“We’ve never really found it helpful to us to set up somebody else as a competitor and then try to evaluate ourselves against that,” company president Gabe Newell told Eurogamer at Gamescom earlier this month.
“Sometimes if feels like you’re constraining yourself to the mistakes and good decisions of other people rather than just focusing on customers and what you should be doing for them. So we don’t often find it really helpful to sit down and say, well, these guys are our competitor and they’re doing this so we should do this.
“There are a lot of companies that, if you identify yourself as a competitor to them, you’re going to follow them right into the ground. It’s like, oh, they’re doing this, let’s do this, too. Arggh! What happened to the music genre? We have a billion dollars in plastic. Yay! Customers are a lot more helpful than competitors in making good decisions.”
I know you’re not a fan of digital distribution but Nintendo can apparently learn something from Valve and I’m not just talking about online functionality.
When people talk about digital distribution, they aren’t really talking about distribution. They are talking about removing control from the gamers. It is that which I do not like.
They may not realize it, but the Cloud pushers are going to watch the ‘Cloud’ become decentralized. Instead of signing a subscription to use someone’s servers for a ‘cloud’, I will eventually just build my own and pay no one a subscription. This will happen soon. The problem with everyone connecting to one server is security (as we saw with PSN Network). When one retail store gets robbed, it doesn’t affect the entire retail store chain’s customers. It just affects that one store.
It is good for Newell to keep the focus on the customer and not the competitor. But I don’t think it is right to imply Nintendo is going after competitors. Nintendo is going ‘Crazy Ivan’ with their sick, sick obsession with 3d technology. They have invested decades of money and research, and for some their entire lives, and “3d gaming” still isn’t ready for the market. These people are getting old and are probably saying, “Hell, I’m going to die soon anyway, so let’s do this. Hell with the market.”
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