>Facing an uncertain future, the company keeps trying to mine its storied past.
>The Japanese video-game giant Nintendo has had a rough decade. Ten years ago, the company was riding high on the commercial and cultural success of the Wii, its physical-controller console, and the DS, its popular handheld. Nintendo’s stature—and its stock price—climbed to record highs by 2007. But flailing Wii remotes around in the den proved to be a short-lived trend more than a lasting lifestyle. The 2012 high-definition follow-up, Wii U, disappointed critics and consumers, and the company’s value had dropped by 80 percent by late that year.
>Things haven’t gotten much better since. Nintendo’s part-interest in The Pokémon Company gave it some lift after this summer’s Pokémon Go phenomenon, but by Halloween the game had already shed 60 percent of its users. As winter approached, the stock was trading at 2000 prices, and the company was again considered a third wheel to Microsoft and Sony in the video-game sector.
>This month, two new Nintendo products offer insights into the state of the company, its work, and its legacy. One looks back, the other forward. Both anxiously.
>In the 1970s, video games proliferated as a slightly hokey accoutrement to seedy, adult nightlife. Arcade games were found in taverns and bowling alleys, the hopeful computational successors to pinball, pool, and darts. When video arcades arrived, they were considered no less seedy than bars, even without the booze. Early home consoles like the 1977 Atari Video Computer System were first conceived as a way to let families bring arcade games home to the comfort (and safety) of the den.
>Titles flooded the ensuing console game gold rush, eventually leading to a sector-wide crash in 1983. Nintendo’s rise in the mid-1980s, especially in North America, was yoked to the reinvention of video games as children’s media. One part of that strategy involved appealing to toy retailers who had been burned by video games—the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was initially sold with a toy robot and light gun to make it like more than just a game system. Another part involved tightly controlling licenses for games made for the system—Nintendo limited the number of titles developers could produce annually and handled all cartridge manufacture in-house.
>The games were mostly innocuous, too. Titles like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and The Legend of Zelda were friendly, cartoonish affairs. Even very difficult games, like Capcom’s Mega Man series, still looked like Nickelodeon shows from across the family room. Nintendo was notorious for tightly controlling the content of its games, an easy feat to accomplish since they controlled the production process completely.
>But as the 1980s gave way to the ’90s and beyond, Nintendo kids grew into adolescents and then adults. First Mario and Zelda gave way to Doom and Mortal Kombat, then Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft. Games became more violent and profane, more complex and time consuming, partly as a reaction to the kiddie-cloister of video games. Then they became thematically innocuous again, but expanded their impact to everyone: FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga. These games traded questionable content for economic duplicity. They were free to download, but coaxed players to spend money or attention for later progress.
Bentley Reed
>Nintendo weathered the changes in games largely by ignoring them. It released new consoles with new features, some incremental (SNES, GameCube), and some revolutionary (N64, Wii). Then it produced new editions of existing games in the company’s core franchises. Often these games were so similar to previous titles as to be indistinguishable. Sometimes they were re-releases or re-masters. Occasionally they were truly new, but a new Mario or Zelda had come to be measured largely by virtue of how faithfully it adhered to the ethos of the series, Star Wars-style. Some of Nintendo’s technological choices were bold and original, but the company was fundamentally conservative. Thirty years after the release of its canonical console, Nintendo had mostly become a spore lodged in the memory of children who would become parents to other children.
>Today, several generations of those parents and children have two new titles with which to play—and understand—Nintendo.
>The first is pure nostalgia: the NES Classic Edition. It’s a tiny replica of the original 1985 NES, which emulates 30 classic games for that system for HDMI output to your contemporary television. The concept is hardly new—all-in-one retro console emulators have been available for years, from the Atari to the Sega Genesis. But a combination of Nintendo provenance and clever design—including an authentic, full-size NES controller—have made the NES Classic Edition a hot commodity. On top of that, supplies have been profoundly limited since its release early last month, making the NES Classic Edition the hard-to-find toy of the 2016 holiday season. Speculators and opportunists have pushed the $60 retail price to $200 or more on Ebay.
