Well well well. 
AT LAST! Today I finally face off against the new debater on the UNITY thread.
One of the VGChartz veterans this time: Mummelmann.
This should be a much more quality debate than the ones I have had here lately.
At least I can be sure that Mummelmann is actually making a valid argument instead of just heckling.
On November 26, 2013, Mummelmann had some pretty intense words to say about me in a conversation with impertinence.
And I just HAD to make a reply to THIS. Here's the link.
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=5838362
This one took me FOREVER to put together but I think you all will appreciate the reply.
It could very well be THE LONGEST post in VGChartz history. So have a seat & bring some food & drink. VERY THOROUGH rebuttals.
And here we go. Line by line, point by point as always. THIS time with topical headings!
| Mummelmann said:
You want on-topic? I’ll give you on-topic.
Let’s go back in time a little bit here, let’s think about the theory John Lucas had prior to this one; oh, the exact same one! In the 7th generation! The Wii would start a new era in gaming, a full-turn revolution, stealing all the 3rd parties and sinking Sony and Microsoft with their stupid business practices and HD visuals (PS3 discontinued after 20 million or so, MGS 4 going 360 exclusive and other fancy statements were the norm). Let’s look at this from a different perspective for a time now; A lot of people are claiming that Nintendo make such amazing 1st party games that 3rd parties wouldn’t be able to compete, that is hardly a nice environment to publish on, another factor is the incredibly poor sales of a lot of 3rd party titles on Nintendo platforms, the latest being Ghosts selling less than 20.000 units week one, Assassin’s Creed 4 was the same story and no one can use the “crappy port” excuse this time around since that’s not the case.
|
•Point 1: Wii's New Era of Gaming & the 3rd Party's Reaction•
Wii DID start a new era in gaming. Wii DID cause a full-turn revolution. Alongside the DS.
This cannot be denied as we see the adventures of Microsoft's Kinect, Sony's PlayStation Move, & Apple's & later Google's emergence in the gaming realm through the smartphones & tablets.
I called Wii 'The Future of Gaming' back in 2005 on the comment boards of Joystiq & Kotaku & that has happened.
This is documented reality now. It's in the history books. This cannot be argued.
But Nintendo didn't expect the 3rd parties to hold out on them like they did.
There were no excuses. Wii had the most sales & thus the most sales potential.
This was not the era of the Nintendo 64 & Gamecube when it could be argued that the relatively low sales prevented support.
It was only natural that Nintendo thought the 3rd parties would at least CONTRIBUTE to their platform with Wii's massive sales.
They didn't have to make games exclusive to Wii. No one expected that.
They just had to offer the same games they did to other platforms so that Wii owners could play too.
But they didn't. They fortified their existing standoff of Nintendo even further & Nintendo nor the gaming public could enjoy the potential of the game design that would come from these 3rd parties.
It was a loss for everybody as the 3rd parties opted to play politics instead.
Horsepower is an excuse because that has never gotten in the way of a developer before.
It didn't get in the way of the Sega Genesis. It didn't get in the way of the Sony PlayStation 2.
I never have believed in the line of "hard to develop for". That's a line given by developers when they don't WANT to develop on a platform either because they're being paid off to make games for a competing platform or they have embedded disdain for the platform on their own.
When the money is right, a developer will FIND a way or else that developer is missing out on some potentially lucrative opportunities.
Infinity Ward didn't want to put Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the Wii because supposedly Wii was too weak to handle it.
Yet somehow Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare shows up on the DS which is MUCH weaker than the Wii could ever be.
Even if the Call of Duty franchise is more identified with the 360 & PS3, that doesn't mean you don't make another version for other platforms.
If Call of Duty games sell more on 360 & PS3, then just lower the amount of copies you make for the other platform.
That way you sell out your shipment & make some easy money from a popular platform.
Those Call of Duty games made on Nintendo's systems sold pretty decently too.
There's simply no excuse for how the 3rd parties treated the Wii. They preferred to play politics to show their power.
•Point 2: 3rd Party Developers & The Bad Business Practices of Sony & Microsoft•
The 3rd parties wanted to rule the business & didn't want Nintendo to have any more power than they already did.
They propped up the XBox 360 & PlayStation 3 to signify what they believed to be their command of the gaming business.
If Microsoft & Sony have to lose billions in the process so be it. So long as they remain calling the shots, the parasites could care less about their hosts.
Sony & Microsoft were never gamemakers really. Their gaming businesses depend on pleasing the 3rd party developers for support.
They bend over backwards giving the 3rd parties what they want throughout every temper tantrum because Sony & Microsoft had goals for these machines that went outside of gaming.
If the PlayStation name or the XBox name gets big enough Sony & Microsoft can transfer that name value into their ultimate goals.
A defacto Microsoft PC (in hardware not just software) that rules the living room for your entertainment.
A Sony media hub that becomes the gateway for all Sony products & formats.
Who's zooming who?
Sadly it seems to be Sony & Microsoft who are getting played by the 3rd parties in Sony's &Microsoft's risky gaming gambits.
Sony who was once the Undisputed King of Electronics has lost command in pretty much every field they're in & are now dependent on the PlayStation to bolster their brand & their business.
Their credit rating has plummeted to JUNK status, they're selling headquarters & major offices for capital & then there's THIS:
Sony Slumps After Hirai Cuts Forecast as Tsuga Revamps Panasonic
Excerpts:
Sony (6758) Corp. President Kazuo Hirai is paying the price for trying to revive ailing TV and smartphone sales, with more than $2 billion of market value lost today, as his counterpart at Panasonic (6752) Corp. benefits from paring those units as it struggles to compete.
Sony stock headed for the biggest drop in five years after it unexpectedly lowered its full-year profit forecast by 40 percent on stalling television and digital camera demand and box office flops...
...The leaders of Japan’s two largest consumer-electronics companies took over last year amid record losses in TVs and failures to develop hit products to compete with Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and Apple Inc...
...Sony fell 12 percent to 1,650 yen as of the trading break in Tokyo, the biggest decline since October 2008. The stock was cut to hold from buy by Jefferies LLC analyst Atul Goyal...
...Sony’s net loss totaled 19.3 billion yen in the three months ended Sept. 30, wider than the 15.5 billion-yen loss booked a year earlier, the company said in a statement. That missed the 14.8 billion-yen average profit of five analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
“The biggest concern is that even though they have the currency working for them they still can’t turn a profit,” said Yoshihiro Nakatani, a fund manager at Asahi Life Asset Management Co. “Outside of their financial business, things aren’t looking good.”...
The company needs to cut costs and undertake “more aggressive reform” of its product portfolio and entertainment business, Fitch Ratings said in a statement today. Sony’s BB-credit rating, which is three levels below investment grade, may be downgraded, it said.
Microsoft's situation is not quite as dire as Sony's is but how many more billions are they gonna lose on this XBox project?
The XBox has NEVER made money for Microsoft. NEVER. Billions lost on the original XBox. Billions lost on the XBox 360.
If they continue losing billions on the XBox One at some point some higher-up is going to say "Enough Is Enough".
Microsoft is still flush with cash but they're experiencing the exact same thing IBM did when Microsoft was the young upstart.
They're going to be pigeonholed into a certain sector & won't be able to grow outside of it.
The tablet PCs & their smaller "smartphone" variants don't even know Microsoft. Google & Apple run these new-age PCs.
Desktops & laptops run by Windows will slowly fade into the background as more & more people use their tablets run by Android or iOS.
And I say this as a desktop user who uses Windows!
IBM still exists but they are no longer THE NAME in tech & are relegated to the general business & industry sector.
Microsoft is about to be similarly relegated to the general business & industry sector as well.
That's why they created the XBox. To maintain prominence in the residential sector.
They didn't want to be stuck with the offices & the factories. They wanted more strength in the home.
A cozy home is more personal than the ominous big office & giant factory.
They didn't want to end up with the staid & boring image offices & factories conjure up.
They wanted to be Your Fun Company™. There's just something special about those personal electronics.
But what if Microsoft ends up in the same place Sony did with the PlayStation?
What if Microsoft ends up dependent on the XBox to maintain their brand & business & are forced to lose billions to continue the XBox due to the temper tantrums of the demanding 3rd parties who bolster that console?
It's very hard to make money in the videogaming business. It's not as dependable a money source as becoming the default operating system for nearly every computer in the world: residential, business, & industry.
Too much blood, sweat, & tears for such little return if any.
The 3rd parties demand more graphical power.
OK we have to create an expensive system that we cannot sell at a profit from launch. And we still have to sell it at a fairly high price even then.
The royalties from the game sales are not covering the costs & now we have to cut the console price because not enough people are buying the system so that we can be profitable.
So now the ratio of manufacturing costs to sales profit gets even wider.
We're starting to close the ratio bit by bit but now the system is getting seen as old & we're compelled to create a new expensive system to satisfy the boredom of the developers & the gaming public.
This essentially puts us back where we started & even a little further back.
And all the while we have to cut the old system's price a little more each time along the way.
Unless we sell a record amount of consoles which in turn makes for a record amount of games sold & thus game royalties, we'll never get anywhere in this business.
We're not that good at making our own so we have no choice but to do what the 3rd parties demand if we want to stay in this space.
And handhelds?! NEVER MIND. Then we'll have TWO of this kind of situation going on! How do you juggle THAT?
One company makes this crazy situation work & you know who I'm talking about.
They are not held hostage by the demands of the 3rd party & don't have to go beyond the tech curve wrecking their budgets to deliver a product.
They concentrate first & foremost on making their product sell big while not putting them in the red ink with losses.
They study where the market REALLY is & will not, for example, put out HD resolutions until most TVs owned are in HD resolutions.
It's smart business sense. Understand who you are & how the business that you're in works. And you will have lasting success.
•Point 3: 1st Party, 3rd Party, & Nice Environments To Publish On•
There's a reason why I call the 3rd Party "The Kids". I should call them "The Brats".
And that bratty behavior is replicated in a good portion of the gaming public.
These 3rd party developers are SPOILED & many gamers are SPOILED in reflection.
They want what they want & don't care about the costs in getting what they want just like a spoiled brat.
The temper tantrums of the 3rd party & the gamers who emulate that brattiness are not entertained by "Dad".
Dad knows JUST HOW MUCH to add & saves the rest for later. He knows the foolishness of overkill.
He knows just where to be on the tech curve.
Not the Brats. I WANT WHAT I WANT & I WANT IT NOWWWWW!!! NOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!
Uncle Sony & Mr. Moneybags Microsoft let those brats get away with murder but they won't be pulling that crap at Dad's house, betcha that.
They don't have to pay the bills. They don't have to pay the mortgage. They don't have to be a responsible member of the community.
They don't have to make the machines & suffer the costs. They don't have to maintain the health of the overall business.
They don't have to worry about political fallout when Sub-Zero pulls a spine out by the head or when Hot Coffee scalds the lap of the business.
But Dad does & when the bratty Kids get out of line, he ignores that ignorance & plays his necessary role to keep the home intact.
The 1st Party MUST be the responsible one for the good of ALL parties (see Nintendo & Swapnote for an example of responsibility).
The Kids got it lucky now. Back in the day Dad used to pull out the James Evans belt! Set them little brats straight, that's what he did.
Dad has always provided a nice environment for his Kids but do you think The Kids showed him any appreciation? Noooo.
The 3rd parties made their names on Nintendo consoles. Super Mario coexisted side by side with Mega Man.
The Legend of Zelda coexisted side by side with Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior & Final Fantasy.
Simon Belmont was just as prominent as Samus Aran. The Wrecking Crew used to take their lunch breaks with Bomberman.
Nintendo Power promoted 3rd party games right in their magazine alongside their homegrown productions.
It's a lie to say that 3rd party titles can't sell against Nintendo's 1st party titles on Nintendo platforms.
