Nintendo Consoles Really Don’t Need to be Super Powerful

There’s a good reason why Nintendo isn’t bothered by PlayStation 4 Pro or Scorpio.

It’s a complaint as old as time: Nintendo consoles are “under powered”. The competitors pump out devices with unimaginable capabilities, pushing polygons and gigaflops around like rag dolls, RAM and HDD numbers nearing double digits and more resolution than an entire Bondi-based yoga group on New Years Day.

The more powerful the console, the wisdom goes, the better the games will run. So when Nintendo releases a console like the Switch or the Nintendo 3DS, the internet is awash with articles pointing out its technical limitations compared to the top tier products from Sony and Microsoft such as the PlayStation 4 Pro, Vita or Xbox One Scorpio.

Nintendo’s biggest challenge in affecting change in the gaming industry is that the people who complain about these things are actually correct in some areas. There are plenty of things the PlayStation 4 Pro is capable of that Nintendo Switch just isn’t. And Sony can probably make a few tech demos or even a commercially released game that shows off those capabilities quite well but the challenge is explaining how that product fits into a cohesive, larger vision that’s going to allow these companies to sell $6 Billion worth of products every single year.

Time and time again we see the correct answer is to start with the customer experience as the number one priority over the technology. When the technology is prioritised, the challenge becomes trying to figure out where you’re going to sell the product. PlayStation VR is a great example of this: as potentially capable and exciting as it is, the premium cost of the entire setup puts it way out of reach of all but the most core gamers who may feel a little short changed as the expensive-to-develop “AAA” games aren’t exactly raining down onto the platform.

Nintendo in coming up with a strategy for the company going forward, has started with thinking about what benefits it can provide to the customer. It has decided that the customer’s experience is more important than asking its engineers what the coolest technology is and trying to figure out how to market it.

Nintendo was first to market with motion controllers with the Wii. Its development was quite an engineering undertaking with different software and hardware partners. The Wii console itself was behind the power capabilities of its rivals but when Nintendo rolled out Wii Sports for the first time, 100 million people around the world said “Wow. I’ve gotta have that.”. The experience of the Wii outweighed the potential for high definition, realistic graphics in many customers minds. Nintendo didn’t even bother marketing the technical capabilities of its console because it really didn’t matter: as soon as you saw the benefits of those Wii Remotes in Wii Sports, you knew you were going to buy it.

That’s where Nintendo has to get back to, and it’s the right path to take.

And it’s not to say that Nintendo has a perfect track record of this. Mistakes have been made along the way, and will be made. That’s a good thing too because it means decisions are also being made along the way. Nintendo finds the mistakes and tends to fix them.

As Nintendo makes this concerted move to put the customer experience ahead of the technology, some people will be pissed off. Some people will not know what they’re talking about. But thanks to Nintendo’s efforts, the entire industry is already in a much better place than it was not very long ago.