Jeremiah Garcia
>It’s possible Nintendo limited stock to create a bottleneck, and thereby a holiday phenomenon. But more likely, the company just didn’t anticipate demand for an official re-release of its three-decade old flagship. Emulated games have been available for download on Nintendo systems since the Wii, after all, but player interest has been limited.
>The NES Classic Edition seems to suggest that the physical form and context of the original ignited the kindling that Nintendo has been arranging for years with sequels and re-releases of its original titles. The gray, front-loading toaster made palm-sized and adorable, the star-and-laser emblazoned packaging and marketing, the feel of the square controller and the concavity of its red buttons—these features are the Proustian madeleine of ’80s NES kids. The experience of the games themselves are less important than the sight and feel of the thing. You have a Nintendo.
>To buy an NES Classic Edition isn’t to express an interest in playing classic Nintendo games again, so much as it is a totem with which to recall the context in which those games were once played. Or, for younger players who never encountered the system in its heyday, onto which to project a firmly stable, if utterly invented, context against which to contrast the anxiety of the present.
>In a 2008 New Yorker profile of the flamboyant Gears of War game designer Cliff Bleszinski (aka CliffyB), the writer Tom Bissell tells a tender story. Bleszinski’s father died of an aortic aneurysm at the age of 47, when the younger Bleszinski was 15. “Bleszinski still remembers what game he was playing when he learned of his father’s death,” Bissell writes, “the Nintendo game Blaster Master. He never played it again.”
Jose Thomas
Who is this journalist and why should I care about his opinion piece?
Robert Powell
>For those old and dorky enough to know, much symbolism pervades this anecdote. In Blaster Master, the player controls a tiny, weak human player whose power comes from being able to armor himself inside a powerful, jumping tank. The human body is fragile and impermanent, but machines can offer succor. Bleszinski now owns his-and-hers Lamborghinis.
>But Nintendo’s role in that story is a contingent one. Bleszinski’s interest in games in general and Nintendo in particular meant those were the objects with which he surrounded himself with as an adolescent. It could just as easily have been something else: Powell Peralta skateboards, or new wave mixtapes, or competitive tetherball accoutrements.
>The story is touching, of course, because Bleszinski’s eventual career and success were tied to the objects that surround him as a youth, some of which were bound up with his father’s untimely death. Eventually, Clifford became CliffyB, and Blaster Master became Gears of War. But even if the future is made from the raw materials of the past, it is not made by translating them through time and space without transformation.
>In retrospect, it’s obvious that Nintendo has been a company mining its own nostalgia even as it goes through the motions of innovation and reinvention. But the NES Classic Edition finally admits that Nintendo’s success is built largely of echoes of prior successes. And implicit in that concession is another: that eventually, inevitably, enough time will pass for those reverberations to cease.
>Speaking of concessions, the second specimen is a huge one for Nintendo: Super Mario Run, the company’s first release of a game in a major franchise on a smartphone platform (Apple’s iOS).
Jason Morgan
Patricia Hernandez
Leo Diaz
>Until now, Nintendo has resisted making mobile versions of its titles, except on its own handheld hardware. But as smartphones and the apps they contain proliferated, players found fewer reasons to invest in dedicated handheld gaming consoles. Particularly when those machines looked and felt so bulky and childish compared to the sleek, modern form of the iPhone.
>Nintendo’s history as an iron-handed platform licensor also came into play: allowing a company like Apple to police its games meant taking a very unfamiliar seat at the table for Nintendo. And furthermore, the company had never developed software for hardware it didn’t also design and fully control. The frequent and unpredictable changes to smartphones, not to mention the variations already on the market, offered nuisance that Nintendo thought itself long beyond.
>But as its hardware and software sales—and its stock price—continued to fall, Nintendo had to do something. It partnered with the Japanese mobile giant DeNA to release Miitomo, its first smartphone app, in March of this year. Miitomo was more a curious social network app than a game, but it did borrow the visual aesthetics of Nintendo’s Mii caricatures, first released with the Wii in 2006. It was clearly a toe dipped into the waters, a sacrificial scout for a more substantial future title.