I recently registered Konami's Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirrors of Fate for the 3DS on Club Nintendo.
Club Nintendo usually only registers Nintendo-published material not 3rd party material. So why this 3rd party game?
What about Nintendo's Club Nintendo cross-promotion of Shin Megami Tensei IV with their own Fire Emblem Awakening?
Initial Japanese sales of Shin Megami Tensei IV were good as it topped the charts for that week.
If you go to Wikipedia & check the game lists (order by Publisher) for the NES & SNES vs. the N64, GC, & Wii, you'll see that Nintendo didn't really make as many games for their NES & SNES libraries in comparison to their libraries for the N64, GC, & Wii.
The NES & SNES lists are dominated by 3rd party titles. By proportion, by prominence, & by sheer number.
It's the 3rd party that created this situation. They stayed gone for so long; They dismissed Nintendo consoles for so long that they forced Nintendo buyers to gravitate heavier to Nintendo titles.
Buyers didn't get hardly any fighters or RPGs from the 3rds in the N64 era so they got down with Super Smash Bros. & Paper Mario.
3rds didn't put any real effort behind sports titles on Nintendo platforms so the fans got down with Wii Sports & Wii Sports Resort.
They don't expect the 3rd party title to be done with the same care, with the same attention as they do it for the Sony & Microsoft platforms.
The 3rd party doesn't treat it as priority so why should the buyers?
If the 3rd party quits treating Nintendo consoles as an afterthought, then their sales will improve.
Dad the Groundskeeper has provided a fertile enviroment for everybody to get their belly full but The Kids can't expect to be fed if they don't do any work in the field. Help Dad bring in the harvest & you can share in that harvest. Don't wait until Dad has collected all the crops & then say "When do we eat?!"
Assassin's Creed 4 is a start & if certain 3rd parties continue to respect Nintendo platforms in this way, then they will receive the benefits.
But you can't quit after one time the game doesn't sell as well on a Nintendo platform if you keep continuing to make games for Sony & Microsoft platforms after your games don't sell well there either.
3rd parties in general can fail over & over again on a Microsoft or Sony platform & never feel they have to change course.
They just keep plugging away until they have a success. So why can't a Nintendo platform get this consideration?
| Mummelmann said: Another factor here is Nintendo’s treatment of 3rd parties in the 80’s and 90’s, the have created this problem themselves and were widely known to front a very developer hostile climate on their earliest platforms, when they also lost their ability to sell consoles and win markets in the 5th gen, no wonder 3rd parties jumped ship. The Wii came along, after two generations of a dictatorship, demeaning and bossing 3rd parties and two generations of poor hardware sales and refusal to embrace any form of standard tech, media or solution in architecture Nintendo fully expected 3rd parties to swim back and climb aboard again, perhaps eking out an existence making Just Dance clones for all their days, I dunno what the plan was. This didn’t happen, of course, and Nintendo and their fans demonized 3rd parties and the stupid “hardcore” gamers that provided them with sales, the very fact that anyone could not be content with only a Nintendo platform was an affront to gaming in general, this despite the fact that Nintendo did little to hide that they didn’t much care to cater to the “hardcore” with the Wii.
|
•Point 1: Nintendo's "Dictatorship" on the 3rd Parties in the 80s & 90s•
You know I used to buy into that big bad Nintendo theory of the NES days but the more I think about it, it's bunk.
Did Nintendo exercise tight control in the 3rd gen? YES. Was it necessary? YES. We just had a gaming crash.
But at the end of the day nobody held a gun to these 3rd parties' heads & said you HAD to develop for a Nintendo platform.
There were 2 major competitors against the NES in the 3rd gen: The Sega Master System/Mark III & the Atari 7800.
That's not counting the home computer platforms of the era. There were other fishes in the sea.
If the 3rd party was that offended at Nintendo's rules, they could easily opt to build up Sega's system or Atari's system or any of the home computer systems out there at that time.
But they didn't so why is that? The money was too good, that's why.
Nintendo created that money-making opportunity as they resurrected this business from the ashes & the 3rds wanted that money.
Well there's no such thing as a free lunch. And if Nintendo took the risk of providing a hot platform to make big money, they SHOULD set the ground rules on how the opportunities are distributed.
3rds wanted to reap the rewards without taking the risk & that ain't gonna fly with anybody. Opportunism.
Give Hudson Soft credit. At least they had the balls to make a system of their own (with NEC—the PC Engine/Turbo-Grafx 16) instead of complaining & whining about Nintendo's rules.
Yeah, thanks to Nintendo's "dictatorship" the 3rd parties had an industry to sell their products in the first place. You're welcome.
That "dictatorship" created/boosted game franchises that are beloved to this day: Mega Man, Castlevania, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Bomberman, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, WWF Wrestling games, Earthworm Jim just to name a few.
It couldn't have been THAT bad of a "dictatorship" when the home computer/PC developers started flooding Nintendo platforms with their games: Sim City, Populous, Doom, Ultima, Syndicate, Another World/Out of This World, Flashback, Prince of Persia, Civilization, Shadowgate, M.U.L.E., Skate or Die just for a handful of examples.
In the 4th gen, they had the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis to get behind yet they still did business with Nintendo's "dictatorship".
Nintendo didn't lose their ability to sell consoles & win markets. The 3rd party abandoned them & left Nintendo's library threadbare.
Nintendo didn't rely as much on 1st party production in the NES & SNES eras because their 3rd party was so rich & varied.
When the 3rd parties got behind Sony (who unlike both Nintendo AND Sega would let them run the platform any way they wanted to with little reciprocation for the favor), Nintendo was forced to emphasize its 1st party more in the N64 & Gamecube eras for the sake of their libraries.
In turn that further strengthened & refined Nintendo's 1st party power making their titles even MORE dominant.
When the 3rds followed the example Nintendo set they made games that could stand alongside Nintendo's.
Whereas Final Fantasy used to be a landmark title of unparalleled quality now we get Final Fantasies that have to have do-overs like Final Fantasy XIV.
Check that company called Rare to see the befores & afters of Nintendo's influence.
Former employees of Rare are expressing their regret that Rare left Nintendo's "dictatorship" more & more each day.
From RareFanDaBase.com - EXCLUSIVE: Where Are They Now? An Interview With Chris Seavor
Excerpt:
RFDB: If Rare were still with Nintendo today, do you think the company would have still been the same as it was all those years ago?
CS: Pretty much. Tim and Chris would still be around, Mark B, Simon, loads of other people who subsequently left as well… Even me maybe :) A company isn’t defined by bricks and mortar. It’s a people thing, so yeah , bar a few tweaks it would have been pretty much the same, both the good and the bad ;)
Former Rare employee blames Microsoft for ruining them!
Excerpt from former Rare composer Grant Kirkhope:
"I think Rare have completely f***** themselves. And - it isn't their fault; it's Microsoft's fault. They have completely ruined that company, and it makes me cry every day of my life."
Who Killed Rare?
Excerpt:
...However, in time it became clear that everyone had underestimated how much of the studio's success was down to Nintendo's gentle steering. "It seemed like Microsoft was really a novice in the games industry and for some time they left us to try and see how things worked," Cook explains. "They wanted hit games for their console and since they weren't sure how to go about it they trusted Rare to do what was necessary. The problem here was that Rare was a very long way from the very corporate structure of Microsoft and when Rare had made games it wasn't in isolation from Nintendo but as a creative partnership...
Yeah, such an evil dictatorship that the people once under it looked back on it fondly. Some even cry when they think back on it.
Grant Kirkhope recently applied to Retro Studios by the way. He was turned down but I hope he keeps trying.
We need someone with that kind of heart back in the Nintendo family. Might as well be Retro since it's pretty much the new Rare.
•Point 2: Nintendo, "Standard Tech" & "The Hardcore"•
"Standard tech". This is a CONSOLE, Mummelmann.
You're not supposed to just do the standard, you're supposed to MAKE the standard.
That's the fundamental difference between Nintendo & the other console makers.
That's why they change the game over & over again.
You want a DVD player, buy a DVD player. This is a videogame console. Focus on games & games only first & foremost.
Throw in a bell & whistle here & there if you want to but never forget it's about THE GAMES when it comes to a GAME CONSOLE.
So because the others are fighting this futile fight between Blu-ray & HD DVD does that mean that Nintendo should do the "standard" & fight in that battle too? Does that mean they should jack up their manufacturing cost for this bell & whistle too?
Just because the others are using high energy consuming systems means that Nintendo should do the "standard" & make a high energy consuming system as well? That they SHOULDN'T attempt to make a low energy consuming system?
Just because the others are pretty much making stripped down PCs means that Nintendo should do the "standard" & make stripped down PCs too?
That they shouldn't remember that the entire purpose of a console is to DIFFERENTIATE themselves from a PC?
What you say is just an elaborate version of "How come Nintendo can't be like everyone else?"
I'll TELL you why. Because they are The Leader. They're not the Follower. They're the Pathmaker. The Standard SETTER.
What they do with the game controller & game design & business strategy HAVE set & CONTINUE to set The Standards for this industry.
SCREW the "Hardcore". None of that "Casual/Hardcore" mess is real anyway.
It's phony marketing talk that has no real grasp of the true demographics within the videogame business.
Right now on Nintendo's eShop is the 2013 Holiday Gift Guide suggesting games to buy.
Their categories are: for kids, for teens, for grown-up kids, family.
For "grown-up kids". Nintendo understands the reality of the child-at-heart & they are not ashamed in the joyfulness & playfulness of their games.
The vibrant bright color with cheerful happy characters. That cynicism has not infected their spirit.
They make games for EVERYONE. Not "Casuals" Not "Hardcores". EVERYONE. From 5 to 95.
THOSE are the demographics Nintendo seeks.
It's that authenticity that makes me want to NEVER see Nintendo be like everyone else.
The 3rd parties could have rejoined this spirit but they chose to play silly politics instead.
Oh & when you put down Just Dance, you're putting down the game that helped take Ubisoft to the top of the game developer/publisher world.
Ubisoft was one 3rd party that actually put work into efforts on Wii & it paid off in MASSIVELY.
If they got behind Wii absolutely with all of their franchises they might not have suffered those losses they did in recent years.
How could Assassin's Creed II reach 9 million in sales all platforms combined yet have Ubisoft posting losses of €43.7 million in 2010?
Ubisoft Posts Losses As Assassin's Creed II Nears 9 Million
THQ bought into that "standard tech" mess with Homefront running on Unreal Engine 3 & went out of business.
I find it funny that Crytek of underperforming Crysis 3 fame is taking over from THQ with Homefront 2 running on the standard tech of CryEngine.
Enough of this repetitive middleware garbage. That's why many of today's games are so samey samey all the time.
Production-wise, presentation-wise, subject-wise. All cut from the same cloth.
SOMEBODY has to dare to do something different & THANK GOD that company is Nintendo.
| Mummelmann said: Then there’s this notion of a Nintendo that is somehow more relevant, loving and caring than others, they have the only true passion for games and gaming. Why? Because they have different art direction? All other companies are just evil bastards who don’t like anything but your money and they’re too dense to see that they’re ruining the industry because Nintendo are the only ones who understand “what’s really going on”. Nintendo are, believe it or not, a company with investors, they love to pocket your change as much as the next company, a change in color-palette doesn’t change that. Look at their advertising over the past three decades; where companies like Sony and Microsoft and independents often focus on effects, visuals, sound and other, perhaps superficial things, they choose to focus the presentation on the product. Nintendo have a long history of panning shots where they show ecstatic kids playing games, this isn’t because they have such immense heart and love your smile more than others, it is simply a marketing ploy to draw in young customers, they focus on the implicit euphoria of owning Nintendo products, instilling a sense of “can’t miss this, kiddo!” rather than focusing on the product. Which is more ethical? Don’t think for one second that Nintendo are some benign saint who swooped down to earth so that grandma and her cancerous grandkid could enjoy gaming together, laughing and living it up like a fairytale; they want grandma’s money and they want the cancer-kid money (offended? I’m making a point), they want everyone’s money like everyone else does, they’re running a business!
|
•Point 1: Nintendo vs. Sony & Microsoft - Care, Cash, & Cynics•
Jacking up console prices to $400, $500, $600. Making you pay an extra bill for online play when it used to be free.
