A Dolphin's Tale: The Story of GameCube
dromble.com
dromble.com
It was kind of sad to read this. There are some thing in the article, like the idea of a console as a toy for fun, that are so quintessentially Nintendo and why I love them. But it's also so clear that it's not the direction the market went. You can see how the 3rd party problems got worse and the beginnings of the disaster that Nintendo's on-line efforts. There are points where it's just so clear their arrogance is causing them serious problems.
I really love Nintendo. I hope they can turn themselves around before it's too late.
The problem is, they didn't capitalize on it. A lot of people with a Wii didn't buy much software. The Wii had no real online component, despite being released a few years after the introduction of Xbox Live. Over the lifetime of the Wii, Nintendo appears to have learned basically nothing about online services. Sony & MS kept improving their online experience.
The Wii had the ability for downloaded games, but it didn't work that great. They were oddly tied to the console, and that was never fixed. Meanwhile it worked great for Sony and MS.
But years later, when the WiiU and 3DS came out... they had the same problems. Games tied to hardware (not accounts), terrible online components. They don't have the success to draw in third parties (on the WiiU), so they're having serious problems. That's four generations running of poor 3rd party support.
And they seemed to learn the wrong lesson from the 3DS. They tried something interesting with the Wii, and it worked pretty well. They tried it again with the 3DS, and it's basically failed. Even Nintendo is making games that don't use 3D. So when the WiiU came... it was full of new (and expensive) gimmicks. So the 'just games' console cost most of $400.
Sony, on the other hand, actually learned from the PS2 and PS3 and simplified. They didn't try to cram new exotic hardware in the console, and that made it easy for 3rd parties and cheaper to produce.
I don't think Nintendo will ever recover on the WiiU. I hope they can last long enough to fix things for the next generation.
However, I'm not totally optimistic. The Wii U has been an absurd marketing disaster.
My other problem with the 3DS is that they still haven't learned how to do downloadable software or online games properly. They're making the right noises on these issues... but it's not like it should have been a surprise.
The only time 3D works is when it is not presented on a 2D surface, such as a VR solution.
Or a web browser that puts high-scoring HN submissions in the foreground and lower scoring items in the background. (Has anyone done a red blue glasses chrome extension for this?)
Apart from that the 3d is neat, but pointless. I'm sure there are some games that use it sensibly, but most don't.
It's weird to see so many racing titles on iOS and so few on 3 DS.
Can't figure out any other good explanation behind why they still won't let me buy Minish Cap. Sure it made sense a couple years ago when they wanted to make people who bought a 3DS before the price drop feel special. But that's far enough in the past that they're not earning any additional goodwill from it, so it's morphed into something more like, "Making sure these people still feel whatever shred of special-ness they might still feel from being 3DS Ambassadors is more important to them than earning more of my money."
Got similar suspicions about why they refuse to make SNES and N64 games available on 3DS Virtual Console.
I really enjoyed my WiiU much more than I expected to. I think the hardware and the platform are really cool. They should rebrand.
This software architecture is not conducive to what you expect from modern systems with hypervisors and multiple things running alongside the games and apps. Read more at http://wiibrew.org/wiki/IOS
But that's wrong - the Wii had a perfectly fine attach ratio of a bit over 8 games per console - above PS3 but below XBox 360.
Sources:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/01/24/wii-tie-ratio-at-81-i...
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20988
As far as the current gen goes, I see only the Wii U as an actual console. XBone is an always-on camera on a consumer PC and I have to pay to get online. PS4 is a consumer PC without a camera and I have to pay to get online. They have nothing that won't come on the PC that's worth playing.
And for the 3DS the two problems I see are the low pixel density of the screen and the motion controls. The low pixel density means I see different jaggies (aliasing) with each eye and that feels weird. The motion controls don't mesh well with the need to always keep the system at a precise tilt and distance from my eyes, but in games without motion controls it works reasonably well. I wonder if any game studio would decide to not use the 3D feature, but instead push better graphics.
P.S. The one thing that worries me about the 3DS is the lack of homebrew. Flashcarts are already available but only for piracy, I still can't run my own software on the device.
The PC is the one that is likely to struggle since fewer and fewer people are buying desktop machines. And laptops/tablets are all about battery life.
We're doing just fine thank you very much.
Totally agree. Nintendo in the N64 era made games so good that became part of popular culture.
But that matters little because they dominate with the 3DS. In terms of handhelds they have little competition. Nintendo can survive the WiiU if they're smart about it, so I doubt they'll be out of the game anytime soon.
They just need to stop doing the stupid gimmicks they pass off as innovation and focus on their strengths, making fun games that everyone can enjoy.
----- [2003]
Each time Satoru Iwata did an interview with the press, the subject of online gaming would rear its head. As you can imagine, Iwata became increasingly annoyed with answering the same question over and over. He slammed critics who claimed that Nintendo couldn’t survive as a business unless they embraced online gaming as the future.
“All the talk in the industry regarding online gaming has been misleading. Network swindlers have made it seem like companies can’t survive in this business without network compatibility,” said Iwata. “That’s the same type of rhetoric people have been saying about the newspaper business, that the paper-based periodical business will be dead in three years. In reality, the number of users willing to pay a monthly fee for online games is small. Many of the American companies who were focusing almost exclusively on network games last year now view network capabilities as an advertising tool. The fact of the matter is, network games can’t provide a stable source of profit for a company of Nintendo’s scale.”
That quote was apprently from 2003. Many (formerly) paper-based periodicals may be dying, but some, like the Financial Times and the New Yorker, seem to have a reason to live.
Their strategy so far is to pretend that it's still 2001 and that isn't a strategy that they can sustain forever.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/hard_soft/index.html
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/software/3ds.html
What's wrong with making good games and charging more than a fast food lunch for them? It's not like anybody levels this complaint at Microsoft or Sony, who tend to charge even more for new releases.
