Nintendo sucks… but I love them.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last three decades you might be aware of a Japanese company called Nintendo. Nintendo is known for bringing gaming to the home through the now classic Nintendo Entertainment system or NES. The innovation that led to the creation of a home based system was ground breaking at the time. Games mostly lived in Arcades. To play at home was revolutionary. However as Nintendo progressed the need for innovation became apparent. Home counsels needed to be more than a system to play games through a button based controller.
This is why I love Nintendo. They are willing to explore new technology even if it fails them. They’ve had great success (The motion based controls of the Wii) and great failure with these innovations (The Virtual boy).
Pictured above is the motion control of the Wii in action. Grandma simply swings the remote to simulate real tennis. When this was revealed(2006), it was before smart phones and mobile gaming and therefore was instrumental in getting “casual” gamers to play Nintendo. What Nintendo didn’t see was that by bringing casual gamers into the market, they opened the door for mobile gaming in a few short years. This would kill the counsel market that Nintendo had itself created.
While Nintendo has had great success implementing new technologies like the motion controls into its systems, it has also implemented some ideas that left consumers scratching their heads. The Wii was one of the most successful home counsels ever. Fast forward one iteration to the WiiU and it has essentially failed on every level.
Nintendo set out to yet again redefine how people played games. They figured that the Wii was so successful that they could simply use similar tactics to sell units. Rather than focus on the motion control as the “gimmick” the WiiU set out to use a second screen to create Augmented gaming. The idea being that for certain games you would need the huge blocky controller to interact with certain aspects of games. To Nintendo’s surprise the WiiU was not well received. Hard core gamers found the second screen to be cumbersome and felt that developers weren’t using the technology in a way to benefit the gameplay. Casual gamers felt the second screen was too complicated. They simply wanted to play Angry Birds on their phones.
This is why Nintendo kind of sucks. They seem to avoid user and market input in lieu of just going for “innovative” styles of play. While the motion controls of the Wii were ground breaking, the second screen of the WiiU diverted a ton of core and casual gamers away from Nintendo. The sales of units and games has been dismal to say the least.
However the reason I still buy Nintendo products is because I have faith that the company’s leadership, both abroad and in Japan can come back from the mistakes made on the WiiU. The WiiU had a lot of great titles to play but it lacked the gut wrenching greatness of the Wii. Thankfully something new is on the horizon for this storied trading card company.
In the past year or so thanks to data mining, leaks and eventual press releases we have been introduced to Nintendo’s next “home system” The NX. While we don’t know too much about the tech, the NX is shaping up to be a lot of what the WiiU wasn’t.
Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot had this to say “I believe Nintendo will be back in the race with the NX.The new Nintendo [console] is a fantastic machine,” Guillemot added during a separate Ubisoft presentation, according to GameSpot. “It’s really a new approach, it’s really Nintendo, [which is] coming with something new again. We love it.”
The most interesting bit of data we’ve gotten is that the NX could be a hybrid counsel/handheld experience. Hopefully learning from the mistakes it made with mobile gaming, the NX seems to be a uniform system for playing the same games at home and on the go. This is a distinct departure from the typical Nintendo tactics of keeping home and mobile separate. Maybe they’re starting to listen to the global market outside of Japan?
While much of the NX is still unknown, the buzz surrounding the system is great. It seems again that Nintendo is seeking to assert itself as the “innovator” in gaming space. Hopefully the NX is a smart, sleek and portable way to play high end games wherever you go.