Trying to restrict the purchase of used games. Trying to restrict the ability to share games.
Disabling the ability for console to work offline. Microtransactions ruining the gaming experience.
Commercials inside games. Advertisements on home screen of console. The abandonment of local multiplayer.
Focus on superficial Achievements over the natural discovery within the gaming experience.
Building & releasing fragile shoddy consoles that overheat & chew up your game discs.
You doggone right I think Microsoft & Sony are damaging the gaming industry—ESPECIALLY Microsoft.
Nintendo does NONE of that & it seems like many people don't appreciate how they maintain videogaming's integrity.
You know, I have seen this 'hip cynic' schtick before.
How it becomes cool to flippantly say "Yeahhh, they just want yer money. They're no different than the rest." as you contort your face into a joyless smirk.
Somehow because it's a business it must be stereotyped as a bean-counting sociopath who values money & only money at all costs.
I understand how this view came up. We have lost trust in our institutions & we have been let down by people in authority.
The cynic stance is a protection against potentially being played for a sucker. Nobody wants to play the fool.
You don't want to be trusting Pollyanna with your eyes as wide open as a character from a Disney cartoon.
So you put on this hip tough image that shows off your street smarts & the world becomes a depressing series of grays where color once stood.
I fall into it sometimes myself even. I'm not immune. It's easy to be distrustful. Safer.
But the genuine still exists in this world. If it doesn't then this world is not worth fighting for. And Nintendo is genuine.
The people at Nintendo work for a living just like you & me.
But just because they earn a paycheck or salary does that mean they don't CARE about what they do?
Do you think Michael Jackson did what he did just for the money? You don't think he legitimately enjoyed performing & creating music?
Do you think Michael wrote We Are The World for just some cynical cash in purpose?
Do you think Stevie Wonder created the song Happy Birthday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because he could cash in?
The local baker running the bakery in your community. You don't think he/she legitimately enjoys making cakes?
The day care workers in your community. You don't think they truly enjoy spending time with kids just because they get a paycheck?
Do you think Charles Schultz, the guy that made Charlie Brown, didn't legitimately enjoy drawing his cartoons just because he got paid for it?
Do you think Gabe Newell looks at Half-Life & Steam as just a mere money-making opportunity?
Do you think the porn stars who have sex on camera do it just for the money or could they also enjoy the sex along with it?
Do you think David Blaine does his magic tricks simply for the money or that he legitimately enjoys blowing people's minds with those tricks?
Do you think The Rock came back to the WWF (I hate saying WWE) simply for the paycheck or did he legitimately enjoy interacting with the fans on the wrestling stage?
You can't work in a field like this if you didn't enjoy what you did everyday.
Nintendo CARES, Mummelmann. Their actions show that they care. That's how you know.
Satoru Iwata refuses to cut staff in layoffs just because Nintendo goes through a rough patch. He cuts his own salary instead.
You don't get the genuineness of the Iwata Asks segments if that company was as cold-hearted as you make them out to be.
Talking with Genyo Takeda who was with the company BEFORE Nintendo got into videogames. You don't see that from other companies.
You're not gonna see Jack Tretton or even Kaz Hirai pull that off with PlayStation personnel. It would look phony if they tried.
You're paralyzed by your cynicism, Mummelmann.
And somewhere in your life you thought it was smarter to dismiss the good & only see the bad.
You were disappointed & disillusioned badly somewhere in your life & you can't believe that Genuineness still exists.
TvTropes.org calls this phenomenon the Crapsack World. Snarky cynicism becomes the order of the day as disbelief & disgust rule the psyche.
Maybe I've stumbled upon the root of the hatred of what Nintendo does. Nintendo dares to show you the brighter day.
The happy faces.
They're not paralyzed with cynicism & make you believe that the common middle-aged working class man can save the day.
That the humble kid from the outskirts of town can save the world.
That the alien parasite would sacrifice its life to protect me from evil.
This may also explain some people's disgust of ME. I dare to see the brighter side without caveat, without asterisk.
I see the good & I welcome it openly, proudly, & loudly. I encourage it. I don't bend to the disbelieving crowd.
If I have to be one man against millions so be it. I will be that man & I will call for the brighter day no matter the obstacle.
Come out of the Crapsack World, Mummelmann. Everything is not done for a cynical end.
•Point 2: Care, Cash, Cynics, & Commercials•
A commercial is a commercial, Mummelmann. We know it's advertising.
Nobody should expect a bunch of supermodels to come out of woodwork just because you drink a beer.
Nobody should expect to play sports like the pros just because they wear some special shoes.
Nobody should expect to have orgasms from using shampoo (who thought of THIS kind of ad?! Hahaha).
Frogs don't talk. Beef jerky don't snap. Polar bears don't drink soda. Trucks don't make you rugged.
Retail store workers are not that happy.
Computers don't make you live in worlds like Orwell's "1984". And game consoles don't blow you up against your back wall.
There's also no random Japanese man coming to your door & saying "Wii would like to play". BUT...
...What those commercials depicted IS real. They showed varied, diverse audiences of all ages playing videogames & enjoying it.
Wii was at heart the same thing Nintendo ALWAYS produces: a console for the ENTIRE FAMILY, for EVERYBODY.
They called it the Family Computer for a reason, Mummelmann. Every Nintendo console ultimately follows this blueprint.
You said the following about Sony & Microsoft in their advertising:
"...where companies like Sony and Microsoft and independents often focus on effects, visuals, sound and other, perhaps superficial things, they choose to focus the presentation on the product..."
And contrasted what Nintendo does in their advertising:
"...Nintendo have a long history of panning shots where they show ecstatic kids playing games..."
That's right, Mummelmann. While Sony & Microsoft focus on the product, Nintendo focuses on the PEOPLE.
Sony & Microsoft are in love with their tech. Nintendo understands that the tech should only serve the people who use it.
This is the Nintendo difference. It's why their games are different. It's why their strategies are different.
Nintendo could have put a spotlight on the Wiimote alone & require you be in awe of it.
No instead they showed people USING it not only in the American commercials but in the Japanese commercials as well.
The American commercials & Japanese commercials are two totally different styles with American ones showcasing togetherness & bonding while Japanese ones showcase usefulness & practicality. But in each the focus on tech is supplanted by the focus on people.
No high focus on the Wiimote tech in the American ones preferring to show the happy aftermath of what Wii can do for a group of people.
Wiimote is always gripped by a human hand in the Japanese ones showing how it can shoot targets, balance a broom, drive a car, & shoot pool.
Later in Wii's life on the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the Japanese ones showed varying play reactions from a group of 4 people.
PEOPLE. REACTIONS. The interaction with the game console during play & their PERSONAL reactions to that play.
Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4.
People, Mummelmann. Not Tech. Tech means nothing by itself. PEOPLE use Tech for their own personal human needs & desires.
You never hear Nintendo go on & on about tech in their press conferences.
Frankly that's boring talk that should only have appeal to engineers.
What does that tech DO for ME? That's the question you need to be asking. That's how Nintendo approaches technology.
The human factor.
The late Hiroshi Yamauchi said that the console is pretty much just a fancy box to give you games.
No one buys the box for the box itself.
The title of the following headline says it all:
Nintendo czar Hiroshi Yamauchi understood people, not hardware and software
The care Nintendo puts into their work shows & that's why people continue to buy their products. That's why people trust them.
Why SHOULDN'T Nintendo get paid for providing a quality service for people like this?
Why is it somehow sinister that Nintendo promotes good feelings through their products & gets paid in the process too?
They're running a business alright, a good business & it deserves the reward. You reward good companies who do good things.
The Family Computer, Mummelmann. That's what it's all about.
Technology has a habit of isolating us so why can't technology play a part in bringing us together?
Did you ever think this is the reason why Nintendo is reluctant to put online multiplayer functions in Super Mario games?
Did you ever think this is the reason why Nintendo always puts in local multiplayer in any of their games?
Maybe they don't WANT us walling off to ourselves & speaking to others only through a headset.
Maybe they want us to make some friends & have get-togethers in person.
Maybe that's why they made Wii Speak a group mic rather than a mere headset if we MUST speak through microphone.
Kill the cynic in you, Mummelmann. Families HAVE come together playing Nintendo games just like the advertisements portrayed.
Lifelong gamers were able to share their gaming passion with their parents who previously dismissed videogaming.
The stories are legion.
Commercials have a lot of fake stuff within them but what Nintendo did with Wii was REAL. No fairytales.
People joyfully came together through games. There're no monsters here preying on cancer-stricken kids & their grandmothers.
It's real, Mummelmann. VERY real. That Nintendo Magic ain't just PR. And it's what keeps this company alive.
Here's a homegrown real life example of one of those ecstatic kids enjoying that magic Nintendo provides.
| Mummelmann said: Now, the Wii U is a HD console, undeniable fact. John Lucas and fans argued in the 7th gen that rising development costs would send 3rd parties reeling headlong into bankruptcy unless they embraced Nintendo and cast off the shallowness and tedium that is Playstation and Xbox. You know how it goes; it’s the exact same formula as in the OP, only several years back. There’s a problem; developing HD games for Nintendo costs the same as it would on a PS3 or a 360! What the hell?! How will they survive under such conditions, this was deemed deadly circumstances only a couple of years back! And this amazingly ridiculous notion that Nintendo were in complete control of the Wii’s decline and abrupt irrelevancy is utter hogwash, the Wii U was in no way, shape or form a planned action, it was very much a forced action by a company under pressure and facing historically unique circumstances. They got carried away, sat back and watched the money roll in and then, poof, lost their customer base. It is also worth noting that a “brilliant” mind such as John Lucas failed to see Nintendo’s amazing plan for an epic relay, why did he predict such amazing results and conditions for the Wii if Nintendo planned all this all along? Isn’t that the very definition of lack of insight? Or, if he failed to see this, and Nintendo didn’t have this planned since 2007, doesn’t that mean that the Wii U is simply an attempt to reset and have another go? I addressed the possibility of the Wii’s failing momentum damaging their 8th gen efforts already at the start of 2011, does that mean that I’m magical? No, it just made complete sense.
|
•Point 1: Nintendo, HD Costs, 3rd Party Bankruptcies•
THQ, Midway, LucasArts, Bizarre Creations, NuFX/EA Chicago, Factor 5, Psygnosis/SCE Studio Liverpool, SCE's Zipper Ineractive, Pandemic Studios, Disney's Propaganda Studios, THQ's Trauma Studios/Kaos Studios, Phenomic Game Development/EA Phenomic, Black Box Games/EA Black Box, TimeGate Studios, Ensemble Studios, to name a few.
Capcom is almost out of money. Square-Enix, Namco-Bandai, Electronic Arts, Activision, Microsoft Game Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Bethesda's idSoftware, Silicon Knights, 2K Games, Codemasters, & other companies have had numerous layoffs.
What happens when you type the words "Nintendo layoff" in Google or Yahoo? How many times have they laid off staff?
The following quotes from this Gamasutra article is why Nintendo is & will forever be THE BOSS of this business.
Layoffs are not the solution - Nintendo's Iwata
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world...
...Regarding why we have not reduced the number of the personnel, it is true that our business has its ups and downs every few years, and of course, our ideal situation is to make a profit even in the low periods, return these profits to investors and maintain a high share price...