Gabriel Hughes
>That title arrived this week: Super Mario Run. The game brings the multi-world, coin-collecting, jump-and-squash adventures of Mario and his crew for iPhone. In an awkward acknowledgement of how out of place even its circa-1985 controllers have become, Nintendo bills it as “a new kind of Mario game that you can play with one hand.” For the two billion people who own smartphones, the game would better be called a Mario endless runner—the genre defined by titles like Canabalt, Temple Run, and Crossy Road. In Nintendo’s rendition, Mario runs continuously to the right, and taps or presses on the screen make him jump to varying heights. The player uses this mechanism to guide Mario through the world and levels traditional to the franchise.
>The result is incongruous. A mismatch between the experience of holding and using a touch-controlled smartphone and playing a classic Mario game.
>Part of the problem starts even before play begins. Nintendo has spurned both common models for app sales: free-to-play with extras sold for a premium, and fixed-price download. Instead, they’re offering what amounts to a 2000-era trial download. The first three levels come for free, then the player must shell out $10 to unlock the rest of the game. While reasonable in the abstract, the business model is unfamiliar to contemporary mobile users, whom it has confused and angered.
>The apparatus built around the game produces even more cognitive dissonance. A complex account and game setup procedure stands between downloaders and their first running of the Mario. While common to Nintendo’s consoles, where the player is at the company’s mercy, this kind of apparatus is rare and tone-deaf on iOS. Even before issuing the first jump, the player must accept Nintendo’s terms of service and privacy policy, because an internet connection is used to prevent piracy (and presumably to collect data).
Asher James
>Nintendos sad struggle for Survival >Founded 127 years ago DUDE NINTENDO IS DOOMED LMAO
Colton Gonzalez
>But the experience of the game is even stranger. On the one hand, the grammar of the endless runner is at work: A character moves or is pushed ever forward, forcing the player to improvise responses in time to avoid obstacles. But on the other hand, that interaction model collides with the grammar of the Mario-style platformer game. In Super Mario Run, Mario can vault automatically over small gaps and even enemies—a perversion of the most fundamental assumptions of the originals. Furthermore, Super Mario Run changes overall sensation of operating a Mario game—what the game designer Steve Swink calls game feel. Mario games have always offered tight but nuanced direct control over the character’s movement on all available axes. Playing Mario, it turns out, was always more than just making him jump.
>Nintendo probably thought it was deftly merging the design language of smartphones with that of Mario. But the result is less synthetic than tone-deaf: the video-game equivalent of listening to your grandparents using outmoded slang that might have sounded acceptable in another time and place. Modern players will just want to hide their heads.
>But perhaps most surprising is the decidedly allegorical meaning of Super Mario Run. An endless runner is always framed by some calamity or catastrophe. In Canabalt, the runner scales rooftops to escape from an undescribed, but pretty plainly obvious alien robot invasion. In Temple Run, the player flees a curse invoked by a negligent archaeologist in a ruin.
Jason Hill
>From what is Mario running in Super Mario Run? The answer is as obvious as it is tragic: from the smartphone itself. And in this contest, any victory is pyrrhic. For Nintendo to succeed on iOS is also to admit that its expensive hardware business might be inessential. But to fail on smartphones would only deport Mario and his crew back to the poverty of that very business. Nintendo is trapped. No wonder the company is looking back to the 1980s for relief as much as its fans.
Nathan Johnson
>But perhaps most surprising is the decidedly allegorical meaning of Super Mario Run. An endless runner is always framed by some calamity or catastrophe.
>female """gamer""" journalist Into the trash it goes
Julian Flores
Go shill your shit somewhere else
Owen Ross
How exactly am I shilling by posting a link to a piece published in a credible publication, and posting the piece so you don't need to give clicks to the publication?
Tyler Martin
Because you have no reason to share this literally who's opinion other than to shill their article.
Jacob Sanchez
Fuck yourself you shitty writer. Your garbage. Kill yourself.
Wyatt Johnson
My reason is this. Any time Nintendo is accused of being doomed, it is dismissed as something that only Sup Forums says. We are told time and time again that they have legitimate means to not be at risk of complete failure. This is a normie piece in one of the most normie of publications, and they are saying the exact same thing. It's a look outside of our own bubble, and pretentious though it may be, a lot of the points he makes are many that we do as well. You can dismiss it as a literally who opinion, but it is one that an editor of a well established publication with more than a century of credibility felt deserved to be shared. That credibility elevate it to consideration.
