Nintendo escaped the console war. Now Microsoft and Sony want out, too | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo escaped the console war. Now Microsoft and Sony want out, too

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27 pointsisaacfrond22 comments

Let's watch as Microsoft and Sony completetly miss the point that this article makes. Where Nintendo is making bank with fun-to-play games (Splatoon being the example in TFA), MS and Sony will be holding meetings to brainstorm how better to monetize loot boxes. One company seems to emphasize making fun games for me to play, two other companies emphasize extracting more money from my pocket and hopefully the game is enough fun to play to keep those dollars flowing.

I guess the point I'm driving at is, though I was always a cow to be milked, the last couple versions of Call of Duty (as just one example) have made it way too obvious now. In contrast to a first-party Nintendo game that just lets me play the game I bought.

Nintendo, and seemingly evermore monolith soft, are incredibly talented when it comes to games. But even forgetting monetization, they clearly focus on making games that seem fun. Whereas most other companies make games that want to be popular or cool. Nintendo doesn't have much competition in this space for no particularly good reason. Some indies dip their toes in it but it often falls into a level of self deprecation that I think harms the experience.

Mario himself seems to have a lot fun jumping around and its pretty infectious. Link (mostly), Splatoon inklings, animal crossing villagers, pokemon, and kirby do too. I don't think I can name any major titles on Xbox or Playstation where the characters' primary emotion is joy.

Mario's movement is an odd design. He runs like a hyperactive toddler, his arms flailing out to the sides. But his other moves, especially his advanced jumps, he does with the precision and grace of a gymnast. It's like a simultaneous expression of the fantasy of navigating the terrain through acrobatics and "weee, this is fun!" spontaneous whimsy.

If you look closely enough, Nintendo design is oddball, but very purposeful.

Crash Bandicoot, but that's from the good times. He does regularly die horribly though.

I don't think you know Sony.

Sony has been making tons of fun games to play with zero loot boxes in the game.

God of War, Last of Us, Uncharted, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon are all top selling videos games in the past few years and all of them contain zero loot boxes.

All of them are highly loved video games as well.

Sony spent the last few decades buying gaming studio to make fun games for them. Almost all of them have nothing to do with loot boxes.

I don't think you know Sony.

I think it more a problem of me letting the article dictate the terms of the discussion. Did Microsoft publish my whipping boy Call of Duty? Of course not, one can play CoD on a Playstation just as well, and any undesirable traits of the game lie at the feet of Activision.

It might be more accurate to bitch about Xbox Game Pass and the like, as there seems to be a hard push to just rent your access to games with a monthly payment. Or the acquisition of studios (as TFA makes a point of) so that $COMPANY has exlusive access to $HOT_GAME.

Dude, Game Pass is spectacular and completely optional. Want to pay $15/mo and have access to basically every game that exists for the Xbox (including $79 games on launch), sign up for it. Want to still buy the games and own them for $79? You can do that too.

Also, your last sentence about exclusivity is a really strange point when comparing to Nintendo - which literally only does that. (And has extremely vicious customer unfriendly pricing. Breath of the Wild is still $60 5 years later).

>extracting more money from my pocket and hopefully the game is enough fun to play to keep those dollars flowing

Yet Nintendo has an extensive gacha lineup like Super Mario Run, Mario Kart Tour, Pokemon GO, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes etc.

You might ignore it but don't pretend Nintendo is some holy divine protector of gaming.

> brainstorm how better to monetize loot boxes. [...] extracting more money from my pocket and hopefully the game is enough fun to play to keep those dollars flowing.

This is one of the three major things that drove me away from gaming almost entirely over a decade ago.

> brainstorm how better to monetize loot boxes.

(some exec) I know! NFTs and the blockchain!

Oh that's completely not fair. Microsoft is extremely gamer friendly.

Microsoft is sitting here with Game Pass giving people unlimited access to most games in their catalog for $15/mo including 0-day access to their biggest releases. Better yet, they do this cross platform so you can play them anywhere and keep your data in sync. And, if you don't want to subscribe to game pass you can STILL buy the games.

Meanwhile, Nintendo literally charges $59.99 for games released in early 2017.