...We should of course cut unnecessary costs and pursue efficient business operations. I also know that some employers publicize their restructuring plan to improve their financial performance by letting a number of their employees go, but at Nintendo, employees make valuable contributions in their respective fields, so I believe that laying off a group of employees will not help to strengthen Nintendo’s business in the long run...
...Our current policy is to achieve favorable results by continuously cutting unnecessary expenses and increasing business efficiency."
THAT'S how you run a business. THAT'S how you command an industry. THESE are the markings of a strong well-run company.
Not constant layoffs after making a game—hit or no hit. Not bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy.
I showed you the list. I named the names. They DID reel into bankruptcy or at best laid off countless staff to stay afloat.
Companies are bloating up their staff & blowing a lot of money making games that don't sell much beyond their 6th gen predecessors.
More money & more staff to get the same sales or less. THAT'S why these companies "downsize", "restructure", lay off & go bankrupt.
It's gotten so bad that a trio of young game developers created a website called GameJobWatch.com to keep track of all of the job losses within the videogame industry.
And to understand how devastating these constant sudden frequent job losses feel to staff who are victim to it, read this.
Recently laid-off devs rant about being recently laid off
Sega embraced Nintendo & got the best-selling game in their entire history with Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
If they embraced Nintendo absolutely they might not have had to lay off staff. They're starting to smarten up as time goes by.
Hopefully this gen they'll be more willing to put their best effort on a Nintendo console over the others.
And hopefully Capcom recognizes that they need to butter their bread with Nintendo just the same.
Eventually all of them will have to come to this conclusion. The business is not sustainable the way Sony & Microsoft handle it.
•Point 2: Wii U's HD Costs•
At E3 2006, Shigeru Miyamoto talked to the press & answered a question about high definition graphics. This is what he said.
E3 2006: Miyamoto on Wii and HD gaming
Excerpt:
...Miyamoto said that the penetration of HDTVs is "really not that high yet...we thought it would be better to create a system that allows you to interact with any TV set you have in your home in an entirely new, different way, and even kind of turn that into a toy for your TV that anyone can pick up, interact with and enjoy - rather than only the people who have a very high-tech, specific kind of TV set..."
...Miyamoto continued, "If you look at the technology that's out there and the companies that Nintendo has partnerships with when creating the system, obviously if we had decided to create a HD system we could have very easily..."
...He finished by saying that Nintendo wasn't against HD, and that their next console after the Wii would support it: "Of course I think five years down the road it would be pretty much a given that Nintendo would create a HD system, but right now the predominant television set in the world is a non-HD set..."
Recently on June 13th Miyamoto spoke to a Japanese game site called 4Gamer.net & said this (translations by KameDaniRyuu at Tumblr).
Miyamoto: "I Wanted To Go HD Sooner"
Excerpt:
4Gamer: For this game, when I saw the high quality rendering of the little Pikmin, I really got the benefit of HD because of the Wii U. Could you tell me more about that?
Miyamoto: I felt like I wanted to go to HD sooner.
Even for the Wii, no matter how much it made the system cost, it would have been great if it were HD in the first place. However, it was going to take some time for HD televisions to become common and we felt that until that point was reached, there would have been no point for Wii to be HD.
From our point of view, once the subsequent generation to Wii came around, HD televisions would be more common and we felt it would be time to make our games in HD then. However, HD became more common about 2 to 3 years earlier than we had anticipated. A main part of that was that the prices for HD televisions manufactured overseas had gone down at an unthinkable pace.
So, as a result, while we were right in the middle of selling the Wii, the TVs in people’s living rooms (in Japan) were slowly becoming HD sets. Overseas especially people had never so rapidly and drastically changed their hardware to the newest technology but in America as well HD TVs became standard little by little...
4Gamer: HD TVs are standard now but 4K TVs are also coming out.
Miyamoto: Yeah. When it comes to games, I don’t see the need for Zelda in 4K but for Pikmin, making it 4K compatible could possibly further show more small detailed Pikmin moving around, show things from an even further perspective, and being able to see more may make a more fun game.
Personally I think Nintendo made the right call in NOT putting HD with the Wii. It would have jacked the price higher which would have interfered with buy-up & that would make it lose that important price differential that made it so much more attractive in the face of the $400 XBox 360 & $600 PlayStation 3.
Now the costs of the components have gone down so it makes more sense to put out a Wii U with HD capability.
It was the tablet controller called the Gamepad that pushed Wii U to its unprecedented $350 launch price not necessarily the HD components.
And just as soon as nearly everybody jumps on the HD bandwagon now we got 4K TVs to worry about.
As you see above Miyamoto mentions the usefulness of 4K resolutions for Pikmin but just like it was for Wii it's not financially smart to load Wii U up with 4K resolutions. Nintendo has always struck the balance between giving you a good piece of tech while also giving you as fair a price as they can in the process.
Why not put in 8K resolutions? Why not pack each system with a $1,000 for every buyer? Why not put in the moon AND the stars too?
Your mind can go anywhere but your body can only go so far. There are limits to things in this life & costs have to be paid.
But because Nintendo did things the smart way & waited until the time was right, they do NOT have the same high costs for Wii U that Microsoft & Sony had for the 360 & PS3. It's all about balance.
Now while Nintendo has a handle on a HD component costs they have found out the "costs" on human resources in order to build these games in the current HD resolutions much less 4K or anything else.
Game development slowed them down & that explains the game drought.
Yet still Nintendo will not overhire & will not bloat themselves to put out a product. People are saying they are not hiring ENOUGH.
But keeping a tight-knit workforce (5,095 worldwide) is how they handle these giants like Sony, Microsoft, Apple, & Google. Efficiency.
When the games finally DO come out, it will all correct itself & Nintendo will continue to retain their staff with no layoffs & no bankruptcies.
Nintendo always runs a smart efficient business. Lean with little to no waste. No bloat in staff OR budget.
It's how they handle the giants & it's how they'll handle HD production. No deadly circumstances for Nintendo whatsoever.
•Point 3: The transition from Wii to Wii U - Forced Move or Planned Strategy•
How many times do I have to say it? Wii was RED HOT as 2011 began.
They just came off of YET ANOTHER mindblowing holiday season in 2010 by simply painting the Wii red.
The Red signified how RED HOT it was.
A little "underpowered" SD console outdoing the big overpowered HD Twins one more time. All due to content. The games.
Even a Wii port of a SNES collection of NES remakes (Super Mario All-Stars: 25th Anniversary Edition) sold out & sold out big.
Normally there would be no reason to stop this momentum.
The natural thing to do is to continue on & extend the momentum even more.
So why didn't Nintendo do that with Wii? Wii was successful even WITHOUT much 3rd party support.
It had redefined the industry & set new standards which its competitors followed (Kinect & Move).
It was influentially successful, commercially successful, financially successful, culturally successful. Why stop this?
Here's an article from 2011 that explains Nintendo's sudden shift from Wii.
Nintendo: Wii wasn't intended as a casual console
Excerpts:
When asked about Nintendo's current market strategy Iwata explained that it still aimed to pursue "gaming population expansion", but added that releasing games for "casual or light users" isn't the only way to go about it.
"There was a misunderstanding that Nintendo was dedicated to such games at some stage of the lifespans of the Wii and the Nintendo DS," he said.
We have made efforts to develop video games that are in tune with various consumer tastes; however, we have not been able to gain adequate consumer understanding regarding our intentions, while in the common perception there are no or few core users playing Nintendo platforms, which is not the case."
He went on to insist that Nintendo plans to develop games that "can be accepted by a wide variety of consumers, irrespective of age, gender or past gaming experience."
"As it is natural that Nintendo alone cannot provide every kind of software, we would like to achieve our goal in cooperation with various developers."...
..."Now that we realise there may be times when we need to take care of four platforms at once, we are initiating these new challenges, and I believe that such a fixed notion as, 'we have to do everything by ourselves,' has faded inside the company to a large degree."
Nintendo got pigeonholed by the gaming press as "casual" when they have always wanted to sell to EVERYBODY.
This video displayed at the unveiling of the then-Revolution Remote at the 2005 Tokyo Game Show (September 16, 2005) shows what they were aiming for & shows who they wanted playing their system.
Nintendo Revolution Controller
You see that? They wanted EVERYBODY to play.
All ages, all sexes, all backgrounds, all fans of all genres, new players & veteran players.
EVERYBODY. EVERYBODY was Nintendo's focus for both DS & Wii.
DS received the Everybody but Wii did not & that is because of the 3rd party.
With many of the 3rd party developers/publishers holding out on Wii or putting subpar games on the system if they DID contribute, it left Nintendo with a false image pressed upon them.
The 3rd party & their sympathetic gaming press wanted to diminish Nintendo's power with that erroneous "casual" label.
It's the same thing that happened to the Gamecube when they called it "kiddie". That's how the 3rds think they can limit the 1st of Nintendo.
Nintendo got tired of that crap & started earnest work on Wii's successor despite Wii still being on fire in the market.
They also got tired of doing all the heavy lifting by themselves to support games on TWO phenomenal game platforms.
In addition they knew that the REAL competition no longer resided in Sony & Microsoft but from OUTSIDE the console gaming world by Apple through its iPhones & iPads & by Google through its Android-powered smartphones best represented by Samsung Galaxy.
The DSi was the first answer to the oncoming Apple/Google threat & they quickly followed that up with the 3DS.
3DS was to ensure the continuation of handheld console gaming as smartphone/tablet gaming represented the reemergence of the PC, a fight Nintendo had 25 years prior with the NES ensuring the continuation of home console gaming during the emergence of the PC gaming platforms of the 1980s.
Seeing all this they designed Wii U to be a multi-strike for all of its competitors: Sony, Microsoft, Apple, & Google.
They wanted to create a unique home console experience that tablet lovers could fancy while simultaneously ending the 3rd party standoff that have long stymied Nintendo's libraries forcing Nintendo to do all the heavy lifting.
They took the Wii higher. They continued to fight that necessary Nintendo Revolution through Wii U.
Which sadly meant burying the old Wii.
That explains the sudden abandonment of the Wii platform in 2011, the frequent price drops for Wii that year despite having just one in 2009 & doing just fine, the stripping of Wii with the non-Gamecube-compatible horizontal-only Wii Family Edition, the reason why Wii U launched FIRST of all home console competitors in 8th gen when Nintendo always goes last, the reason why they sold Wii U for a loss when they NEVER sell consoles for a loss (they couldn't wait until all components got cheaper since they wanted to get the headstart).
Yes it was planned. Nintendo halted the hot Wii because #1—they wanted to break the 3rd parties' political standoff to enhance library as well as nurture 3rd party game design innovation through Nintendo's standards, #2—they wanted to create a counter to the tablet/smartphone revolution which could potentially render the entire console world extinct.
They killed Wii because they couldn't afford to be fighting off their own phenomenon.
They needed people to buy the new Wii to finish what the old Wii had started.
That's why I call it a brutal version of their Third Pillar strategy.
It was obvious that the DS was gonna replace the Game Boy Advance but they introduced it softly so as not to upset the GBA buyers right away.
They didn't have time for the soft approach this time around so they made old Wii unattractive & unsupported even when it was in its prime.
I myself think their execution of this strategy was rough & wonky. That's why Wii U struggled in 2013.
But the strategy was necessary when you look back on it because now they don't have to fight Wii anymore. Wii exists WITHIN Wii U.
They don't have to compete with themselves & Wii U will receive all the benefits old Wii would have got.
Just because Nintendo sees the emergence of the new PC market in smartphones/tablets & the continued obstinance of the 3rd parties doesn't mean they made the move out of desperation. Every action has a reaction. This is basic physics.
Nintendo saw what was on the field & made a strategy. Strategies are PLANS. They weren't scrambling to put Wii U out.
They were in control.
