They’re in the entertainment business. Segmenting them off into the “arcade gaming business” doesn’t buy you much, because then they’re just the established incumbent in the “arcade gaming business,” and an incumbent can always be disrupted. Besides, a lot of these iPad games are very arcade-like. It seems to me that over-defining Nintendo’s business is the same mistake a lot of incumbents make. “Oh, we’re in the mainframe business.” “We’re in the telegraph business.”
And who’s to say disinterested customers won’t play iPad games? My dad, now close to 60, has every Tiger Woods game for the Wii. But I don’t think he’s touched the Wii in a year or so. However, he does have an iPad, and he does have quite a few games on it. Remember, part of what sent Nintendo in the Wii direction wasn’t just that people many didn’t touch games at all, but that social games were very, very popular on the Internet. The alternatives to Nintendo aren’t just Xbox and non-gaming.
I’m in the same boat as your Dad. My DS is nothing more than an alarm clock and my Wii is nothing more than a Netflix device. However, my gaming habits have gone on with PC gaming. But I’m not a PC gamer. I only buy maybe one or two PC games every few years. Usually, these games are Civilization and a Blizzard game of some sort.
Disinterest doesn’t mean you stop playing video games entirely. It means your favorite restaurant stopped serving good stuff and you are forced to deal with mediocre junk from the grocery store. Behavior like your dad is an indication of disinterest. Cell phone games were all the rage before the DS came out. Yet, the DS attracted interest.
What I mean to say is that Nintendo cannot be disrupted by PC gaming. PC gaming includes PC gaming in all its incarnations.
1) Video games on personal computers.
2) Video games on dumbed down personal computers connected to a TV set (Playstations and Xboxes).
3) Video games on handheld personal computers (iPhones and iPads).
You say I am trying to put Nintendo in a box called ‘arcade gaming’ that separates it from everyone else. But I am saying that people are incorrectly throwing everything into a box called ‘video games’. Why is this incorrect? Because video games do not share the same origin or audience.
The two different origins of video games are due to their unique audiences. Personal computers, even to this day, have accessibility issues. Therefore, only sophisticated computer users (e.g. people who like computers) or people with too much time on their hands (teenage kids) tend to be PC gamers. This was true in the 80s and is true today. You do not see housewives on Steam.
“But what about handheld PC gaming?” Same thing. People who play games on their iPhones are people who like their iPhones. If people liked computerized toasters the same way, they would be playing games on their computerized toasters.
Arcade gaming emerged from a very different place. Arcade gaming is very similar to the carnival. It is extremely accessible, very family orientated, and you do not need to know anything about computers in order to use it. You are not required to purchase a personal computer. Every PC gamer or iPhone user must first purchase a personal computer (iPhone is a personal computer) in order to play video games. “But what about the game console?” What about it? It is nothing more than the arcade at home. And even then, some of them weren’t originally designed to be purchased (such as the Neo Geo).
I can only laugh when people do not wish to make the distinction between PC gaming and arcade gaming. It fits all the available data we have going back three decades. Most importantly, it solves the riddle of the Seventh generation as to why the Wii moved so many numbers and it didn’t affect the Xbox or PlayStation at all. Why did Super Mario Brothers 5 cause the Wii to sell more in one month than any game console in history?
While someone might accuse me of trying to make a box called ‘arcade’ or whatever to make things convenient for me, I say it is going on with the other side. If video games were a simple market, we wouldn’t see failures everywhere. Separating gaming into pc gaming and arcade gaming is not making my job easier. It would be much easier for me to just throw everything in a box called ‘video games’ and be done with it.
But the data doesn’t show this. And that’s the important thing to remember is to look at the data of not just this week or this month’s sales reports but of every sales report of every generation since when PONG appeared at Andy Capp’s Tavern!
Why is there an assumption that video games are a monolithic entity? Even arcade games and computers games play differently. They both have different business models. And people who are successful at making arcade games tend to be unsuccessful at making computer games and vice versa.
To me, it is so plain and simple as the only reason why anyone wouldn’t see this is if they didn’t want to see it. It was also the prevalent belief of these two different strands of gaming throughout the latter 80s and early 90s (starting when the NES sold gangbusters despite the conventional wisdom that all gaming was on computers and NES wouldn’t sell).
In the mid 90s, when the PlayStation came out, only then were video games were being written again as a monolithic entity. And this is likely due to the egos at various computer game companies at the time.
Here’s some simple questions:
Question: Did the PlayStation beat Sega and Nintendo at their own game, or did Sega and Nintendo shoot themselves in the foot with the Fifth Generation?
Answer: Sega was in full financial suicide. Nintendo was shooting itself in the foot by making love to 3d in every which way (3d Mario, Virtual Boy, etc.). When Nintendo stopped doing that (Seventh Generation), Sony and Microsoft couldn’t even touch Nintendo.
Question: If Microsoft and Sony are in the same market as Nintendo, then what happened when both of them entered the dedicated handheld market?
Answer: Sony got squashed. Microsoft still doesn’t have the courage to enter that market.
Question: If video games are all one market, then what were the effects on Nintendo of the introduction of PC gaming in the 1980s, the introduction of dumbed down PC gaming in the 1990s, and the introduction of handheld PC gaming in the 2000s?
Answer: There were no effects. The rise of PC gaming in the 1980s had no effect on the rise of the NES (or the fall of Atari). The rise of handheld PC gaming [cell phone gaming] had no effect on Nintendo’s Gameboy or DS lines. Even the rise of dumbed down PC gaming (PlayStations and Xboxes) had no effect on Nintendo. Nintendo’s decline was due to not realizing what market they actually were in. Once Nintendo realized they were not in the same market as Microsoft and Sony, they end up with the great hits of the DS and Wii (both of which did not affect PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360’s sales performance).
Question: Why do Western developers dislike Nintendo consoles?
Answer: Western developers are almost always PC game developers and cannot think of game development from any other context.
Question: Who else looks at video games from a view other than a single entity?
Answer: Nintendo still does. They differentiate between a PC game and another type of game. To Nintendo, they call a ‘PC game’ as something like an insult. See Miyamoto saying something like, “Oh, that title? Isn’t that a PC game? (laughs)”
Malstrom's Articles News 