Personally, I don’t think the issue with Nintendo of America is that they’re lazy as such. I think everything comes back to their perception of phenomenons, but this is a very old problem with Nintendo. It is in the very DNA of the company.
In the early days of the Famicom, Old Man Yamauchi had a particular vision for their video game console. He believed that Nintendo had to tightly control the presentation of their wares, in order to turn the release of a video game into an event. He looked at the way motion pictures were advertised and motion picture release dates were used to build excitement. This is the origin of Nintendo’s old control on 3rd party publishers and the number of games they could publish per year. Yamauchi didn’t wan’t Famicom games to seem “ordinary” by their being too many of them. This mentality was directly transplanted to Nintendo of America and has been in place ever since.
Now, one might say “but the 8-bit era was full of every sort of game imaginable being released.” I suspect this was due to the sudden take-off of the Famicom/NES and the need for content to fill the demand. Nintendo had no choice but to publish and allow publication of many games, though they still tried to maintain some degree of control with their 3rd party policies. Nintendo however, has a weird notion of how to manage their game consoles. Essentially, when demand for software seems low – disinterest – their response is to stop making or publishing games. When demand seems high, then they publish many games. There are two problems here.
1. Their response to disinterest is a bad instinct. Because the only think in terms of building and creating “phenomenons”, they see a time of disinterest as a poor time to “waste” valuable releases that won’t be part of a phenomenon. They don’t fully understand all the reasons for disinterest. They get some, but are oblivious to others. A reason for this may be that a lot of people at Nintendo don’t understand gamers. Yamauchi didn’t. He actually looked down on their own customers. He characterized Japanese youth who were big fans of games and played “too many” negatively, actually insulting them openly and characterizing them as degenerates. Miyamoto doesn’t. He understands many reasons why people *enjoy* games, understands the value of looking at faces to learn the truth of when people are having fun. He is not a gamer however, and doesn’t know why people *keep* playing games. He doesn’t know why people may want to play a lot of games, of a similar type for instance. So Nintendo doesn’t grasp the value of always having a ton of content available regardless of whether they currently are stoking a “fire” of an entertainment phenomenon.
2. Their response to high demand is to worry far too much about keeping a phenomenon alive. Essentially, they choke to death the very thing they’re trying to keep a grip on. People complain about the lack of motion-software for the Wii during its big droughts. I wonder – how many prototypes of great motion-control games did Miyamoto kill internally, while sweating bullets on trying to insure his next “big thing” was *big enough*? How many dozens of ideas or even working prototypes that may not have, by themselves, been the next Wii Sports or Wii Fit, but would have filled the gap titled “quality motion control game” that existed in between each giant release like Wii Sports Resort? Their attempts to manufacture phenomenons came to a head with Wii Music. They clearly thought Wii Music was going to be the next huge thing, with their glamorous reveal presentation, while everybody who saw it was shocked and confused. Because Nintendo tries to keep a stranglehold on ideas, they run the risk of betting everything on the wrong horse rather than spreading their bets out evenly.
Right now, their refusal to act on games like Xenoblade, Last Story, or Regeliev likely is because they are trapped by their fear to act. They know that people want something from them, but don’t understand gamers so they don’t know what people want. And the ghostly voice of Yamauchi whispers in their ear “don’t release a game if you’re not certain it will create a new phenomenon.”
Historically, this may be one of the truer reasons for Nintendo’s decline. Every generation, Nintendo released fewer and fewer games. Lots of Nintendo fans ignore this because they’re narrow fans. They’re fans of *only* Mario, *only* Zelda, and so they look back and don’t understand when someone says the Gamecube, N64, or even SNES were great disappointments. They got a great Mario or Zelda game right? They were awesome! In reality, Nintendo became afraid as their fortunes shrank and the ran into real competition. They stopped releasing “just anything” and tried to make each game seem like an epic event that the entire console hinged on. The N64 was the worst in that hardly any “true blood” Nintendo games got developed for it. Mario, Zelda, one shorter Zelda spin off, Mario Kart and Paper Mario. Nintendo tried farming much of their content creation out to Rare, but Rare was a company with many internal problems. While they made some classic games for N64, they also turned other Nintendo properties into duds, like Donkey Kong.
During the Gamecube era, it was clear that Nintendo’s internal development capacity to actually finish and release games had atrophied. They did release more games than they did for the N64. But what typified a Nintendo Gamecube era game was incompleteness and reduction in scope. Their only Mario game suffered from reused levels and a short finale without much work put into it. Most shockingly of all, *they shipped an unfinished Zelda game*. The Wind Waker wasn’t done. What was it missing? Well, it’s scuttlebut, but I can believe it: 2 full dungeons in the overworld, and much more crucially, a real Death Mountain finale dungeon under the sea in sunken Hyrule. This is the reason for a lame “invisible wall” that prevents the player, once in Sunken Hyrule, from leaving the castle and traveling to Death Mountain that *seems* to be a real place. That’s because it was supposed to be. Aonuma admitted openly later that the tri-force fetch quest at the end of the game was a shameful attempt to quickly create content and make the game seem finished.
