| bdbdbd said: @Impulsivity: Interesting queston . But i don't think they would make any more money by going 3rd party, since they make profit on hardware too and 3rd party royalties. The problem with the asserton vis, that it's completely based n vassumtion vthat a) People buy games only because they buy the hardware b) Nintendos games would lose their appeal Because we are seeing hardware peaks when new games come out, "a" can't be the case, but it's the excact opposite, people buy the hardware because of the games available. Now, "b" can be the case, and you could say this happened in the 5th gen, but judging by Nintendos current performance, nothing indicates this would happen in the foreseeable future. As for "phones taking over mobile gaming", this happened about a decade ago, if we look at the sales of gaming capable mobile phones and the sales of handheld games consoles. You had a strange view n v"crappy hardware". It's no wondervwhy Gameboy beat Game Gear, all you have to do is to take a look in the battery life. Nintendo wasn't behind at all with the Gameboy, they made a portable gaming machine that was possible with the tech of the time. Wii seems to be having 1/8 of the failure rate PS3 has and Sony is copying the Wiis controller. N64 had low failure rate compared to competition and the system was designed so that everything in a game would be made with the engine. And again, the controller was copied. DS has touchscreen,vwhile PSP relies on the old control method, DS has good battery life and PSP:s portability suffers from disc based media. |
Saying they have crappy hardware does not mean what they make is low quality (high failure rate) but rather it is crappy as in it is obsolete 2-3 years before it is released.
The gameboy was primarily black and white well into the 90s (it was great for the mid 80s, but was pretty seriously obsolete by the time it retired). The Wii is, performance wise, quite similar to consoles from almost 10 years ago both in graphics and use of the DVD media (and lack of a hard drive), the N64 was behind the times before it came out with the very limited cartridge games...playing games like Resident Evil was a horror with all the things that were missing from the PS1 version. You can't even think of playing something like Resident Evil 5 on the Wii so things have only gotten worse on the tech side.
My point is that without being led by competition to the point where they're forced to at least TRY to catch up with current tech, they leave things in eternal obsolescence and charge full price because it's cheaper for them.
I would not contend that Sony is vastly better on the handheld front. I think going with the UMD minidisk format for the PSP was a stupid idea, but one probably born out of necessity (since when it came out there wasn't really the capacity for a download only handheld).
I would contend that Sony is vastly better on the console front. With the addition of the motion controller for the PS3 there will literally be no good reason to buy the Wii except for a handful of first party titles that seem to get more and more rare every year. I found the Wiimote to be great for a narrow range of games (golf games, minigames, maybe first person shooters though it's close on that one) and far worse then the controller for the kinds of games I like (fighters including smash bros, adventure games, RPGs) where limited buttons and movement based options is more a hinderance then a help. That's kind of beside teh point though.
The point is that the DS and other dedicated handhelds are become a waste of time except for very very young (under 8 or 9) children.
Mobile phones have had gaming for decades but it was always gaming of last resort, as I said earlier. They were REALLY bad, very simplistic and since the app marketplace was controlled by the carriers very overpriced.
Now with the iphone and to a lesser extend Android these games are at least on par with anything on the dedicated devices for between a 75% and 100% discount over similar games on the DS or PSP.
In the future I think the choice will be A) make a console/phone or B) switch to making games for a phone platform given how much more powerful mobile phones are getting and how much better the games are getting.
I really hope that someday, maybe 6 years from now or so, Nintendo chooses B. I have to think the DS was their peak and when they release future handhelds there will be diminishing returns as more and more people outside the small child market has a phone powerful enough they don't need a handheld.
I guess in the meantime theres always emulation which works great on the iphone (which I have no legal qualms with since I owned pretty much every game I'd want to play through emulation on the NES or SNES unless the game wasn't released in the US like Secret of Mana 2).
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
