On people’s lack of understanding of Nintendo
You hear it all the time – people speak about how Nintendo are aiming at a different target, are trying to capture non-gamers and casuals instead of core gamers, are winning because of some fad effect, etc. I spoke about some of the issue with this in my last post, where I talked about the writings of a man named Sean Malstrom. This man’s writings should be on the “required reading” list of anyone who wants to talk about the videogame industry. While I don’t agree completely with everything he says, most of what he says is spot-on, and he talks about things that too few people are interested in saying. He is clearly both knowledgeable and highly intelligent. But enough about Mr Malstrom, let’s get back to the post.
As I was saying, people talk extensively on what Nintendo is doing, and yet, very few actually understand what Nintendo is doing, to the extent that they make outrageous claims and demands. And it is this that I will be talking about in this post.
I will start with the very point which inspired me to write this post – Wii channels. Go to just about any gaming site that has forums for Wii, and you’ll hear people complaining that there aren’t enough interesting channels on the Wii, that Nintendo are wasting a huge opportunity, that their channels are uninspired and weak offerings, and that Nintendo needs to bring more interesting channels more frequently.
There’s no nice way to say this – they’re all wrong. Every one of them. Nintendo’s channel system is moving exactly the way that it was designed to (although there are certain additions I think would make sense based on their strategy – more about that later). It’s not a selling point of the Wii – people aren’t going to buy the Wii just so that they can get access to the “DVD playback channel” or the “Music download channel”. The Wii isn’t a multimedia system, it’s designed for one thing – games. The channels that they provide serve three purposes – either getting people to use the system, or advertising their games, or providing low-level games for entertainment purposes.
And in this, each of the channels can be categorised into these three purposes – News Channel, Forecast Channel, Internet Channel, and Photo Channel, for instance are all designed to get people using the system. They’re non-games designed to get people comfortable with the wiimote, while providing an experience sufficient to get people using it more than once in a blue moon. Similarly, Nintendo Channel and Wii Shop Channel are all about advertising and sales. The third category, the “low-level games”, have the Mii channel, Mii Contest Channel (known as Check Mii Out in America), and the channels that are installed by games (such as the Wii Fit Channel).
Even where there is overlap (Internet Channel is also set up to allow flash games designed around the Wiimote, for instance), the channels fit within these categories. Any channel that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, you shouldn’t expect on the Wii. If the channel doesn’t fall into one of these categories, then the channel will not be advantageous for Nintendo to release onto the system. As such, the only way to expect anything with such non-advantageous functionality is to expect it to be non-free purchases. A DVD-playing channel, for instance, would only be useful for Nintendo if they charged a reasonable fee for people to get it. Indeed, I expect something like this to happen, some time down the line, when system sales start to taper off, as a way to increase revenue.
There are, however, channels which Nintendo should consider introducing. One such channel that I have thought of is a “Funny section” channel. This would provide a number of daily comics as well as a few daily puzzles, in emulation of the funny section of the newspaper, as something for people to use on a morning as light entertainment, much as that section is normally used. Such a channel would pair well with the News and Forecast channels, which provide other services within this “newspaper-esque” field. This channel, by the way, falls somewhere between “light entertainment” and “getting people to use the Wiimote”.
But this reasoning must be extended to more than just the Wii’s channels. Nintendo is a company – their aim is to make money. Companies care about their consumers insofar as it is profitable. This is why Nintendo does not sell their system for less than cost-price (Sony and Microsoft do so because their systems would otherwise be too expensive, and they would not make profit from it). It is why Nintendo make games with Mario more often than necessary – Mario sells games. It is why Nintendo strive to make their games high quality and fun – if they’re fun, people will buy and play them. Everything Nintendo does must be interpreted under this context.
When people notice Nintendo’s choices regarding their online system, they complain – Nintendo’s online system is “a joke”, and only serves to alienate consumers. People rail against Nintendo’s online system… but do they understand it? Why did Nintendo choose that system, and not another one? What is it about Nintendo’s online system that made Nintendo choose to use it? It can’t just be that it was simple, and it worked on the DS – Nintendo has never been a company to just re-use things without thought. Indeed, this is emphasised by the additional features that have been gradually introduced. Mario Kart Wii provides a number of great features, including the ability to join a room that contains a friend who is in a worldwide match (and thus join the worldwide match), the ability to send friend invites to people on your Wii List (avoiding the need to know your Friend Code for those people), the ability to add friends-of-friends to your friend list with a button-click, and so on.