Even if aspects of the strategy didn't go according to plan, that doesn't mean there was no plan.
Anybody who observes Nintendo long enough knows that they ALWAYS work from long-term visions & strategies.
There's always a method to their madness. What was done with DS & Wii was put into plan YEARS before those systems arrived.
You still don't think so? Then take a look at this video of Satoru Iwata speaking at the 2011 Game Developers' Conference.
He mentions the decline of craftsmanship in game design (which we see with the AAA developments by 3rd parties) & the probable decline in value of the videogame-making profession (which we see in the copycat cheap & cheaper race to the bottom of the smartphones & tablets).
That covers Sony, Microsoft, Apple, & Google, doesn't it.
GDC 2011 - Nintendo's Satoru Iwata talks about the future of the gaming industry
•Point 4: How did I fail to see Nintendo's plan for Wii U in 2011?•
Because I'm human, Mummelmann. I don't know everything.
I know a LOT about the gaming business but I'm always a student of the game.
I'm always learning & I find out new things all the time. Everybody has something to learn in this world.
Teachers are Students at the same time.
Check this out, Mummelmann. You'll find this very interesting.
When Nintendo first announced the Nintendo Revolution at E3 2005, I wasn't even keeping up with gaming news.
I didn't even know anything about it! I was playing my Gamecube & collecting lots of old games for my older Nintendo systems.
A retro gamer.
I had been on the internet since 2001 but I had never even THOUGHT to check out videogame news online. Not ONCE!
When I DID keep up with gaming news it was through the gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), GamePro, GamePlayers.
I STILL have these magazines in my room as we speak (got an EGM from November 1990–Issue #16 with the preview of "Super Mario Bros. 4").
But I stopped keeping up with even those in the early 2000s. I was in the dark on the happenings of the current gaming scene really.
I never kept up with E3 & just didn't care about what was going on to be honest.
I was pretty much what Nintendo once described rightfully: a lapsed gamer.
A friend of mine kept emailing me about this Nintendo Revolution & I'm like "OK. I'll probably get it when the first price drop hits."
I was blasé about it. I would always get a Nintendo system because I loved their games & appreciated what they did for the business but I was enjoying my Gamecube & collecting my older games. I just wasn't in the mindset for a new system so I wasn't too wowed with what my friend told me.
This was the Summer of 2005 & I didn't give a *BLEEP* what the hell was going on. Did. Not. Care. One. Little. Bit.
But one day I decided to check one of the links that my friend showed me about Revolution's features. He was relentless with these emails!
The link he provided picked up my interest a little bit so I decided to do some looking of my own.
I typed in "nintendo revolution" in Google/Yahoo & discovered a number of websites talking about this upcoming system.
Among them was Joystiq, Kotaku, Gamespot, IGN, & many other smaller-scale websites & forums.
For the first time ever, I was actually looking up gaming news online.
As July rolled into August my interest in the Nintendo Revolution grew more & more. I was no longer blasé about it & listening to the comment boards on the articles & forums got me more & more excited about Nintendo's new system.
Still, there wasn't much to know about the Revolution at that time. All we had was the console body pretty much.
So people's imaginations ran wild with the possibilities & this was fun to get caught up in (Remember Nintendo On?).
I remember this one poster on Joystiq who went by the name RevPatentLeaker & he would talk in the most mysterious cryptic kind of tones.
"four are aware and six await"
"It lies within ...a space*...of four dimensions
a cordial invitation has been cast out across the electromagnetic spectrum* that
binds all..
all energy is bound by this time and the clock* has reached 00:00:00 ON Sep 16
2005 and the resets will disrupt the memories that elluded us
aloft on these bandwiths* of nothingness...away with your dual HD connections...
... ..but if.. .
...what if.. .
at 00:00:00 ...we saw it. .. the blu* light
...what if.. . within that space..for a split second of a micro* second, we could
define a point...singular...for each reference*. Then would we need seven..? .the
white one gives seven...? we need not seven...we have gone past seven"
"soon we will connect to both sides.. of our reality* center..that which balances
us...that which gives us our bearings*...our notions of what is there and what isnt*
the left*.... .
and the right*.... .
and when we have sought this place,
we will find that we have come ..to a
*R E V O L U T I O N*.
the left..and the right"
"and when the negative hour* approaches 00:00:00
.. ... the creator will take his finger.. ..
and point...and lean* into the darkness*.. and then it will move the third* step...
... .?. ...
it is that simple"
"Seek the blu* light...
just as I have...
so too will you...
not even I.. am ready... "
Entertaining poetic presentation he had & he made your imagination run even wilder with what the Revolution could be capable of.
You wondered if this was someone who worked on the actual project cryptically divulging insider info since his messages made so much sense when you deciphered them. Could have been some fan in the know. Could have been some viral marketer.
Either way I was now HYPED about the Nintendo Revolution when only a few months before I was apathetic.
All of RevPatentLeaker's talk about the White One (Sony), the Green One (Microsoft), the Blu* Light (bluetooth? or the blue light that Wii gives off), the Left & the Right, all the Four Aware/Six Await stuff came right on time for me.
Because when that 00:00:00 hour finally came on September 16, 2005, I saw The Future of Gaming.
When Nintendo unveiled that Revolution Controller on that video I showed you earlier, my mind was BLOWN.
I was so proud of Nintendo for being that LEADER. To change the game, to set the standard again & again. SO excited!
I KNEW Wii would own the 7th generation right then & there & I couldn't WAIT to speak this truth to every site I could talk about it.
I made my predictions on the 7th gen right in the Joystiq comment boards in late October of 2005 (I think it was around October 28th).
Joystiq scrubbed a lot of the old comment boards so here's a remnant from a repost I made of that prediction from a December 2005 story called "PC Magazine gaming predictions".
It's currently on page 32 of my Joystiq Member Profile. Scroll down. I titled it Future of Next-Generation of Gaming.
Better yet just click this link: Me from 2005: Future of Next-Generation of Gaming.
I was all over Joystiq, Kotaku, & any forum I could speak in foretelling the coming power of the Wii.
And eventually this led me to VGChartz after Wii came out.
Then I came out of lurk & made my sales predictions on Wii here in March 2007.
I knew this console was The Future of Gaming. I believed in this NECESSARY Nintendo Revolution to save & transform the industry.
Believed in it so much that I thought that the Revolution could only be fought WITH Wii & nothing else.
That's how I got stuck in 2011 when Nintendo altered the plan. It took me a good while but eventually I learned something ELSE new.
At the beginning of the 7th generation, I learned anew that a competitor could sabotage itself—that competitor being Sony.
At the beginning of the 8th generation, I learned anew that Nintendo could transfer their Revolution into a new vehicle—the Wii U.
The Student learns a new lesson. My "brilliant mind" as you put it was enhanced by new incoming data & I was no longer stuck.
The transference to Wii U wasn't planned in 2007. Nintendo expected Wii alone to break the standoff & when they found to their surprise that it didn't, they devised the Wii U to be undeniable.
Only AFTER Nintendo's olive branch through Wii was soundly rejected did they make their plans for Wii U.
When they saw how the 3rds acted by 2009 & 2010 well after Wii's established success, they began transferring the Revolution to the Wii U.
Wii was the nice guy, the olive branch, the peace offering. Wii U is the bad guy, the nuclear option, the call to Armageddon.
2011 is when crunch time was fully underway & they began the transference in earnest. Hence Wii's de-emphasization.
A price was to be paid for transferring the soul of the Revolution into a new body but it would all work itself out in the end.
Nintendo will get what they want when the dealing's done.
| Mummelmann said: What exactly is the plan for the future in regards to casual gamers, I wonder. They are gone, they’re not buying home consoles any longer, the casual market was disrupted by phones and tablets and browser and social gaming, but this was also probably part of Nintendo’s brilliant plan for world domination. That’s why Nintendo are jumping into the tablet sector right now. Malstrom did not see this disruption, John Lucas didn’t see it and Nintendo sure as hell didn’t see it. Why? Because they didn’t want to. They’re suffering from a condition where they need Nintendo to be the savior, they reminisce about the golden days when games were fun and companies made good stuff and they shun the idea that people might have different tastes.
|
•Point 1: The Tablet/Smartphone Disruption & The "Casual Gamers"?•
"Casual gamers". These guys are STUCK on that phony catchphrase!
NO...SUCH...THING as a "Casual Gamer". NO...SUCH...THING as a "Hardcore Gamer". STOP THIS. ENOUGH.
Nintendo aims AS ALWAYS for an EVERYBODY market. This never changes even if the strategies to obtain it do.
EVERYONE, say it with me Mummelmann. EVERYONE. Not Casual. Not Hardcore. EVERYONE. Understand reality not marketer speak.
Have Apple & later Google disrupted the console market with the tablets & smartphones? Yes. Is the disruption irreversible? No.
Can Nintendo survive the re-emergence of the PC gaming market through the tablets & smartphones?
Yes & they're doing it now with 3DS.
They did it nearly 30 years ago with the NES as the home computers, the personal computers of that era disrupted consoles the first time.
Because they countered this disruption with a disruption of their own, we HAVE the videogame console today.
It really should not exist anymore. The game console should have LONG been dead & buried. Nintendo is who keeps it alive.
So they will keep console gaming alive—home AND handheld consoles—this time around just the same.
There are critical flaws in the business models of browser games, social network games, & tablet/smartphone app games.
Here. Just take a listen to the following articles I post for you.
Rovio's Revenue Crisis and the App Market Revolution
Excerpts:
On March 6, the mobile app industry witnessed something that it had not seen since April 2010. No Rovio games in the US Top 90 chart of iPhone apps generating most revenue. According to Appshopper, Angry Birds Star Wars has dropped to #91 and Bad Piggies to #100 when it comes to making money. Both still fare well in the download charts at #8 and #13.
Something fascinating has happened in the app industry over the past two years; download volume performance has decoupled from revenue performance almost entirely. A few years ago, the original Angry Birds spent 22 months in the Top 20 chart of biggest revenue generating apps in America. The latest Angry Birds game struggled to stay 2 months in the Top 20...
...Both Apple‘s iOS and Google Play ecosystems are witnessing the same phenomenon. It cuts across Americas, Europe and Asia. The age of download-driven revenue generation is over. This has left old mega-franchises like Angry Birds with strong ongoing download performances, but rapidly shrinking share of direct game revenue.
Devs Head Back To PC and Consoles After Realizing Mobile Gaming Sucks
Excerpts:
So you're an indie dev, you just made your first game and you want to sell it. It goes up on the iTunes app store or Google Play service or whatever it is the other lesser-devices use to peddle their apps through, and you get your first buy. After a 30% cut to the distributor you're looking at a 69 cent revenue stream from a single customer... a customer that stays your only customer for a week... for two weeks... for a month. What happened to that infinite well of prosperity that was promised by every big mover and shaker in the industry when the numbers rolled out and it looked like mobile was the way to go?...
...The article talks to a number of developers who have had it tough trying to sell games on the app store, where indies like Jeffrey Lim and Paul Johnson revel in the pity of their sob-stories for getting games out onto the mobile marketplace. Lim and Johnson aren't the only ones, though, you can talk to just about any indie dev making mobile titles and hear a similar story, from Nautilus to Kaveluza, the name and situation may change but the results are all the same: the mobile marketplace is flooded with apps, competition is stiff and profits are slim...
...Many developers realize they'll never have an Angry Birds on their hands or revel in the success of a Temple Run because mobile app success is almost harder to achieve and more difficult to sustain than it is on console and PC...
...Instead of fighting for pennies to a dollar on the app stores, mobile developers are abandoning the once promoted waterhole of success and retreating to more stable ground... they're going back to where gamers made the industry famous: PC and home consoles.
Why Most Indie Developers are Ditching Mobile Gaming?