Now personally, I believe Nintendo got off to a stellar start with the Wii not just in “new generation” games like Wii Sports, but in what used to be their old mainstays. They did understand that their development had degenerated and began working to restore it. The games were more finished. More complete. Unlike a lot of fans, as far as “core” games go, I think the Wii is far superior to the Gamecube and N64 era. Twilight Princess, for its flaws, is even a better Zelda game than Ocarina of Time.
But we saw the result of Nintendo’s flawed mentality in two ways the last five years: first in the success of the DS. When the DS took off, it really took off. Nintendo responded by opening the floodgates. The DS became a cornucopia of software. Hype wasn’t needed to get people to buy DS games. The fact that they had more games than they knew what to do with, sold DS games. It made the DS look healthy, vibrant, and made its library look exciting and begged exploration. Then we have the Wii. After a strong start, the Wii was burned two two things.
First, by Nintendo trying too hard to make motion and blue ocean games a success and not releasing enough of them (again, such irony). Second, by 3rd parties destroying the Wii’s core game market with shovelware and terrible, low budget titles made by F-list teams. Nintendo responded to the disinterest created not be stepping up and filling the gaps with games like Reginliev, Fatal Frame IV, or Disaster: Day of Crisis. Instead, once again, they froze. Unsure of how to restart the core market, they did nothing.
Now, with the Wii U controversy, we see signs again of what may be Nintendo’s biggest weakness. Maybe the only one that ultimately, really matters. The public is in crisis over Wii U. Everyone – literally everyone – wants answers and they want them now. Everyone wants to do if Nintendo is going to fix everything that went wrong with the Wii. And Nintendo is frozen. They’re doing nothing, saying nothing. Perhaps they don’t understand why everyone wants to know, so they’re waiting to see if it becomes clear, to “say the right thing”. Perhaps they’re too fixated behind the scenes pruning a perfect bonsai tree of presentation – again, to try and manufacture the striking of gold and craft a phenomenon. But in the end, no matter what their goals really are, or their internal dialog really is, all that matters is: they’re doing nothing.
Many Wii consumers I talk to are unhappy with how Nintendo has been handling software. Wii Music? Yuck. And then there was all those Super Gamecube games like the Galaxy games or Metroid: Other M which they didn’t like. Because of their dissatisfaction with the Wii, they have no intention of buying Wii U. And neither do I.
I don’t think Nintendo understands why the Wii or the DS, for that matter, were successful. Iwata believes that hardware/software integration is the ‘magic bullet’. Of course, if this was true, then Apple would have taken over the PC market long ago. What I’ve been greatly amused by is how Nintendo has responded to the success of Super Mario Brothers 5. At first, they declined to assign the game had any role in the sudden sales spike of the Wii at the end of 2009. Later, they begrudgingly admitted Mario 5 was responsible but said that it was because of ‘nostalgia’.
The Industry did not understand Mario 5’s success. They called Mario 5 a casual game. Super Mario Brothers? A ‘non-game’? I thought I had seen anything but clearly not. Super Mario Brothers comes closest to the definition of a ‘real game’ than almost any other game out there. Amazingly, NPD analyst Fraizer ignored the game in her analysis. I remember Pachter getting angry at me about Mario 5 as well. He said something like it didn’t matter that it sold because it was a Mario game and Mario games always sold. Hahaha. But this wasn’t some Mario RPG or something. This was the mother of killer apps. It was Super Mario Brothers.
When Mario 5 was announced, Nintendo’s competitors recognized it for the threat it was. Viral marketers appeared to declare how Mario 5 was ‘copying LittleBigPlanet’ (hahahahha) or to spread misinformation that it was a port of the DS game. The viral marketers were really working overtime on Mario 5. And when Mario 5 became successful, everyone began spinning that it was because of ‘dah casuals’ though they couldn’t explain why Wii sales skyrocketed.
I believe my explanation fits the data the best. Nintendo’s original audience, the Old School, are the original Core Market and got left behind as Nintendo pursued youth markets and other consoles pursued PC games. The Atari/NES/Arcade gamers are the origin of console gaming. Therefore, if someone tried to make a game to ‘introduce gaming to new gamers’, the game inadvertently would resemble an old school game. In their quest to make simple games to expand the market, Nintendo stumbled back to the Old School type gaming with games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and 2d Mario. Not only did these games attract brand new gamers (as the Atari and NES and arcade games did), these games re-attracted the original Core Market. And this is what caused the Wii explosion. This is how all this demand appeared out of nowhere.