“But,” the people complain, “where’s our voice chat?” Nintendo has plans for voice chat, that can be seen by the fact that voice chat is a potential selling point, and that Nintendo added it to a number of DS titles. However, what is the point of adding voice chat if you can’t make a little money out of it in the process? Nintendo has openly stated that all that needs to happen for voice chat to become part of the Wii is for a peripheral to be finalised. Anyone who thinks that Nintendo wouldn’t want to make money from a voice chat peripheral is kidding themselves – this is going to be a proprietary peripheral, and it’s most likely going to make an appearance at E3. If it doesn’t, people can look back at this part of my post and laugh all they want.
Anything else you want Nintendo to implement into their system, you need to stop and ask yourself: what’s in it for Nintendo? They’re not going to add anything that isn’t profitable for them, so answer this question, and you’ll know whether or not Nintendo are likely to add it. For instance, as much as people are annoyed at friend codes, what does Nintendo gain from switching to a “gamertag” style system? They don’t need to encourage further sales – they still can’t keep Wiis on the shelves as it is. They won’t sell more of those games, because people aren’t going to decide to play a game solely on the existence of a codename replacing their friend code. It’ll be extra work for Nintendo, for essentially no gain. And before anyone says anything about “PR”, I’ll repeat the point that, with Wiis constantly out of stock, there’s no need for additional PR boosts such as the one involved in introducing codenames.
This same reasoning applies to anything related to Nintendo, or to either of the other console makers… but you must always keep in mind, these companies are not infallible. Nintendo, as the market-leader, has no need to add more features, or anything like that. The others do, and thus are under greater stress to add things to try to boost sales. This is why, although it would be a bad business decision from Microsoft if they do it, it is entirely plausible that Microsoft will, indeed, release a motion-sensitive controller for the 360. Similarly, Sony may indeed drop the price of their system even further in an attempt to attract more consumers, even though a price drop would have little effect on sales – it takes system-sellers to sell systems, not price drops. Why buy the system now, when there aren’t enough games to justify buying it, is the argument the consumer makes.
So remember, everyone - don’t just assume that, because you’d like it, it’s something Nintendo should do. Their job isn’t to satisfy you completely, but to make money.
And bringing that back to the original point, which is where I start to overlap with my last post, Nintendo aren’t ignoring the core gamer. The core gamer is the source of a [i]huge[/i] amount of profit for Nintendo. Nintendo simply wouldn’t make that mistake, since they’re the ones who basically [i]established[/i] the core gamer in the first place. If Nintendo were only caring about casual gamers, they wouldn’t be releasing games like Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, etc. These are games that sell predominantly to core gamers, and Nintendo haven’t been ignoring them. Indeed, we can expect the number of these games to start to ramp up over the life of the Wii, as more and more casual gamers are brought “upstream” into the core.
Now, if only third-parties would understand this, and help bring the gamers upstream into the core, they’d profit from the Wii just as Nintendo themselves are. But, as per a new Malstrom article (which I can’t find a way to link to), the big third-parties are lacking an understanding of Nintendo’s strategy, and as a result, it’s the small developers, like LostWinds’ “Frontier Developments” and Trauma Centre’s “Atlus” that will be the big winners other than Nintendo. These are the developers that will profit from the Wii, and may very well end up being much bigger by the end of the generation. And before anyone laughs at the idea, I’d like to point out that all the big companies right now started off as much smaller companies. Take Ubisoft, for instance – established in 1986, it wasn’t until Rayman’s release 10 years later that Ubisoft truly started to thrive. Now, just 12 years after that, they’re considered one of the biggest developers and publishers.
Sadly, those same 12 years that Ubisoft thrived in has left them weak and resistant to change, meaning that the time is ripe for them, and other huge developers, to be overthrown in preference for smaller, more dynamic ones. Fortunately, Nintendo, in its long time in the industry, has managed to remain nimble enough to actually stay relevant, perhaps in no small part due to Miyamoto’s genius. And it’s this agility that allows Nintendo to drive this revolution, not in games, but in developers. Slowly, the big developers (other than Ubisoft) are starting to ca