Excerpt:
...The mobile industry has over 1 billion users, that’s one seventh of the whole world’s population whereas talking about the console-based industry it is astonishing news when Sony announces that it expects to sell more than 5 million units of PS4 in the season.
Yet, everything is not as it seems to be right? Many of the indie developers who went jumping towards the new market niche have either hit dead ends on momentous competition. A survey by App Developers Conference revealed that nearly half of the mobile app developers surveyed had made no profits whatsoever!...
...Assuredly, the piracy issue in the mobile app development market is a lot bigger when compared to the PC and consoles gaming industry. Topping that off is the fact that the competition here, though strong, is not as violent as the mobile gaming industry.
Game devs ditching mobile in favor of PC, Console?
Money Quotes:
..."I speak with lots of mobile devs regularly and most are moving away or at least thinking of it, either to other platforms or out of the trade completely," Paul Johnson, managing director and co-founder of Rubicon, told us. "Having to give your game away for 69 cents a throw (after Apple's and Google's cut) and then competing with 1000 new apps each day is hardly a draw for anybody. We've reached a point now where even those slow on the uptake have realized the goldrush is over. It's actually been over for a few years."
Jeffrey Lim, producer, Wicked Dog Games, agreed: "The mobile space offers certain advantages, like having the largest customer base and relatively low development costs. However, there's no doubt it is getting harder to be profitable with the ongoing piracy and discoverability issues."
"So yes, we do think developers (especially indies) are considering going back to develop for the PC - and even game consoles. The cost of self-publishing on these platforms has dropped significantly, and console makers are also making their platforms more indie-friendly now," he added....
...For every developer we spoke with, the discoverability issue reared its ugly head. There's no doubt that this is a major concern. While building a high quality game can help, it's simply not enough. In the world of apps, you cannot let the game do the talking for you...
A number of devs also believe that platform holders have a larger responsibility that they've been shirking so far. "For platform holders (e.g. Apple's App Store), they can start to curate apps released on their store because there are too many clones of existing games that are taking up the traffic. They could attempt something like Steam Greenlight; although it is still an imperfect system, it's better than not having any curation at all," Lim commented.
(Paul Johnson of Rubicon)..."The one thing I've come up with that would make a real difference is for the platform owners to charge five grand for a developer license. All the utter crap would disappear and there'd be less apps fighting for space," he continued. "And the end-users wouldn't have to waste time downloading the crap as nobody who makes stuff they don't believe in would dream of fronting that license fee. It's Draconian but it's really the only thing I can see having any noticeable effect. Anything else is just lip service."
"From the consumer angle, it's a golden age. The amount of good quality games that can be bought for laughable prices is fantastic and there's a ton of money being spent on this platform as a result. The problem for developers is that each individual cut is tiny. This isn't even remotely sustainable and I don't know what the future is going to look like. If I was starting again now from a blank slate, without an existing fan base, I wouldn't touch mobile with a ten foot pole," said Johnson.
I saved that article for last because of those money quotes. They hammer the point home!
Paul Johnson, the co-founder & managing director of Rubicon Development (Great Little War, Great Big War), straight up said that the mobile platforms need to put up LICENSE FEES! 
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!
There was someone who already thought of that. Some little playing card company from Kyoto in the mid-1980s. Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Too much crap, too many clones, too much congestion, poor quality, lack of platform holder oversight, money opportunities diminished...
Hmmm...this is beginning to sound familiar. Didn't something like this happen around 1983? Haven't we been here before?
Who reversed this madness? Oh yeah, that's right. That little playing card company from Kyoto again.
Their efforts to control & bring order to the industry stablized & saved the home console gaming market.
It's so stable that many of these developers who flew to mobile are flocking back to those consoles after witnessing the chaos of the new PC world.
Fun quote from analyst Jesse Divnich of Electronic Entertainment Design and Resaearch (EEDAR) that explain that fly to mobile & back:
Number of devs switching solely to mobile "frightening", says Divnich
..."As an industry that is addicted to pushing innovation and new markets, we often find ourselves reactively chasing whatever is the fad du jour only to come back a couple of years later and realize that there are very solid foundations across a number of verticals which continue to provide fertile grounds for developers to generate revenue"...
And the old PC world which Nintendo compromised decades ago have increasingly done their business on consoles THEMSELVES.
Bethesda Softworks was virtually PC-only up until the early 2000s. Then gradually they started putting their focus on consoles over computers.
Same with DICE who was virtually PC-only up until the early 2000s. Then they let EA buy them out & started focusing on the consoles.
Crytek was focused on PC primarily then started going to the consoles more & more.
Now they have Ryse: Son of Rome SOLELY for the XBox One. No PC. Why IS this? Why does this happen over & over again?
Read this, Mummelmann.
Why do publishers delay the PC version of their games?
Excerpt:
I’m interviewing a man about a game, and he’s trying to avoid answering a big question.
“Can you tell me why your game isn’t coming out on PC on the same day it’s coming out on console?”
He’s a good guy. You can see he wants to talk, to explain the problem, but he’s glancing left and right, knowing that he has to give a no comment or canned PR line.
“If you turn the dictaphone off, if we go completely off the record, we can talk about it.”...
...Once the dictaphone is off and he’s comfortable he’s not going to get named he opens up. The problem is simple. The publishers and the managers at the company he works for are terrified of piracy. They delay the PC version of their game because there is a section of the gaming audience that would prefer to download the game for free rather than buy it. If the PC version is available, it will be cracked and shared. If there is no PC version, there will be some piracy, but not at anywhere near the scale of what they regularly see on PC...
...Many major studios believe that they can increase their sales and their profits by delaying the PC version. They may well be right - we just don’t have access to their data.
If they are though, PC gaming faces a real problem. If this strategy is successful, it will encourage more publishers to pull exactly the same trick. In two years time, will we look at the gaming release schedules and see that most publisher backed games are available on the consoles between two weeks to six months before they’re available on PC.
That would be extremely damaging to our platform.
And you wonder why developers 'hate' PC gamers
Excerpt:
Crysis 2 is released on March 22, but if you've got a little time and even less scruples, you can play it right now. With almost depressing inevitability, an entire developer build of the game has been leaked online, allowing PC gamers early, free access to Crytek's latest eye-shagger. Killzone 3 was also recently leaked.
And this is why developers don't give a sh*t about PC gamers anymore, folks...
...There is, however, one major difference between movies/music, and videogames. In the case of movies, most of a film's success rides on its box office performance. That's where you initially make your profit. In the case of music, the artists obtain very little money off their officially released tracks, instead making it back with live performances. In the case of videogames, their only source of monetary recuperation is that initial sale. Unlike movies and music, which have multiple avenues for profit, there is only one option for the game industry...
...2D Boy's World of Goo was released without DRM, and the creators said they trusted their audience. One of the two-man development team, Ron Carmel, noted afterwards that he was seeing multiple torrents with 500 seeders and 300 leechers, and added that the piracy rate was at about 90%. This was 2D Boy's reward for trusting gamers. This is what they got for making a game easy to obtain, but easy to steal. Really guys, f*ck you for that.
That's why the PC guys keep creeping over to the consoles.
And I know what you're gonna say. "Yeah, they're going to Sony & Microsoft not Nintendo."
But you gotta understand that both Sony AND Microsoft are lost without Nintendo's cultivating & steering this console business.
Sony & Microsoft are eating from the meals Nintendo cooks up.
The King of Consoles has always been Nintendo ever since the 1983 Crash.
They resurrected the business from certain death & sustained the business for 3 decades heading towards the 4th. It's THEIR business.
When you look at the PC developers old & new who have slinked away from the PC world to the consoles, you see with their backing of the 3rd party-friendly PlayStation & XBox that their business models are STILL weak compared to the source Nintendo model.
That's why you keep seeing all those countless layoffs I mentioned earlier. That's why their sales are not as strong as Nintendo's.
Nintendo doesn't layoff anybody. You have never seen it. And their sales keep getting stronger & stronger over the generations.
The PC portion of the 3rd party hate their own home platform—the PC—yet keep trying to turn these weak 1st party consoles INTO a PC.
And eventually they'll get their wish as those PC-fied platforms end up just as much a wasteland as the PC world they left behind.
They hate the console as Nintendo defined it, they hate the PC after Nintendo disrupted that market, & in their total lack of wisdom they go against Nintendo devolving the console they hate into the PC they hate.
Why wouldn't they emulate Nintendo instead of oppose them all the time?
Nintendo is teaching you how to run a Videogame BUSINESS. The way you're going you'll return it back into a Videogame HOBBY.
They know how to innovate design & maintain the value of their profession while selling their products for a fair price.
Making great sales while making great cultural impact all the way. Who WOULDN'T want to follow in this model?
A PC company from England called Ultimate Play the Game did. And they became legendary because of it.
The new PC market of the tablets & smartphones show their weaknesses.
The old PC market of the desktops & laptops show their weaknesses.
The 3rd party servant platforms—the PlayStations & the XBoxes—show their weaknesses. Only one shows their strength: Nintendo.
You see it as the "casuals" running away. You see it as Nintendo "jumping in" to the tablet sector. I see the truth. It's called UNITY.
And from the articles I have shown you (a mobile developer talking about license fees! ha!), you see that UNITY is inevitable.
Nintendo provides the gravity which keeps the industry from floating out to outer space. This has always been THEIR business.
•Point 2: Me, Sean Malstrom, Nintendo the Savior, & The Golden Days of Gaming•
This is gonna be a short point (hooray! says the audience).
Can't speak for Sean Malstrom. As for me I knew it wasn't lasting.
It's another platform & that's good but it would never be THE platform.
The other flaw of those new PC gadgets, the tablet & smartphone, is their form factor. They don't lend themselves to much change.
Tablets can never be more than those notebook-sized rounded rectangles.
Smartphones can never be more than those notepad-sized rounded rectangles.
This form factor is perfect for web browsing & phone calls but doesn't lend itself to the needed interface changes gaming depends on.
What happens when the touchscreen Candy Crush Saga style of gaming gets tired? Where do you take game design next?
In the console world the game is always changing & becoming new thanks to Nintendo.
Their controllers alone show it. Their game design evolutions show it. DS games are BEST played on a DS. Not really the same on PC.
I'll end this point with a short response to your statement here:
"They’re suffering from a condition where they need Nintendo to be the savior, they reminisce about the golden days when games were fun and companies made good stuff and they shun the idea that people might have different tastes."
Yes. When games were fun. When companies made good stuff. Good. Fun. Why should anybody have a different taste than that?
| Mummelmann said: Now, as for me? Do I love all this? No! I hate the idea that Hollywood is the primary inspiration for games, I hate QTE’s, hand-holding, ridiculous AI and other bullshit and I consider phone and tablet gaming nothing but cancer on the industry, pulling quality down along with the Hollywood model. Does this stop me from seeing it happening? No, and I don’t understand why John and his disciples can’t, one comes with the other, the gaming industry is being beset from two sides, both unwittingly aiming to make it broader and dumber.
|
•Point 1: Hollywood Models & Mobile Cancers•
I don't necessarily hate the mobile platform & I am always open to any avenue a developer can have to express his/her vision.
The open-ended nature of mobile DOES tend to pack a lot of trash on this platform but it's not all bad.
There are good games on the smartphones & tablets. There are good games on the PC.
There are good games on the PlayStations & XBoxes.
What I'm concerned about is the EXCLUSION of Nintendo from the discussion.
The lack of appreciation & reciprocation for what they provide.
And the refusal to emulate those proven standards they set. The rebellion against Nintendo ultimately harms the gaming world.
Rovio is wising up when you see them put out Angry Birds Trilogy on 3DS, Wii, & Wii U. Even though they only did 3DS at first.
They are acknowledging that Nintendo platforms are worth sharing your works on. That Nintendo can provide money-making opportunities.