Justin Perry
>it is dismissed as something that only Sup Forums says No retard its dismissed as something only stupid people say.
Jason Myers
Its a piece by a guy with a liberal arts degree who used to make crap mobile phone apps and is so far up his own ass he can't see the light of day. He's an ivory tower academic who thinks he knows everything, but is blinded by his own prejudices. He'd fit right in on Sup Forums.
Michael Lee
No faggot. Its only something dumb motherfuckers say.
Jose Richardson
>He's an ivory tower academic published by a credible publication. When user posts something by anything less than credible it is dismissed as bullshit rumor mongering, so are we just all admitting no one can say anything about Nintendo other than that they are perfect, and that everything they do is perfect?
Ayden Price
>a credible publication
Henry Hernandez
None of this would be a problem if they had just made video games.
Xavier Hill
>Playing Mario, it turns out, was always more than just making him jump.
The most pretentious setence of the most pretentious article I've read all month
Charles Peterson
>published by a credible publication Yes, and? Are you saying that opinion pieces are always 100% as long as the publisher is well known?
Robert Green
>And in this contest, any victory is pyrrhic. For Nintendo to succeed on iOS is also to admit that its expensive hardware business might be inessential. But to fail on smartphones would only deport Mario and his crew back to the poverty of that very business. Nintendo is trapped. *slow clap*
Camden Green
>When user posts something by anything less than credible it is dismissed as bullshit rumor mongering Yes, and if that user had actually put a name down that people could find and investigate their claims might hold a bit more water. If I claim my dad works for nintendo and so do I, its most likely to be bullshit. If I gave you my real name and said I worked for Nintendo you could do even a cursory google search and figure out if there's any basis to my words.
Aiden Morales
Not at all. If anything I would argue that the credibility of a publication brings with it a standard, and that if it happens to be an opinion piece, that it might be an opinion worth hearing, because it it probably based upon more content than NINTENDO IS HORSE SHIT; SONY IS THE BEST!
James Davis
They deserve to die because they scammed me with the fucking WiiU I was fucking scammed with this piece of garbage
Levi Perry
The comments in this thread are "weep for humanity"-caliber. Holy shit.
Jason Carter
We all know that if Nintendo dies they'll be taking the entire console industry with it. Not that I mind, consoles are antiquated technology anyways, the future is in Android TV boxes made for multimedia AND gaming.
Mason Nelson
WiiU or PS4 which has the weakest library of games?
William Brooks
Obviously. Rumors are rumors. They are often published by sites trying to get clicks to increase their revenue. They have no standards. There are publications that do though. They want their clicks, yes, but they aren't going to publish something with the publication's name attached, if it doesn't meet those standards.
My question is, if we are so quick to dismiss both, just as equally, then how can we ever expect to have a worth a shit discussion, hell, go beyond Nintendo, about anything? When those with and without credibility are looked at as bullshit, we really are just here for company wars and memes, aren't we?
INB4 Where_do_you_think_you_are.jpg
Jaxon Thomas
PS4 looks promising, but nothing has really enticed me to go out and buy one.
The Wii U has great games and some disappointing games like Star Fox and Color Splash.
Lucas Peterson
Go to bed, Ian
Tyler Perez
Objectively the PS4
Landon Johnson
>how can we ever expect to have a worth a shit discussion On Sup Forums? You don't, and if you ever expected to you're either an optimist or dumb as a back of hammers.
Nolan Russell
Good, they're a relic of times past, unable to adapt to the 21st century. Nintendo should have died a long time ago, the wii was a mistake and basically necromancy, allowing nintendo to roam as a corpse for a decade or so more.
Xavier Walker
I doubt Nintendo will ever truly fail, but they could easily go the way of Sega and Atari if they don't clean up their act. Hopefully the Switch era sees a return to their old quality.
Jacob Moore
the only difference is that most of Sup Forums doesn't have a formal education of any kind
Josiah Bell
There is hope for Sup Forums, user. I've seen it in the shared embrace of Sonyggers and Nintendrones.
