming that it is the Warp Zones and passwords that made older games more fun. There is a reason why, as you argued, people were delighted to discover Warp Zones – they were always well-hidden, in order to make them things that people can find on repeated play-throughs. They were secret features, designed to be discovered by the most dedicated players – the “casual gamer“, who has the greatest reason to want to be able to skip through and see later levels, generally wouldn’t even think to try the things necessary to find Warp Zones. Similarly, passwords were useful for people who were already interested enough to go looking for the passwords to later levels, but the very people who would take greatest advantage of them were the very ones that wouldn’t seek them out. Note that my use of “casual gamer” is not the common one – I use it solely to refer to play style.
Being alive and playing then, and not being in grade school as most of the NES generation was at the time, I well remember what I saw and observed. The Super Mario Brothers Warp Zones were WIDELY KNOWN. Very, very few people did NOT know about them. For evidence of this, many NES games put in similar features such as your character ‘breaking’ the game by running on the roof of an underground area. I recently played NES Ducktales. The game is filled with ‘running on the roof in underground areas’. Such game breaking went further in games like Zelda 2 with walking through walls, having to fall through one hole in the final palace (where holes would normally kill you). The original NES Metroid was very much designed around all this ‘game breaking’ which made it bizarre and phenomenal (fake mini-boss ftw!).
I get the feeling that your problem is comparable to that of Scott Anthony in your most recent blog entry – you’re inserting too much of what you like into your analysis, and thus falsely attributing failures and weaknesses to things you don’t like, rather than to their true reasons.
You have spoken extensively on how the flaw in modern gaming is the cinematic experience, etc, and that games need to return to the way they were made back in the NES period and earlier… yet this runs completely against the whole concept of disruption. Rather than taking
disruption to its fullest extent, you stop using it as soon as it goes against what you, personally, like.
The reason why I get to disagree with Scott Anthony is because, while I am now a writer on disruption myself (though still not fit to shine Anthony’s shoes), all my research has been in the entertainment fields such as gaming. I’ve read almost everything Anthony has written and he has written very little regarding disruption as it relates to the entertainment business. So I am simply applying what I think I have learned to explain my different conclusion.
Now, again, you speak as if it is my ‘opinion’ that modern gaming made a flaw in pursuing expensive cinematic experiences and need to return to the spirit of consoles of NES and earlier. Considering that the Wii, in and of itself, did pursue this as the goal and the ensuing market success shows it was successful.
This was never an ‘opinion’. It was an ‘observation’. I can sit here and look at the success of Wii Sports and various makers of cinematic game studios going out of business, and what else should I conclude?
Innovation is key to continued success in the videogame industry, and it is disruptive innovation that made the Wii a success. To go back to old approaches is a bad idea. What Nintendo need to do is precisely what they *are* doing – finding new ways to engage the player so that
they continue playing.
I am referring to game content. Sometimes, people just want plain chicken noodle soup or vanilla ice cream. ‘Innovating’ the soup to ‘chicken chili noodle soup’ or ice cream to ‘vanilla pineapple icecream’ is not necessarily a good thing. In the same way, many customers want Mario to be in his plain universe with its familiar rules rather than bizarre galaxies where the Mushroom Kingdom mythos is no longer coherent.
I haven’t talked about the video game products themselves since games are a very different matter than the game consoles. They have their own set of rules for success in the market. Like any piece of entertainment, content is king. One thing I am pinpointing is that ‘casual games’ (oh that word) developers don’t seem too interested in the content. It is all “Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!” A game whose focus is only innovation, and not content, is like eating Cotton Candy; it is like biting a cloud.
The User Generated Content bandwagon, with its peak being Little Big Planet, perfectly illustrates this. Yes, there is innovation! Wonderful! But without professional content, it all falls apart. There is a reason why user-generated books, user-generated paintings, and user-generated TV shows do not exist. No one wants to BUY amateur content no matter how much in quantity.
I have spoken to ‘casual developers’ who want to make games for devices like the iPhone. I ask them what their ideas are, they tell me, I politely nod. I then say what I did about content and a little light bulb goes up above their heads. Content has wrongly been seen as ‘game length’ or ‘game data’ where it is actually ideas and what the player takes away when the game is over. Of all the stuff that consists of a game, content is the upper 10% the player only sees. Tetris was more than just ‘blocks’, it was a taste of Russia. This is one of the reasons why Tetris became instantly loved. Who can forget the ‘Russian’ music of Tetris or its other zany elements?
I tell them: “Think about how games were in the NES and Gameboy era: the entire family could play, simple easy to pick up but had content to them, games didn’t take themselves seriously, etc.” Since they remember this era well, they instantly understand what I am conveying. They remember the arcades. They remember the Atari Generation.
For those that remember gaming vividly before the stupid Console Wars that broke out during the 16-bit generation, all this talk about these older generation systems are considered ‘obvious’.
Science Fiction authors used to have a saying that the ‘Golden Time’ when a child falls in love with science-fiction books is between the ages of 11 and 13. In the same way, everyone falls in love with a certain period of gaming. For some, it is the 8-bit, others the 16-bit, some the N64 games, and so on.
The problem with being in love the first time is that you never get that same exact feeling back (though you strive to get it back). People dream of that feeling when they played Ocarina of Time for the first time, or Super Mario Brothers for the first time, or Super Mario World the first time. Unfortunately, no matter where one’s first time love for gaming comes in, it will never be replicated fully.
I can’t wait a decade from now when message forum posts begin to say, “Remember when gaming was fun as it was with Wii Sports?”
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