Email: Everyone’s going to get fired

Sure. But what is there to say about it? Really, the writing was on the wall in 2009. That was the do-or-die moment determining the future of the Wii. Does Nintendo continue pursuing the expanded audience, or do they start catering to Miyamoto and their developers’ egos again? When I saw NSMB, I felt a little uneasy. Sure, my prediction of a new 2D Mario for home console at E3 turned out to be right, but it was so obviously phoned in as compared to Mario Galaxy or the old SMB games of my childhood. Then the sequel for Galaxy gets announced (despite other games being far more popular), Other M, and so on. At this point it became clear that Nintendo had always thought “moving upmarket” in the disruption roadmap means “selling your traditional Industry products to the new consumers brought in by your disruptive product,” not “making more sophisticated products that capture more and more of the market.” It’s as though IBM tried to follow up the PC by trying to sell mainframes to home users, or Apple decided to follow up the first generation iPod with a really nice portable CD player. For Nintendo, that means the weird little vanity projects their “game gods” come up with, which is even dumber as they were already failures in the establishment Industry (I mean if you insist on competing in the “red ocean,” a game about angry dudes shooting bad guys with large guns is going to get you farther than a game about riding a choo-choo train in a magical toy land). By the end of 2009 or 2010 or so, I didn’t know what the successor to the Wii would be, but I knew whatever it was, it was going to bomb, since Nintendo had already abandoned the “Revolution” philosophy of 2005.

 

So here we are. The Wii is bombing. Nintendoland was the opposite of Wii Sports, a nostalgia trip through a self-indulgent orgy of Miyamoto childishness rather than a simple, no-frills, universal-appeal game. NSMBU is blatantly phoned in again. They’re rereleasing Wind Waker to appeal to the small number of us who have some nostalgia for the Gamecube. The console’s controller is rehashing an idea that failed on the Gamecube, and motion controls are all but gone.

 

It’s failing, just like anyone with half a brain knew it would.

 

Oh, but at least they got exclusive rights to Bayonetta 2, the sequel to a game that sold under 2 million units. That should move several dozen consoles.

 

Gaming got pretty crappy this generation. At the end of last gen, I had over 40 games for my consoles (PS2 and GC). This gen, I have fewer than half that (I like the PS3 games I have, but there are few worth having). Nintendo, amazingly, has managed to start the next generation with a product that’s even less appealing than anything out now.

Well said.