Benjamin Ramirez
>implying Sup Forums isn't good the way it is There's better places for conversation and discussion. Sup Forums is what it is for good reasons. Why make every website homogeneous?
Caleb Nelson
>Why make every website homogeneous? Didn't think that's what I was asking for. If anything there can be disagreements without every thread devolving into shitflinging between fans of rival hardware or game franchises.
Jack Bell
Hypothetical: If Nintendo went 3rd party, what exactly would be bad about it?
Hardmode: No childish "because other kids could play with my toys too"
Luis Cox
The only possible downside I could see would be a lack of a non-meme tier portable console, but one could argue that Ninty could develop their games for the Vita, and its successors, and elevate it out of Memesville, and into legitimate territory. Ninty could downsize on their hardware manufacturing property, decreasing the fixed costs of overhead as they do so, potentially increasing their liquid assets as they did so, and focus on hiring the best dev talent available to be a purely respectable game dev, instead of one praised on one hand, while being laughed at on another.
Xavier Rivera
It'd be bad for the 3rd party devs as they know that Nintendo's first party output always destroys any third party releases in sales.
Joseph Hughes
Nintendo has enough money to buy out Square Enix, and enough popularity and fame to be the face of the Tokyo Olympics BY REQUEST. Fairly sure they are fine.
Henry Wilson
Oops I thought you said "if nintendo had third party", though what I said still applies I guess
Ethan Price
Well, they could make 3rd party console-tier games and continue making 1st party handhelds and handheld-tier games. I think there's a huge grey area, that we're arguably already in now that they're making mobile games.
I think the Switch's biggest problem is that it really fails at being both a console, and a handheld. People say it's powerful for a handheld and that's true, but it's also big and the battery life will be bad. Plus games will be $60 and designed like console games, so they won't be "pick up and play". It's not the pocket sized device with great battery that made the DSlite so popular. And one of the best things about the DSlite was that it launched $129, so there's that angle too. I think the Switch will be too expensive
Blake Barnes
It's not that Nintendo's first party destroy's 3rd party sales, it's that people don't buy Nintendo hardware for 3rd party games. 3rd party games would continue to sell just as well as they do on other devices. In fact, having more developers would mean everyone would have to be more competitive, and it would mean games would be better. It's a win for everyone
I think Miyamoto was asked what the NES symbolized to him and he said "competition", and that's what's sorely lacking in modern Nintendo. They stopped competing. Once you stop competing, you stagnate, because there's no drive compelling you to be better.
Jason Wilson
Right now? The PS4. The 2017 releases seem like they will change it.
Josiah Long
>it's that people don't buy Nintendo hardware for 3rd party games Bullshit. That is what people who avoid Nintendo products try to tell themselves so they feel superior.
Evan Howard
Quality of their titles would drop drastically due to executive meddling.
Jace Rogers
Great fucking job, user.
Levi Powell
>Patricia Hernandez she needs to go back
Jayden Brooks
>because there's no drive compelling you to be better. Except, ya know, money? What, did you seriously believe Sony/MS see it as a competition with one-another rather than simply "what will make us the most money?"
Wyatt Fisher
It's extremely rare for 3rd party games to be big sellers on Nintendo consoles
There's a handful of exceptions and I think the biggest one is MH.
Jason Lewis
But at some point, we have to be diligent in not becoming "The Sup Forums that Cried Wolf," yes?
Because one day, Nintendo may make a string of catastrophically stupid moves, and if we can't shake them out of it, that's the end of one of the only decent gaming companies.
Samuel Green
Competition is how you stand out in the market and make money, fucking dumbass. Or do you think everyone is a richfag and can afford to buy all three consoles + their games?
Parker Parker
>did you seriously believe Sony/MS see it as a competition with one-another rather than simply Well of course. What do you think compelled Sony to remove all the things about the PS4 that would have made it just as bad as the Xbone? All the online DRM, used game sales blocked, those were all in the PS4 design patents. Sony took them out when they saw the response to the Xbone.
That's competition. Sure, it's driven by a desire for money, but it's competition. If these companies weren't competing, it wouldn't have happened, because the desire for money would have dictated that always-online, blocking used games sales makes more money. See? Competition actually works as a deterrent to the drive for money.
