Let’s face it, Sony and MS steam roll us with game after game for their consoles, show developer after developer willing to bend over backwards for them, show great things they plan to do for their new upcoming gaming peripherals. Meanwhile no one seriously gave wii motion controls a real effort… and Nintendo just plugs along…
Despite all their setbacks it’s clear that Microsoft and Sony are infinitely more adept at adapting to setbacks and re-training market focus to their favor. They’re making lemonade from lemons and damn tasty lemonade at that.
Basically everything that Wii gamers had claimed would happen for the Wii back in 2006/2007 has happened for the PS3. The Wii would eventually win over the core gamer, but it was the PS3 that is slowly doing so. The Wii has loads of quality games on the way, but it is only the PS3 that has delivered on delayed quality this generation.
While this generation is a lost cause for Nintendo in regards to core gaming, there is hope for the next gen, assuming Nintendo is smart enough to give the consumer what they want. We’ve already seen Nintendo dump massive amounts of revenue into new studios for developers and create a sub-company dedicated towards quality control. However…
From the outset, Nintendo faced many problems this generation:
- Developers entered this generation not wanting to seriously support Nintendo.
- Nintendo worked poorly with third party developers and failed to back third party titles.
- Nintendo failed to diversify their image and product appeal, relying too heavily on casual gaming.
- Nintendo did not cultivate the Wii to be a console geared towards selling a variety of software.
- Nintendo was not prepared for the success of the Wii, lacked the infrastructure and second party studios to create a software snowball effect that is needed to get any console to become a viable software selling machine
In the end, its largely Nintendo’s inability to please third party developers and create a product that will sell their games. Nintendo can recover from this, but while gaining considerable ground this generation, they’ve lost their golden opportunity to take the market back, assuming that was even possible given their inbound handicap.
Nintendo needs to learn from Microsoft and Sony or they’ll end up losing the casual market to them too in due time. Nintendo needs to be willing to pay money out of their own pockets to get quality third party games put on their console.
While I’m sure some of you are just content with the way things are going for the Wii and DS, there are those of us who see that Nintendo can do more.