DS had the same fate. When the DS was launched, it was considered a ‘portable N64’. This was when it had bad sales. But when it was considered a ‘portable SNES’, its sales blew up. Nintendo’s handhelds have always been the most stable because the Core Market of the Gameboy was never fully abandoned as the NES and SNES gamers were with the N64 and Gamecube.
It is very important to note that the excitement about the DS and Wii was triggered by certain games such as Wii Sports and 2d Mario, but that there was this expectation that Nintendo was returning back to the Old School, that Nintendo was returning to making games for their original Core Market. There was intense excitement about that for the original Core. When the Wii was made, there was none of this ‘integration between hardware and software’ talk, but more of Nintendo looking to the NES as to how to make games and consoles.
Now Nintendo does not want to hear this Old School explanation for their success. They don’t like that. It doesn’t fit with their future plans. This is why I laugh when Nintendo stumbles around trying to explain Mario 5’s success (it can be nothing but old school).
Pardon my language, by Nintendo’s weakness is that they have their head up their ass. They believe fate has made them the magical shepherds of video games. They believe it is their destiny to lead gaming, like Moses, to the promised land. And do you know what the promised land is? It is 3d gaming that is independent of TV and other devices. The reason why Nintendo doesn’t have much online gaming is because they are not interested. What holds Nintendo’s interest, or rather obsession, is 3d gaming. And Nintendo does believe they are geniuses.
When people are weak, they are easy to co-opt. Nintendo’s weakness is allowing the Industry to co-opt Nintendo. Old School gaming is, by definition, anti-Industry. It was the Old Schoolers who crashed console gaming long ago and they possess the power to do so again. They don’t like those gamers.
The Old School gamer is a gamer who cannot be controlled or manipulated. He or she plays whatever games he or she likes, when he or she wants to, and is interested in the game aspects while ignoring the production aspects. The Game Industry wants to be like the Movie Industry or Music Industry. They don’t like gamers being so savvy. They don’t like gamers having such control. In movies and music, those industries can hype and push absolute garbage as ‘best selling’. This isn’t really possible in gaming… yet. The market refuses to be manipulated, and the Industry doesn’t like that.
Trust your gut. Why does it feel like games seem to get worse and worse as time goes on? Why does it feel like the games become more ‘machine made’ instead of made by humans? Why do you have less and less control of your games? What the Industry wants is for you to pay everytime you play the game. They’re far from that point, but should everything go Cloud then that opportunity is possible. Why is it you never hear anyone from the Game Industry talk about the quality of the product but only the efficiency of the business model or the services inside the company? Why is it that the Game Industry wants you to measure the health of gaming by revenue and not by the number of actual gamers?
Nintendo wants 3d gaming badly. Since the people at Nintendo believe they are God’s-Gift-To-Entertainment, they believe they have a decree from heaven to go that way. This is why Nintendo is easily persuaded by the Iago-faced Industry whispering, “If you do X, you will get all these third party games. That will stabilize your console sales, and you can pursue the innovation you desire.”
Nintendo is too independent and doesn’t need third party software which is a consistent threat to the formation of a permanent Game Industry. In other words, Nintendo cannot be manipulated by the Game Industry unlike Microsoft or Sony. Nintendo also isn’t a computer company. Nintendo is an arcade company. Sony and Microsoft, however, are computer companies. PC game companies like computer companies to port their stuff over.
When I look at Wii U, I see Nintendo as Charlie Brown and the Industry as Lucy. You know the result:
The NES didn’t get industry support because there was no industry. EA gave token support and jumped to Sega immediately (and backwards engineered the console so it would have leverage over Sega). So the SNES didn’t really get much industry support. Then the N64 which had no industry support. Then there was the Gamecube which the industry promised to support but didn’t. Their excuse was that the Gamecube didn’t sell much (which didn’t stop them for porting everything under the sun to Xbox). So Nintendo makes the Wii which sells a ton. Industry says, “We can’t put our games on that! The hardware is too weak.” So now Nintendo is making Wii U which will have ‘better hardware’. I guarantee you that the Wii U will not have Industry support in any degree the same or better than the Sony or Microsoft system.
Nintendo shows themselves to be a bunch of clowns by so easily being manipulated. Not only will Wii U not get Industry support, the Wii audience will not transfer to the Wii U. But I’m sure the Industry will put up the football and give another promise to Nintendo that they won’t pull away the ball next time. And Nintendo will keep falling for it because Nintendo is obsessed on playing with new hardware and their 3d direction. They have such tunnel vision, they don’t see themselves being played.
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