Colton Hall
Nintoddledrs are like trump supporters. You criticize their their "precious" even if its justifiable and they lash out and attack you or call you names. Pathetic.
Julian Myers
why did you buy a wii u in the first place? Didn't you get ass fucked enough from the wii's last 3 years of literally nothing?
Robert Rivera
Build it.
Jack Martinez
Would you have bought any Nintendo console in the past ten years if you were told beforehand there would be absolutely zero first party titles for it? No Mario, no Zelda, no Metroid, no Smash, no Kirby, no Pokemon, no Fire Emblem, nothing?
Jacob Turner
kek
Robert Morales
I bought a Wii mostly because of backwards compatibility piracy and component video without spending 1000 bucks on a GC Component cable. I used it for GC games and emulations. I gave zero shits about Wii games. I think I played like 10 Wii games at the most on that thing. The WiiU on the other hand was looking promising with things like Mario Kart 8 and the surprisingly generous DLC that felt more like a really cheap expansion pack. Then it went downhill.
Ryan Smith
>money
Nintendo's already doing that - creating less content and charging more for it in many ways (DLC, amiibo, etc.).
Competition MADE SURE that they feared for their existence and put their best foot forward.
As a Nintendo fan, I never really considered that this disadvantage of a Blue Ocean strategy would be an issue for Nintendo. That just seems foreign. But given how the Wii U, its games, and the Switch's design have dropped the ball, I think there may be something to this. And it's unnerving.
I can only hope that the absolute blasting that I did during that social media survey reaches someone high-up.
Liam Ward
>a credible publication sho sho liberal shill
Josiah Jackson
I know it doesn't matter saying that but, i started that sony x nintendo rollercoaster love back then with a simple thread that went like: >''can we put our differences aside and laugh at how badly microsoft fucked up with the xbox one?'' I was in the army and had 25MB of data left, so all the OC went by and me being unable to open them. I didn't expect it to produce dozens of threads that hit bump limit within 10 minutes each.
You have to remember though that this was back then when we thought the wii U would deliver, the infamous january 2013 direct happened a few months before that, and the ps4 looked also promising back then. Things have changed. Consoles feel really scattered now with only sony being able to make any meaningfull numbers.
Dylan Ward
Honestly, user, Unless the battery is worse than the 3DS, I think it'll be alright. As long as it isn't like the standard Wii U gamepad, it should be alright. The size may be where you have a point. The trailer left me thinking it wouldn't be too bad, but the Fallon presentation made it look big. If people use a messenger back, or a backpack it won't be a problem, but if they only go out with what they fit in their pockets, then you're totally correct. As for the cost, I think that being a problem will be dependent on how much the games succeed at feeling like a home console game, and not a portable game with better resolution like MonHun 3U did. If they are more a home console game that they can take on the go, and less portable games with better resolution while in the dock, I don't see the $60 price point being a problem. That of course is going to be the big question though, won't it be? If it can be more the former than the latter, then Nintendo may have a legitimate shot at getting 3rd party ports back. If it isn't, it'll just be where Devs send their portable games to.
Christopher Hill
tl;dr for other anons: Mario Run isn't very good which obviously means nintendo is dying, irrelevant, etc
really bad article senpai
Joshua Campbell
>implying there aren't Trump supporters meeting with Bernie right now
Austin Ortiz
>the wii's last 3 years of literally nothing but that's wrong, we got super mario galaxy 2, xenoblade, kirby return to dreamland, DKCR, and rhythm heaven fever
Wyatt Smith
>Nintendo is dying
Benjamin Hughes
Ninty hasn't been a decent company for years, user. Whether it be Amiibos, censoring, or many other crappy things they do now that they refused to just years ago, they have hands that are just as dirty as Sony and M$.
Easton Ross
My major concern is them having to bend to the will of an oppressive publisher. Remember Mario with a gun?
In general, there'd be a high risk of their IPs just sort of 'blending in' to their genres and becoming generic.
Gabriel Howard
1 game per year.
