Comment by mrcharles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrcharles | Hacker News Reader

The reaction from the game industry as a whole, even including the fringe elements, has been pretty lukewarm. Another gimmicky peripheral, unknown hardware capabilities, and it sounds like Nintendo hasn't locked down silicon yet, meaning that next year will be all first party titles and it'll launch, again, without third party support.

And then you get response from people like the developer of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, which highlights exactly what a lot of people are thinking:

https://twitter.com/#!/the1console/status/81023029114699776 https://twitter.com/#!/the1console/status/81023726652624897

Couple that with Nintendo's level of hostility against indie devs, and their complete failure to grasp what it is that is making iOS such a threat to their gaming business (hint: it's the app store, not the touch screen), I can't help but think that Nintendo has peaked and is now on the way back down.

They may still make a lot of bank off of their wacky controller and kid friendly gimmicks (though I wonder how friendly it will be in a group of children and only one of them gets to use the special controller), but their days of influence in the game industry are coming to a close, methinks.

They seem to be trying to position themselves so that they're not viewed as competing with App Store games. Granted, they still, to some degree at least, have to compete over developer resources, and their attitude toward indie developers is incredibly ill-advised.

I really don't see the controller as gimmicky, though, at least in the sense that touch screens in general aren't really seen as a gimmick anymore, and other aspects of the controller have been done before. Moreover, someone upgrading this time would actually have to buy fewer peripherals than for previous systems.

Harsher things were said of the Wii, and it was ultimately pretty successful. I'd wager Nintendo will stay relevant precisely long as it continues to produce quality first party titles, but not a moment longer.

If the only thing keeping Nintendo relevant is their first party software, I would expect them to go the way of Sega fairly quickly. I don't think Nintendo will be in the hardware business in 15 years unless they dramatically change their corporate culture and attitudes towards third party development. That means everything from who they allow to develop titles to what tools they provide for development. Given the overall level of enmity they've created amongst the indie development community and the large third party devs (thanks for telling everyone about the motion plus about half a year too late, jerks), I strongly doubt they'll win any hearts and minds. The only reason any third parties even bother with Wii dev now is because of the marketshare, even then, that marketshare has not resulted in the expected returns for most third parties.

Not insignificantly, though, Sega dropped the ball on their (already limited selection of) first-party software before they dropped out of the hardware business. Nintendo has multiple franchises that are all at least as strong as Sonic was in the Genesis days. Nintendo's console sales have always been held up by first party franchises - they burned bridges with 3rd parties long ago by charging extortionate license fees on the SNES. It'll be interesting to see how far they need to go to tip the scales against them.

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