I have seen a number of the mobile/web games be put out on Nintendo platforms like Wordjong, Cake Mania, Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled.
I discovered Mystery Case Files from that DS edition called MillionHeir.
Nintendo published it & the DS functionality made that game shine.
Back in the early 1990s, PC developer Will Wright of Maxis lent his SimCity phenomenon to Nintendo & they made one of the most beloved versions of that game ever. Nintendo enhanced things on Will's game adding in changing seasons, a hot soundtrack by Soyo Oka, & the Dr. Wright character.
If the mobile/web developers of today teamed up with Nintendo like this, they would have similar results. The cure for that mobile cancer.
Good things tend to come from working with Nintendo & they shouldn't be shunned by default.
Since the mobile business is shaky, the PC business is flaky, & the Hollywood AAA developments are quaky, the independent developers—the 3rd parties big & small—need to get with that company that delivers that cakey...for their own sake-y.
Princess Peach did the bakey. 
The game industry doesn't have to be as dumb as Hollywood & Nintendo continues to teach you how to prevent that from happening.
When you look at Pikmin 3 you understand Real Time Strategy games are not always defined simply by Zerg Rushes in outer space.
When you look at Metroid Prime you understand that storytelling doesn't always have to involve a cinematic cutscene.
When you look at Animal Crossing: New Leaf you see a game with no pretentiousness. A game that's not ashamed to be a game.
A game not trying to pass itself off as a movie. It makes fun of itself. It has fun with itself. It has fun with you.
Games that don't believe in myths called "Casual" & "Hardcore". Games that dare to be different. That dare to be as original as they can be.
Oh trust me Mummelmann, I see it coming. I see it happening.
That's why I'm behind Nintendo. That's why I root for them. That's why I want them to continue to counteract that.
I want originality, non-pretentiousness, inventiveness, delight, quality, value to be the RULE not the Exception.
Those who you call "my disciples" see it too. That's why they give me props on my words here.
That's why they support Nintendo the same.
They ALSO want Nintendo's standards to be the Rule not the Exception. Mummelmann, you should want the same too.
It's a treasure that we have here in this videogaming world & we're protective of that treasure.
We applaud the ones who provide that treasure & continue to add to it. That magic we enjoy when use the videogame medium.
That escapism. That fantastic fantasy world of Virtuality we use to escape the drudgery we sometimes see in Reality.
Nintendo storehouses this treasure & keeps adding more & more TO that treasure. So we treasure them in return.
You don't want Hollywood schlock? You don't want Hollywood fake? Then keep it real & get behind The N.
No implants. All natural.
| Mummelmann said: Let’s talk about broader for a second, this leads us unto a subject close to John Lucas’ heart; the Playstation. Now, no one can deny that the Wii expanded the market, I hope no does at any rate. However, in percentages and impact, the original Playstation and its sequel; the PS2, can be attributed even more growth, they expanded the market greatly, they made 3rd parties absurd amounts of money and they dominated like no Nintendo home console ever has and likely ever will. This, however, is something John Lucas refuses to give credit for. Why is that? He doesn’t like the Playstation (this is all the more clear seeing as how killing Sony is more important than killing MS, he fantasized about prime PS franchises going to the 360 in the 7th generation) and what it represents, he resents the idea that a company with no pedigree in gaming could come in and change the course of the market, Nintendo, having saved the industry in the 80’s, deserve to be the top dog, and they do love games and gaming all that much more after all. It’s personal, pure and simple, just as personal as those shouting in the halls when the Wii exploded past the HD twins and the non-gamers had the gall and audacity to dare pick up simple games, people were offended. John Lucas and the likes of Malstrom perpetuate the war by representing one extreme of the spectrum; they want the hardcore gamer to die, therein lies the key; they want. It has nothing to do with divine insight or foresight, or even a basic understanding of business and the ethics surrounding it, it is simply desire, while they chant about “hardcore” being afraid of change, they’re the ones who are still wishing that change never came around the mid 90’s, or at the very least; that the change had come from Nintendo.
|
•Point 1: The PlayStation Expansion•
Here's something you don't know about me.
When the original PlayStation came out, I WANTED a PlayStation. WHOA!! John wanted a PlayStation?!? WHAT?!
No, it's true. I was Nintendo do or die & that is undisputable but I wasn't necessarily against another console.
I used to live in an apartment with my NES & SNES upstairs & had a neighbor who had a Sega Genesis downstairs.
My neighbor used to come upstairs & we would play games on my Nintendo, I would go downstairs & play games on his Genesis.
There were fun games on my system & fun games on his system. We didn't care about which system was more powerful than which.
We didn't emulate none of that "Sega does what Nintendon't" rivalry. We were just 2 teenagers playing what was fun & enjoying it. Simple.
I was always gonna get a Nintendo 64 but I really wanted to see what was going on with the PlayStation. I remember the original Grand Theft Auto & thought that was a cool original idea. I STILL love the idea behind Bushido Blade with its out-of-nowhere fatal kills. Resident Evil was a masterpiece only PlayStation owners could enjoy. I wanted to play all the Street Fighter crossover games (X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom). I was interested in Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. I miss all the RPGs series I got to know during the SNES era with Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII & Chrono Cross. What was going with PaRappa the Rapper?
Syphon Filter looked interesting. And Metal Gear Solid seemed to be awesome.
But at that time between 1995-2000, I was a young adult just getting started in the world & money was more hard to come by than buyers for the Atari Jaguar CD. So I had to make a choice.
Do I get the guaranteed fun of the Nintendo 64 or do I experiment with the interesting titles of the PlayStation?
I chose the guaranteed fun of the N64 with Super Mario 64; Zelda: Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask; Star Fox 64; GoldenEye 007 & Perfect Dark; Turok 1, 2, & 3; WCW vs. nWo World Tour, WCW/nWo Revenge, WWF WrestleMania 2000, WWF No Mercy; Killer Instinct Gold; F-Zero X; Tetrisphere; Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie & Donkey Kong 64; Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 64, Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Paper Mario, Conker's Bad Fur Day.
My choice didn't mean I hated the PlayStation.
And in fact, this made me want a PlayStation 2 even more since it could play all the PS1 games.
But after I heard about how fragile the PS2 was, how much it tore up on people, I was like "Man!" I couldn't justify putting what little money I had behind something that was unreliable. So I stuck with Nintendo-only one more time with the Gamecube.
The Gamecube will last just like all of my previous Nintendo consoles. Nearly 12 years later after I bought it, this is still true.
Once I saw the PS3 fiasco with 599 U.S. Dollars, I couldn't stomach the direction Sony was going & where it was trying to take the industry.
It seems like everything changed after the Dreamcast went down. I think that was a deeper tragedy than most of us realize.
And for the record, if I had the spare money I would have HAD the Dreamcast. I LOVED that system!! It was so right!!
I may still look for one online one day.
You're wrong, Mummelmann. It is common knowledge that Sony expanded the scope of the business with the PlayStations 1 & 2.
I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. There's your credit right there. No one can deny this.
Where I disagree with you is where you say Sony dominated in a way that no Nintendo home console ever will. That is NOT true.
What ALSO is not true is when you say Sony can be attributed to MORE growth than Nintendo has provided for this business.
See back on October 30th, I responded to zorg1000 breaking down the estimated audience of people buying consoles each generation.
I'm going to show you exactly how Nintendo expanding the audience with Wii & DS went MUCH further than Sony expanding the audience with PS1 & PS2. I will reformat the list for the sake of saving space (this rebuttal is long enough).
1st Generation
Home Consoles: Magnavox Odyssey (1972) - 330 thousand. Atari PONG (1975) - 150 thousand. Coleco Telstar (1976) - 1 million.
Nintendo Color TV Game (1977) - 3 million.
TOTAL Audience = 4.48 million
2nd Generation
Home Consoles: Fairchild Channel F (1976) - 250 thousand. Atari Video Computer System/2600 (1977) - 30 million.
Magnavox Odyssey² (1978) - 2 million. Mattel Intellivision (1980) - 3 million. Atari 5200 (1982) - 1 million. Colecovision (1982) - 2 million.
Milton Bradley Vectrex (1982) -unknown but very little.
Handheld Consoles: Mattel Electronics [Auto Race, Football] (1977) - unknown but much.
Milton Bradley Microvision (1979) - unknown but not much. Nintendo Game & Watch (1980) - 43.4 million.
TOTAL Audience = over 81.65 million
3rd Generation
Home Consoles: Nintendo Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System (1983) - 61.91 million.
Sega SG-1000 (1983) - unknown but low. Sega Mark III/Master System (1985) - 11.8 million. Atari 7800 (1986) - 3.77 million.
Handheld Consoles: Nintendo Game & Watch (1980) - 43.4 million
TOTAL Audience = 120.88 million
4th Generation
Home Consoles: NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 (1987) - 10 million. Sega Mega Drive/Genesis (1988) - 40 million.
Nintendo Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1990) - 49.10 million.
SNK NeoGeo Advanced Entertainment System (1991) - 1 million.
Handheld Consoles: Nintendo Game Boy (1989) - 118.69 million. Atari Lynx (1989) - 500 thousand. Sega Game Gear (1990) - 15 million.
NEC PC Engine GT (Game Tank)/Turbo Express (1990) - 1.5 million.
TOTAL Audience = 235.79 million
5th Generation
Home Consoles: 3DO (1993) - 2 million. Atari Jaguar (1993) - 250 thousand. Sega Saturn (1994) - 9.4 million.
Sony PlayStation (1994) - 102.49 million. Nintendo 64 (1996) - 32.93 million.
Handheld Consoles: Sega Nomad (1995) - 1 million. Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995) - 770 thousand.
Tiger Electronics game.com (1997) - 300 thousand. Nintendo Game Boy Color (1998) - 118.69 million (with original Game Boy).
SNK NeoGeo Pocket (1998) - 2 million. Bandai Wonderswan (1999) - 1 million.
TOTAL Audience = 270.83 million
6th Generation
Home Consoles: Sega Dreamcast (1998) - 10.60 million. Sony PlayStation 2 (2000) - 157 million. Nintendo Gamecube (2001) - 22 million.
Microsoft XBox (2001) -24 million.
Handheld Consoles: Nintendo Game Boy Advance (2001) - 81.51 million. Nokia N-Gage (2003) - 3 million.
Tapwave Zodiac (2003) - 200 thousand.
TOTAL Audience = 298.31 million
7th Generation
Home Consoles: Microsoft XBox 360 (2005) - currently 79.70 million—via VGChartz.
Sony PlayStation 3 (2006) - currently 80.90 million—via VGChartz. Nintendo Wii (2006) - currently 100.60 million—via VGChartz.
Handheld Consoles: Nintendo DS (2004) - currently 153.80 million—via VGChartz.
Sony PlayStation Portable (2005) - currently 80.4 million—via VGChartz.
TOTAL Audience = 495.40 million so far
So we see figures within the upper portion of the 200 million to 300 million range when the PS1 & PS2 came out compared to the near 500 million when the Wii & DS came out. WHO couldn't expand the gaming audience beyond the PlayStations now?
The audience doggone near DOUBLED! Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Have they forgotten when Nintendo was responsible for 99% of the industry's growth?
The 4th Generation had console sales of 235.79 million & both PlayStations only took it to 270.83 million in the 5th & 298.31 million in the 6th.
And what's even sweeter about this is, with the exception of Nintendo's handhelds, Nintendo supported their system virtually BY THEMSELVES!
When the PlayStations dominated they did it with the help of every 3rd party developer backing them up.
Many with the PlayStations, Few if any with the Nintendos. Yet Nintendo STILL expanded the audience.
You're wrong about me not giving the PlayStations credit.
Without the PlayStations we wouldn't have media player functions as default in our consoles today.