Mason Diaz
I think the Switch's success will depend entirely on cost, everything else is workable
I honestly don't see it working out for them at even $250. The 3DS launched for not much more than that and it received a huge price slash not 3 months later because it was tanking
Knowing Nintendo they will try to profit off of the hardware instead of accepting losses as a cost of business in this industry, which will cause a bumpy launch, which in turn will diminish consumer confidence permanently
I think if it launches for $200 on the other hand, it might have a chance of working out. Might.
Josiah Cruz
that was 5 in the last 3 years and i only listed the good ones
Connor Anderson
>Weeb says something retarded Same old, same old.
Colton Powell
Sony and MS don't dictate what games publishers make, for starters, and second Nintendo would still publish their own games. They're the biggest games publisher after EA, they don't need someone else to publish their games.
William Jenkins
Not necessarily, especially if your system is targeting a different demographic - which nintendo has been doing since the gamecube didn't meet expectations. It's called a "blue ocean" strategy.
True, but the goal is primarily to make money. Sony/MS compete because they prefer to compete within the same market to the extent that they have very similar hardware and releases these days; it wasn't always this way, though.
Amiibo are cancer, but thankfully Nintendo barely use them for anything, and they've just become a collector's item by this point honestly. However, I think the biggest problem with the Wii U was the awful marketing for the product - the comparison betweenthe Wii marketing and Wii U marketing is night and day. I don't agree with your assertion on the Switch, the design of the system looks good to me - though thinking about it you're probably referring to hardware rumours, to which I feel it doesn't matter as much as Sup Forums seems to believe. Weak hardware has historically still been able to sell - e.g. the PS2 and now infamous Wii (both noteworthy for a really strong marketing campaign, too).
Michael Turner
Whatever it launches at, I'll be selling back my Wii U towards cutting the MSRP. Hopefully GS will do what they have with 3DS's, and take $100 off.
Mason Green
Nintendo needs to stop being special snowflakes with their hardware.
Asher Brooks
If it's literally Nintendo games on different hardware, I suppose I wouldn't have issue with that. If the IP has to change, however, then there's no point. I just feel like there's a high risk of that happening.
Kevin Butler
W8, youa ctually wanted a powerful console isntead of a underpowered to hell and below tablet with an hdmi dock? Are you retarded?
Nolan Jones
The Switch is a very powerful handheld
Levi Moore
I disagree. I think Sony and M$ wouls want them to keep their games exactly the same, because then it expands games that can be marketed to kids, and young adults, as well as those nostalgic for classic Nintendo, which as a consequence expands their potential market segment. They have the adult corner locked at the moment. Keeping Ninty IP's as they are allows them to tell moms they can buy a Play Station or XBox for little Johnny.
Matthew Garcia
What is the best video game console for a gamer who only plays to videogames rated E for Everyone in the ESRB?
Asher Gutierrez
The biggest r eason Sony or MS wouldn't tell them what to do is that they'd be afraid of them going exclusive to the other guy
Hunter White
Or it would be if there weren't already smartphones on the market that outperform it.
Robert Anderson
>>From what is Mario running in Super Mario Run? The answer is as obvious as it is tragic: from the smartphone itself Oh it's satire
Adam Thomas
That too.
Jeremiah Kelly
It helps that every other Toys-to-Life is dying, not to mention that the Animal Crossing line is burning shelves.
Unless it is retro-themed, Nintendo's marketing is cringe, at best. Never a good thing. I understand that it's difficult to market a product to a bunch of shitflinging, edgy children, but Nintendo COULD stand to modernize their franchises.
As for the Switch, I'm not seeing any benefits. Awkward form design with plenty of potential power issues, the games from the last gen have yet to impress, and while they are rumors it does NOT help that we're not hearing all rumors that Nintendo is going top-of-the-line instead of one Gen behind (as they have done since the Wii).
No, none of this bodes well.
Hudson Carter
if only
Joshua Lopez
both systems already have characters that are more than capable to appeal to children they just neglect those IPs , I'd imagine after a year they would do the same with nintendo.
I get this joke but what does having a powerful console actually accomplish ? history has shown that it is never the winning console ever and it usually makes devs focus on graphics which results in a game with horrible to just passable gameplay and most often runs at 5-10 fps most the time.
Dylan White
>No, none of this bodes well. What if I told you.. multi-touch support!