Yokoi articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考?, "Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō") (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology") in the book, Yokoi Gunpei Game House (横井軍平ゲーム館 Yokoi Gunpei Gēmu-kan?), which consists of a collection of interviews. "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.[10]
- I sold my Super Nintendo in high school for $20. What the hell was I thinking...
- My sister took my N64 to someone's house many years ago and I never saw it since (nor do we remember whose house... at the moment I didn't care... foolish me).
- And finally, I left my Gamecube at my girlfriend's apartment, and then she moved and forgot it in some old cupboard in the closet... it's been a few years now unfortunately so I doubt it's still there.
It's funny how in the moment you don't really care that much but later on you're smacking yourself heh.
My Gamecube is packed away, but I still pull out the Bongo accesories to play Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat via Wii backwards-compatibility. This is possibly my favourite game of all time, there's just something magical about getting into the flow state playing a game that you control via bongos and hand-claps.
Here's a video review that agrees with my view that this is a hidden gem that introduced a lot of concepts use later by Nintendo:
Re: flow-state - perhaps the only game where this is possible at any level of intoxication.
I also have my Dreamcast and PSX with screen to keep me entertained. Not sure I'll ever move on to newer hardware, other than the PC games I have! Still reliably playing Homeworld 2 every Monday, pretty sad really.
Great console. Great read.
- Off TV play
- DS on steriods kind of works
- In a family house hold, having the game on both screens completely gets rid of "You're in the way" frustrations.
- Wireless display streaming!? (When this gets better, it will be amazing).
- Few games use it in any meaningful way. - It's bulky and unfamiliar. - It muddies the image of what the console is (is the tablet the Wii U?) - It raised the price of the console significantly. - It threw away the momentum they had for something none of their install-base wanted.
While I love my Wii U, it's destined to become another 20m failure. I hope that I'm wrong and that with time they can really iterate on their online functionality and get some better 3rd party support, but I'm not optimistic. If nothing else the 3DS is killing it, so it's not like they're going broke any time soon.
People over here are starting to play it once again. Lot of people would gather for a beer and a game of Super Smash Melee, even our non game friends.
The controller is great, the games are great, and since the games weren't aiming for looks but gameplay, they all age very well!
They released Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube and sold a total of 1.5 million copies. When they ported the game to the PS2 it sold a total of 8 million copies.
If there's one thing Nintendo seems to be forgetting lately, it's this. They seem to think, nowadays, that bolting on new hardware features will improve demand, but it's never true. Software drives hardware sales. Mario sold the NES and SNES. Wii Sports sold the Wii. Pokemon is selling the 3DS these days -- until Pokemon (and to a lesser extent Animal Crossing) came out, the 3DS was doing terribly. And nothing is selling the Wii U. A tablet controller alone can't save it.
I don't think Nintendo has ever "bolted on new hardware features" for the sake of selling consoles to consumers. The new hardware features are pretty much always for the sake of luring third parties into developing something innovative for the platform.
See this excellent essay: http://www.lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation...
Nintendo makes money on games that explore new genres. It can't keep doing that unless it keeps increasing the design-space and interaction-space to find those new genres within.
Innovation is good when it supports the goal of creating games people want to play. Wii Sports, for example, could not be done without the Wii Remote. That was a good innovation that served both to lower the barrier of entry to games and to allow for new modes of play that people found fun. But things like the 3D of the 3DS, which Nintendo is now wisely backing away from, or the tablet on the Wii U, which substantially increased its price tag, don't provide those same benefits. And hardware innovation alone doesn't cut it -- it needs games like Wii Sports to support it.
And I think that for a company like Nintendo, third-party support is heavily overrated. The best way to get third-party support is to sell enough consoles that they can no longer ignore you, and the only way to do that is strong first-party games.
It's nonsense to imply that Nintendo games aren't polished, or that third-party AAA game developers will necessarily dominate any genre that they choose to develop for. I can't think of a 2D platformer that has ever done as well as Mario, and 2D platformers are one of gaming's oldest genres -- certainly a "mature genre".
That article was written back in 2005, just after the Wii Remote was announced, when people were still speculating about that strange new controller and what it could mean. We have the benefit of hindsight now, and the best way to understand what was going on then is to take it straight from the horse's mouth, looking back at the early days of the Wii, when Nintendo talked openly about their business strategy. Back then, they outright said that they based their new strategy on the books The Innovator's Dilemma and The Blue Ocean Strategy. (They talked about this in their shareholder meetings, which were available online but which I unfortunately can no longer find.) These books give us a framework for understanding what they were doing then -- no need to create ungainly terms like "genre king". The books talk about conceiving of the market as the "core" -- which were the people who were actively playing and buying games at the time, and which were the target market of their competitors -- and the "expanded audience" -- which were those who weren't playing games, or who used to play but had since stopped. The latter is who Nintendo chose to focus on back then. Innovation did play a part in that, but it doesn't explain it entirely: some games were innovative and succeeded, (ex. Wii Sports), some were innovative and failed, (ex. Wii Music, remember that one?) and some were not innovative but still managed to differentiate themselves by appealing to the expanded audience (ex. New Super Mario Bros.). To lump the latter category of games, which were new entries in genres with long and storied histories, together with games that were in completely new genres, is contradictory.
New Super Mario Bros., for one, effectively used none of the hardware features of the Wii to its advantage, and was still one of the strongest-selling games of the generation. Its success is attributable not to innovation but to being a game that many people, especially the expanded audience, wanted to play. It's as simple as that.
This made me seriously consider buying a WiiU again, if only to experience how that story develops...