Hi Sean,
Your theory seems to be that Nintendo alienated all those who saw potential in the Wii with their UGC focus but when I brought that up in a discussion with some gamers they all just went “what UGC focus?”. I doubt many people even noticed it, they see Wii Music as a failed game and that’s it (don’t even see it as UGC, perhaps because the songs in it are predefined and those are content, just content people weren’t interested in), games like Flipnote and Minis March Again are just minor blips, not evidence of any strategy to them. All these people saw was a massive game drought, an absense of new games, not a change in company focus. I think Nintendo doesn’t have as bad of an image as you describe, they aren’t seen as opposing content, just lazy and in need of more game production. That can be overcome with more games, it’s not going to stick with them. They aborted the UGC strategy fast enough that few even noticed.
Asking customers for their opinions is a fruitless endeavor. Customers do not know what they want. You cannot say, “What surprises you?” or “What satisfies you?” If Henry Ford asked customers what they wanted, they would have replied: “Faster horses.”
All the analysis of the “Game Industry” is going the wrong direction. They analyze ‘sales’ and make cute little charts and squeal about percentages. But none of this is useful. Customer behavior is what needs to be analyzed. Many people think they are doing this by pigeon holing customers into different containers with different labels. “Casuals” over there. “Hardcore” over here. “Old people” there. “Kiddies” here. This is what many professional marketers have been trained to do and is a big cause as to why the “Game Industry” is becoming more and more dangerous to gaming.
When making a game, you just can’t say “we’ll just make it fun”. You have to analyze the player and see everything through their eyes. This is no easy task. And it is the same with any entertainment medium.
Of course they don’t see “User Generated Content”. They likely also don’t see “Blue Ocean Strategy” or disruption (unless they read it here. No journalist talked of Nintendo’s Wii strategy in that manner, that is for sure!).
From their point of view, they do not see ‘new’ games or see Nintendo making crappy games (like Wii Music). Their perspective is right for their viewpoint.
When ‘hardcore’ complained about the ‘casual games’, they were seeing things from their perspective. From their perspective, those games do seem ‘casual’ and ‘for stupid gamers’. In the mid 80s, Super Mario Brothers seemed ‘casual’ and ‘stupid’ to many computer gamers.
This is point of view.
From my point of view, all games coming out are crappy. Of course, this is true in my point of view. But my point of view isn’t reality. A point of view isn’t fruitful either.
User Generated Content was not just one or two games, it was the new Nintendo philosophy. What was Nintendo’s point of view on it? We don’t know entirely, but we can imagine. From their interviews, Iwata and Miyamoto probably thought ‘User Generated Content’ was the ‘hot new thing’ because it would keep creating ‘surprises’. Reggie-Fils Aime and the NOA executives probably said something like, “User generated content? By golly! That sounds disruptive! Let’s do it!”
Not just one game was coming out with User Generated Content. An entire FLEET of Nintendo software was being made. I bet there are many games that were in production that we haven’t heard about that were going to be made with ‘user generated content’.
Since gamers can detect only the content of games, games with no content will appear to them as ‘crappy games’ and mediocre all the way around. Wii Music is not a bad game in that no effort was made in it. It was ‘bad’ in that it failed to analyze how customers consume games. I recall Iwata remarking something like, “We need to educate the consumer on how to play Wii Music.” Or maybe the customer is right, and the game is wrong?
When the DS and Wii did their thing, the perspective gamers had was “casual games” and “non-games”. The reality that was going on was Blue Ocean Strategy. So while today, gameres might say that Nintendo is not making any new games or that the games Nintendo is making (like Wii Music) suck, their point of view is right but this is not the source of the issue. The source of the issue is Nintendo going User Generated Content. It is that cause which is creating games that have no content (and from the gamer’s eyes, as extremely mediocre games since content is the primary game experience).
I remember earlier in 2006 and 2007, when I began writing about Nintendo, that I recall it odd that Nintendo and other game companies referred to games and content as one of the same. Consumers do not look at it that way. Some games had better content than other games. At one point, Iwata refferred to content in games as the ‘levels’ and art, sound, etc. assets. This isn’t how content is either.
How consumers experience games will be the great learning place for game developers. There is nothing written on the subject. Consumers will have difficulty explaining it. Think of something like music. Why is some music popular and others not? No one truly knows. It is extremely difficult to decipher. But, decades from now, we will know more than we do today. Perhaps a clear pattern can be made.
It pleases me to be one of the first people writing about games to say that gameplay is not the primary experience. Gameplay only provides the context. The content, itself, is what is consumed. So something like Super Mario Brothers was meteoric new content. No one had seen the Mushroom Kingdom before! Something like Super Mario Brothers 3 was expansion on that new content (as well as new gameplay such as flying that allowed us to experience that content in new ways). Something like Super Mario Kart is the old content (Mushroom Kingdom) but in a completely new context (racing). The RPG Marios are similar: same content but in a new context. Nintendo has been able to keep their franchises alive for so long by constantly applying new contexts to them.
Fortunately, the future is context driven. I could write a book about the fall of the Roman Empire. No one would care. No matter if the book is stuffed with facts and factoids, no one would care. But if I wrote a book that gave a new context to the fall of the Roman Empire, something that changes how people view things, that would sell.