Nintendo sells tools, Sony and Microsoft offer a network of repairmen who will come to your house for a scheduled visit. Yes, they’re both very similar as to what is accomplished by the end of the process, but one of them is satisfied to sell you a tool whereas the other wants the tool to be part of other things… not hard to see why most people who want a tool don’t use their service when they don’t want a service at all.

Nintendo's use of the "blue ocean" strategy was interesting. Microsoft and Sony "console wars" are obsolete at this point thanks to cell phones and pcs.

My kids play minecraft on almost anything. Console wars are a foreign concept to them. The most interesting thing I found is that they don't really have love for nintendo. I bought them each a switch lite, that they don't care for at all. They do play mario kart tour on their cell phones occasionally.

Sometimes I feel like Nintendo is becoming a brand for middle age millennials trying to relive their childhood.

I think the 'console wars' are still relevant, maybe even more so now that both Microsoft and Playstation have their own subscription models. I think there will always be a market segment for console gamers, despite how many Xbox and PS titles go to PC.

> Sometimes I feel like Nintendo is becoming a brand for middle age millennials trying to relive their childhood.

As someone coming into middle-age, I relate to this. With less free time, but more money, I personally suffer from 'choice paralysis' sometimes. I almost exclusively played PC games in college, but now I don't want to use a computer after work to play games. Consoles give me simple, high-quality bursts of fun - and for less hassle than a PC. Nintendo specifically gives me that hit of nostalgia wrapped in new experiences.

Everyone has their preferences. But I've been leaning away from PC and towards consoles.

I never had a Nintendo childhood, as I'm too old (grew up on Atari 2600, et. al.) I still find a lot of fun in that little machine. Even the Ring Fit game, which is a fitness game in case the title doesn't give it away, I find to be a lot of fun. This despite the fact that I run quite a lot (as in, trail races over 26 miles) and should probably poo-poo such things, but it's enough fun to fire it up once in a while and it can give me a workout even if it just takes a few rounds to get there.

Not that I'm negating your point. The fact that I can download just about every first-party game from decades-old Nintendo console says there's something to the nostalgia theory.

It's pretty crazy to me how successful Splatoon is. A kid friendly third person competitive shooter sounds difficult to pull off. Props to nintendo for making it work so well, especially on completely novel IP.

They used the aesthetic of 90s Nickelodeon gameshows -- replete with brightly colored "gak" -- to do it, too; an aesthetic that is coded as kid-friendly to the now middle-aged people who are buying this game for their children. It's a pretty significant masterstroke of design. I also like how the game chooses colors for opposing teams in such a way that they strongly contrast each other, even to colorblind players.

Would the japanese designers who created this game be familiar with American kid friendly live action 90s game shows or is any similarity just a coincidence??

It's the kind of thing Japanese developers would study up on to appeal to Westerners, at least. Remember, this was intended to be Nintendo's Call of Duty.

There are other influences to Splatoon's aesthetic, too, like Japanese graffiti art and urban culture in general.

> completely novel IP

No kidding - Splatoon 1 launched on the Wii U platform in May 2015, when everyone considered the Wii U to be a flop. It had so much going against it at the time:

- New/unrecognized IP

- Shooter genre, which typically doesn't cater to Nintendo's fan base

- Third-person shooter, which is all but extinct, save for Gears of War

- Online-centric, something Nintendo is not known for

Splatoon has been a surprise success from the very beginning.

From wikipedia:

> Splatoon debuted at No. 2 in the UK software sales chart in the week it launched, only behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It is the fifth fastest-selling Wii U game and the fastest-selling new intellectual property on the console in that country, beating the previous record set by Ubisoft's 2012 launch title ZombiU.[81] Splatoon debuted at the top of the Japanese software sales chart, with over 144,000 retail copies sold in its launch week and a total of 1.53 million sold by December 2016.

From the article

> Splatoon 3, which launched last week in Nintendo’s home country to an astounding 3.45 million units sold in its first three days.

Wow! What a major success story on both fronts. From 144k over the first week to 3.45M over a few days. I'd imagine the original would have done even better if not for the Wii U too.

Kid Friendly and played by kids is almost two different concepts. As a millennial parent, I've noticed a lot of adults in my peer group play more nostalgic kiddy games than the actual kids! I've a strong feeling it's due to wanting to return to our childhoods, when life had a lot less pressures.

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