Put on your best clothes, reader, and let us go to the trololo.
Above: You smile while you watch, realizing “why I am I watching this?” This feeling perfectly matches how it is to watch the Nintendo E3 Conference.
I’m not a Smash fan, but I am a Melee fan (hated Brawl), and I thought the new Smash looked promising.
The Mecha game was LOL.
New Fire Emblem? No one cares. Why they keep making Fire Emblem is unknown because no one buys it. The Fire Emblem universe is so bad that not even a Musuox game of it can be fun.
Mario Party? Meh.
Before I go further, let me ask the beloved reader two questions. What is the purpose of game console E3 press conference? And what type of gamers are playing the Switch?
“How dare you, Malstrom!” scolds the reader, wagging its finger at me. “Are you so deluded and pompous to think that you know the type of gamers that are playing on the Switch?”
I do. And you know how you can tell? Through the games. Let us go through a quick history lesson.
Above: The 3rd President of Nintendo: Yamauchi
The one responsible for Video Game Nintendo was Yamauchi. He said: Nintendo is just a box people buy to get to Mario. 4th President Iwata disagreed with that statement which resulted in the Wii U. The point is that people buy hardware to get to the games, not vice versa.
In America, this game appeared:
People bought a NES to get to Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers unleashed copycats, a genre, called platformers. Making a platformer for the NES was smart because their love for Super Mario Brothers translated to a desire for more platforming. We would not have Mega Man, Castlevania, or Ninja Gaiden without Mario.
“But you can’t say that, Malstrom!” again scolds the reader. “The NES had diverse types of gamers there.” You could say that, but we know what the big game was. The big game seller was not NES Tennis or Urban Champion.
Take a look at this game:
Above: Blazing Lasers. Or Gunhed.
Blazing Lasers rocketed the Turbographx 16 (PC Engine) up. Many shmups were made by other companies to get into the success of Blazing Lasers. This is why the Turbographx 16 library is filled with shmups.
Now let us go back to the conference. The big reason why many people bought the Nintendo Switch was because of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In other words, adventure games. What does Nintendo show? A bizarre mecha flight game, Mario Party, a party fighting game, and Fire Emblem. No adventure games were shown. No wonder Switch’s audience is so disappointed.
Octopath is adventure game-like. But that is already coming out soon and known about for over a year.
Xenoblade 2 expansion fits the adventure game. But it is an expansion.
So if you bought a Switch for Zelda: BoW “Wow!”, Nintendo literally had nothing to show to you. This signals the Switch is in serious trouble for this consumer.
The reason why people are upset of the lack of Metroid is more because of lack of adventure games in general. There is nothing shown for Switch’s largest audience!
The reason how Nintendo can be this *dumb* is because Nintendo is following a business strategy of ‘check those boxes’. All these games are there to ‘check the box’ of some group or segment.
In other words, Smash Ultimate is fine, but the people who already own a Switch did not buy it for Smash. They bought it for Zelda. They bought it for the promise of something more from the platform. People who want Smash will buy Switch when Smash comes out.
Iwata said that game console business is a momentum business. That’s wrong. Game console business is a passion business. Having customers, i.e., ‘checking those boxes’, is not enough. You need to create passionate consumers and keep them passionate. This is something Nintendo seems to have lost.
If Nintendo made the NES today, they would have seen the success of Super Mario Brothers and gone, “We need to check those boxes,” and made a party game, a RPG game, a mecha game, and anything else but another platformer. To the STUPID executives, this seems ‘brilliant business sense’ but it is suicide. You have a platform of people who love Super Mario Brothers and no other games for them to play. What Nintendo did do was make Super Mario Brothers 2, Zelda 1 and 2, Metroid, then Super Mario Brothers 3, then Kirby, then Startropics, etc. etc. etc. Nintendo even published Mega Man 6 because they knew their audience wanted more Mega Man.
Consider 16-bit Nintendo. Many people buy Super Nintendo for Super Mario World. Nintendo beat Sega only by making more of what people wanted: Donkey Kong Country, another fantastical platformer.
You increase console’s sales by increasing the passion. Game consoles are not just machines. They are passion boxes. Why else do people pay so much for the NES/ SNES Minis?
We’re seeing this type of EA form of Nintendo where they just ‘check boxes’ and let people who bought the system just rot. What are these Zelda gamers supposed to play? Mario Party? Smash Brothers? No.
Nintendo doesn’t understand the purpose of the E3 conference. The purpose of the conference is not to ‘show some games’. The purpose is to show the future of the platform. “Here’s some games coming out in the next few months. Bye.” It’s so lame. We invested into this platform. Where is it going? “Well, we don’t feel like showing that now…” Fuck you. You showed parts of it already last year. Why did you change? The reason THEN was because you wanted to sell the Switch. Today, you are just ‘selling some games’.
No, you are selling the Switch TODAY. And you are not giving anyone reason to invest into the Switch today. Smash Brothers is an old game. A new version is not going to light up the world. If you got rid of all the sequels and expansions and DLCs, the only new game Nintendo announced was a strange mecha game.
“Why are the Nintendo decision makers so stupid?” It is the constant cycle. Nintendo cannot handle success. When Nintendo has success, they do not attempt to understand it, they just chalk it up to their own genius (of course). Then they push harder with their own ‘genius’ and ride the future into a Gamecube or Wii U gutter.
I see a very weak, paint-by-numbers, Nintendo here. This is not a company interested in competing against disinterest. This is not a company interested in actually working. What the hell is this company doing? Why can they not get online right after all these years? It’s not a mystery!
Now with the lack of any Retro Studio news, everyone is figuring out that Retro is in serious trouble and must be in some decline. This, of course, is not news to this page. Retro has been in decline for quite some time. Half a decade with no new announcement of a game? You’re dead in this industry after that long. You become a ‘has been’ at that point.
Nintendo is putting so many marbles into Smash that they are not seeing the unhappy Zelda gamers. “After Breath of the Wild, there are no good games for the Switch,” I heard someone say. With the exception of maybe Xenoblade 2 or Octopath, what other games would there be for this gamer?
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