Most content on the Internet is context driven. People are not interested so much in facts and information as they are in the context they are provided. For example, this is why top ten lists are so popular. They are a context of how to look at things.
So this is why I can see why Nintendo thought games were gameplay driven. Gameplay is very important. It is the context in how consumers experience the content.
But that doesn’t change the fact that there has to be some sort of content there.
Journalism is so despised in the Information Age, I believe, because their content is being rejected. If you want to hear journalists shriek like harpies, tell them that they are going out of business because of their content being rejected by consumers. They will say it is because their content is being stolen, bad business models, or the Internet in general. So no matter where their content goes, to the Internet or elseware, and no matter what business model it has, it still fails. They cannot believe their content is being rejected, so we are witnessing that ‘industry’ be in total denial as they dissolve.
I don’t think the crisis in gaming is contained to no new gameplay. I also think it is no new content. No fresh ideas. (Are you tired of sequels and remakes? I am.)
To use a book analogy, I always see gameplay to the writing style and content as to the story/substance of the book. Good gameplay, like good writing, will have the person play anything. But the trully big phenomena is that there is something in the content that has set a fire inside the consumer’s mind. It is something that causes them to get other people to read it (word of mouth is very important for book writers as you can imagine).
With something like Wii Sports Tennis, the content is obviously Tennis. The context is using it with a motion controller which made video game tennis very fun and easier to experience. Zelda Wii will, likely, be the content of Zelda that we know and are familiar with in the new context of motion controls (swinging the controller to swing the sword, etc.).
The complaint of Nintendo relying on old franchises of Mario, Zelda, and Metroid is substantive. Nintendo has been lucky that the 8-bit, 16-bit, 3-D, and now motion controls keep allowing new contexts to this old content. But Nintendo can’t rely on it forever. Older game series making new appearances, like Punch-Out, is nice. But the biggest criticism I’ve seen of games like Punch-Out is no new boxers (except one who isn’t too well liked). It is a criticism of no new content, or, rather, reshuffling old content.
Miyamoto says that Wii Sports and the Miis are new IPs. Technically, he is correct. But in the perspective of new content, he is wrong. People wonder if Nintendo even has the capability to create new content that can excite the world anymore. One investor even asked Iwata something like this (and Iwata answered back in giving sales numbers, hahaha).
WiiWare was to experiment new gameplay. But why not new content? Consumers have shown their willingness to buy old gameplay if it has new content (as the constant remakes are all about). A new 2d platformer would go very well even without new gameplay.
Think back when the NES exploded on the scene. Much of the excitement was due to the content. The games were much better content than anything else anyone had ever seen. They were even better than many computer games!
Super Mario Brothers
Zelda 2
Contra
Bubble Bobble
Adventure Island
Ducktales
Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers
Blaster Master
Metroid
Kid Icarus
Megaman
Kirby
…and many more.
All these games were platformers of a sort. All had the same gameplay yet all had very different content. The gameplay wasn’t that much different from Pitfall anyway. Most lovingly, they were highly textured content.
I remember standing in front of store aisles during the 8-bit generation and being overwhelmed at what treasures were before me. On the NES shelves, you would see all these new propositions of content. Since the NES was coming from Japan, there were no sequels.
I want a marketer to explain to me how all these original IPs could succeed. History defies the “Game Industry”.
Now, there were sequels of course. But the original game on the NES was not a sequel unless it came from the comptuer (such as Ulitma III).
Starting with the 16-bit Era, it was somewhat disapointing that so many games were reshuffling their content. However, there was enough new blood back then.
Now, there is no new blood. Every game feels like a sequel or a remake. And games that are ‘new’ are often very quirky and totally bizarre.
How I, and many people, expected Nintendo to approach the Wii was to put out Wii versions of their popular games: 3d Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart, and so on. Then, Nintendo would also return to some old series: Punch-Out, Kid Icarus, Mach Rider, and who knows what else. And, also, Nintendo would present some brand new content propositions. It would be a three legged stool of the currently popular, the old, and the brand new. Lately, Nintendo has brought over what is currently popular for them at the moment. But to everyone’s surprise, Nintendo is making sequels to those games (Metroid: Other M, Galaxy 2). The annoyance is that this is taking the place of return classics (instead of more Mario and Metroid, why not a new Starfox or another series?). And it is also taking the place of brand new series. Nintendo is putting too much weight on one leg.
The reason why I keep bringing up ‘User Generated Content’ and Nintendo is, even though Nintendo has said they are moving on, I’m trying to wave a flag pointing out that they are in the content business. Only a company who does not believe it is the content business could even consider ‘User Generated Content’. User Generated Content is giving consumers, who are rank amateurs, the most important job of video game software.
User-Generated Programming (which HAS been done in game consoles) would even be preferrable to ‘User Generated Content’. Consumers do not consume the programming, but they do consume the content.
If a company like Nintendo didn’t think they were in the content business, you know every other game company doesn’t believe they are in the content business either. Perhaps this would explain why games feel so stale, why there seems to be no new ideas out there. Perhaps this is why games keep getting sold to used games market because the consumer has seen that content before and considers it cliché.
Perhaps this is why the game market is shrinking.
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