I don’t know how I missed this. It was done last week:
That is an excellent read. Everyone should check it out.
What causes game consoles to sell is integration into the user’s life. This is why the DS and Wii were successful. With the NES, I believe it was the first invention of even pausing and unpausing games (you could not pause Atari games). The N64 and Gamecube were designed around ‘3d effects’ and not the user’s life which explains why the controller got strange and why games became ‘too long’.
A big reason why Nintendo’s handheld consoles performed so well was because of strict adherence to Gunpei Yokoi’s mandates for fulfilling the job a handheld is supposed to do: be portable and integrate with the user’s life on the go. This is why black and white Gameboy outsold its color competitors.
With the 3DS, Nintendo is not adhering to integrating the product with the consumer’s life. Instead, Nintendo arrogantly believes it is software and hardware integration that is the key to success (i.e. all integration comes from Nintendo and doesn’t require integration with the consumer’s life. But who cares about consumers as the mass market is a bunch of dirty peasants anyway).
The 3DS was not designed to be a handheld game device. It was designed to be a 3d game device. The battery life shows this. If Nintendo was serious about making a handheld game device, the battery issue alone should have shelved the 3d output. Instead, Nintendo’s 3d obsession continues to cause the company to make big-time errors.
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