Sony, the media maker, naturally leveraged their experience in these fields by putting their CD in the PS1 & their DVD in the PS2.
Play your favorite music CD right there on your PlayStation. Play your favorite DVD movies right there on your PlayStation 2.
But it's exactly that lack of gaming background which causes them to miss the point of what a console is supposed to be at root.
They gave us great bells & whistles but because they ultimately didn't understand games, game craftsmanship slowly began to suffer.
The 3rd parties not rooted to Nintendo's guidance made everything look like graphically intense blockbuster movies & nothing but.
Zelda goes from overhead perspective to 3D perspective to side-scroller perspective with a variety of art styles & interface changes.
3rd parties always create their games in the same naturalistic 3D perspective with the same interfaces following Sony's & MS's leads.
Sony (and Microsoft) are awed by their tech they create & that's why the PS3 & PSP came out the way they did.
Is it a Blu-ray player, a supercomputer, a media superstore, or is it a games console?
The side features, the bells & whistles began to take precedent over the focus on the game.
Nintendo now has media playing functions in their platforms (Nintendo DSi Sound/3DS Sound for one example, options for Netflix/Hulu for another) but they will NEVER sacrifice the focus on the game for the side features.
That's why the Disc Channel in the upper left corner of the Wii Menu could not be moved around like the other ones.
That's why Nintendo didn't worry about putting natural DVD-playability in their Gamecubes or Wiis (they don't sell movies, they sell games).
That's why the bottom screen of the 3DS always has game promotions from Nintendo during Nintendo Video & nothing else.
That's why they underpromote Nintendo TVii on the Wii U despite it being a pretty decent service.
They stay on-topic & that's why they're the best to lead this business.
•Point 2: Me vs. Playstation & XBox - Personal Grudge or Business Observation?•
Sony's overindulgence in tech would have created an ever-escalating standard for game prices which would ruin game consoles' ability to remain in the mass market. You doggone right I'm gonna resist that! Everyone should have.
It seems that after Sega dropped out of hardware & Microsoft jumped in, Sony has gotten worse trying to outdo Microsoft.
The fact of the matter is that as much as I hated what precedent the PS3 set for gaming prices AT LEAST I could say the machine was built with durability & quality in mind (unlike the more fragile PS2). It was the XBox 360 that I hated EVEN MORE due to its shoddy design & insistence on paying a gaming bill just to play online with other people (XBox Live - Gold Membership).
I am STILL dismayed at how many people rewarded Microsoft for that behavior.
Gamers have approved things that are fatal to the business.
Some gamers fit the mindless consumer stereotype. And the sleazy execs bank on their lack of discernment to sell them bad practices.
I don't use the word "consumer" when talking about buyers preferring to use the word "customer" instead.
A CONSUMER opens his/her mouth wide swallowing whatever someone puts in front of him/her like Pac-Man.
A CUSTOMER looks over the product with a critical eye checking for quality & usefulness before they buy in.
Consumers are open-mouthed slaves who mindlessly consume.
Customers are keen-eyed equals who make sure things fit their customs.
As a CUSTOMER, I make smarter decisions with my purchases because my money is limited & I need the best bang for my dollar.
You saw from the opening post of this thread how I didn't automatically jump in with the 3DS & Wii U just because Nintendo made it.
I didn't like their prices & before I understood it, I didn't like Wii U's market approach.
I didn't automatically jump in with the DS either. I just bought a GBA from a used game shop & was enjoying that.
My first DS (the DS Lite) was a GIFT from someone else. At first I didn't understand the need for the DS when the GBA came out not too long before. I had missed out on handhelds most of my life so when DS made its debut I thought Nintendo was contradicting themselves.
They just made the GBA SP so why undo that with the DS?
Me being not immersed in gaming news at the time had no knowledge of the PSP.
My love for Nintendo was EARNED, Mummelmann. They kept showing me that they have the customer's best interests in mind.
High quality games, durable lasting consoles, fairer prices, smarter market directions, integrity of product & presentation.
Remember I told you I once wanted a PS1 & a PS2. Reports of PS2's fragileness cooled me off of buying that PS2 no matter how much I wanted to play those PlayStation games. I was not a consumer. I used my head & fought off the flighty 'gotta have it!' impulses.
When Sony did what they did with the PS3, my want for any PlayStation waned entirely.
I could not in good conscience support behavior like that.
And I DEFINITELY couldn't support Microsoft with what they were doing with the XBox 360.
Add in the waning quality of gamecraft from the 3rd parties supporting Sony & Microsoft & you see how my support of Nintendo got stronger.
Nintendo consistently stood against the bad principles Sony & Microsoft were increasingly introducing to the business.
I didn't want a game industry run by those bad principles & Nintendo was the only one saying NO.
it made me long for the return of Sega & the Dreamcast. Competition with the RIGHT principles.
Just like it was in the Genesis days when I played with my downstairs neighbor. Sega was a GAME company & respected GAMES.
You think it was personal when I made my prediction on Metal Gear Solid 4 going to the XBox 360 instead of the PS3.
That could have very well happened. Games get cancelled, transferred, switched up all the time. If the market wasn't right for Konami, they could have very easily put the game on Microsoft's platform. Look at what happened to all the promises from the 3rd parties on the Wii U for instance.
Square shocked everybody when they uprooted Final Fantasy VII from the Nintendo 64 & moved production to the PlayStation.
The PS3 lost Sony billions within its first 2 years. The console wrecked Sony Computer Entertainment severely.
This wasn't some grudge from the mid-1990s. It was a practical call in the wake of bad business done by Sony on the PS3.
It's a rejection of bad business when I talk against "The Hardcore", high gaming prices, stale game design, tech-power myopia, on-disc DLC, fragile shoddy hardware, online gaming bills, weak innovation, beta testing by buyers after release (patches), abandonment of local multiplayer forcing online multiplayer only, political 3rd party standoffs that rob us of new game idea implementations.
It's only personal in the aspect that I CARE about the videogame business & what harms the business reduces the ability for videogames to reach those who care about them. I like to play videogames. I like this medium. I like this pastime.
So those who protect & preserve this business, this medium, this pastime, I'm gonna root for.
I root against those who would ruin it as anybody who cares about videogames SHOULD.
And I don't believe in "Non-Gamers", Mummelmann.
How could you say this when I consistently reject the labels of "Casual" & "Hardcore"?
The one who plays Candy Crush Saga is JUST as much a gamer as one who plays Mario. Those who play the Facebook games are JUST as much a gamer as those who play World of Warcraft. Those who only play the perennial sports games like Madden & NBA 2K are JUST as much a gamer as those who play indie games.
And because I don't believe in this concept of "Non-Gamer" means that I DIDN'T resent the emergence of the PlayStation when it expanded the scope of gaming. I don't resent the emergence of the smartphones & tablets as a gaming platform. I don't resent the emergence of the browser based games. I don't resent Steam as a platform. I didn't resent Nintendo's Touch Generations titles like Brain Age & Wii Fit when it brought people who never played games to the pastime.
The more gamers the merrier.
What I DO resent is the 3rd party's consistent efforts to contain & stymie Nintendo instead of cooperating with them which would result in so many new game ideas. I resent those who don't appreciate Nintendo's efforts & continuously give them disrespect. I resent a gaming world which tries to extract Nintendo from the conversation. That's what I resent.
If those who label themselves "The Hardcore" believe that these things should be done to Nintendo, then they DO need to go home.
Hunter Hearst Helmsley says they're not "What's Best For Business".
| Mummelmann said: John Lucas, you have been down this path before and been pronounced a genius for it, people thought you understood something they didn’t and they love to chime in with their support and devotion to you superior analytical skills and your amazing posts. I also find your posts amazing, but purely as a study, you have an incredible way of making ridiculous, unlikely and un-provable things seem plausible, you manage to make compelling cases with non-existent arguments and pure speculation. Do you not see how this is much like people were saying; “The Wii is a fad, it will stop any day now.”? “Just wait and see the revolution, the Wii U will dominate the 8th gen.”
|
•Point 1: Mummelmann's Criticism of My Presence at VGChartz•
When I first came to VGChartz back in 2007, I saw myself as one person among many speaking his own point of view in the midst of the crowd.
I expected disagreement, dismissal, disgust, rejection, revulsion, ridicule as possible reactions to what I wrote & I was fine with that.
I am just one out of many. Why should my words count more than anyone else? We are all equals here each with our own point of view.
But some people here LIKED what I had to say & began to agree with me & support my views. That ALSO was a fair reaction to expect.
I offered my views & put 'em on the table where readers could choose to accept or reject. All I could do is argue for my point of view.
My favor here at VGChartz was EARNED, Mummelmann. Some liked my conclusions & findings. Some liked my presentation & style.
Some liked how I make gutsy calls in the face of vast opposition, stand by those calls, & never back down from the detractors.
Some liked how I conducted myself civilly in the discussion. Some liked how my views sparked lively debate in the forums. It's all good.
There are those supporting me in this thread right now that don't necessarily agree with every conclusion I made.
That's fine. That's fair.
That's what forums are all about. A marketplace for points of view that people can buy or bypass at their own choosing.
Where your standing is built by the power of your words. I would think nothing less for a showcase of equals debating their views.
This is the mentality I take for EVERY forum I go to.
Yes. I DO think I have a unique point of view no one has considered. That's why I bring that view to the forums for discussion.
That's the point.
To enrich the discussion so that all members of the forum can exchange knowledge & learn new things.
To debate & discuss as we find truth.
When I post to a forum, I underpin my arguments with factual data, logic, & insightful intuition to show that it isn't just wishful thinking.
There's a solid foundation at the root of my lofty conclusions. I welcome the argument & will work from that foundation in the rebuttal.
And Yes. I DO like to go that extra mile into the Unbelievable & DARE you to see it as Believable.
To challenge the established conventions.
To break your brain from those conventional chains & set it free to go on a Mind Adventure. Exploring the world of what can be.
Like Satoru Iwata said at GDC 2011 I like to make the Impossible Possible. This is where Intuition enters the room.
There's more to the story than what's on paper. There's more to the story than the Tale of the Tape. And intuition will take you there.
"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."—Henri Poincaré, physicist, engineer, polymath.
"Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition" —Madeline L'Engle, Newberry Medal-winning author.
"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next."—Dr. Jonas Salk, virologist & discoverer of the polio vaccine.
"No matter how deep a study you make, what you really have to rely on is your own intuition and when it comes down to it, you really don't know what's going to happen until you do it."—Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Company now known as Panasonic Corporation.
"For it is intuition that improves the world, not just following a trodden path of thought. Intuition makes us look at unrelated facts and then think about them until they can all be brought under one law. To look for related facts means holding onto what one has instead of searching for new facts. Intuition is the father of new knowledge, while empiricism is nothing but an accumulation of old knowledge. Intuition, not intellect, is the 'open sesame' of yourself."—Albert Einstein, physicist.
"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer."—Robert Graves, poet, novelist, scholar.
"Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge"—Aristotle, philosopher.
ANY foretelling of the future is speculation, Mummelmann. That's why they call those who invest in the stock market "speculators".
Investors are Financial Gamers, Gamblers who see, who spec what others can't see, can't spec & reap the rewards for their visions.
Don't they call eyeglasses 'specs'? Eye...See...Spec? Talented investors don't rely on financial advisors & their hot stock tips.
They use their INSIGHT, their INTUITIONS along with Logic to interpret the data, come to a conclusion, & make a call on future events.
They specced the Future. They saw into the Future. They envisioned the Future. They eyed the Future. They made a spec-ulation.
Intuition can be faulty & Logic can be limited, so they use a blend of both to predict market events & collect those jackpots as they buy & sell.
AFTER these visionaries made the right call, then everybody else jumps on the bandwagon & the advisors have a new hot stock tip to share.
They don't have the vision that talented speculator has & can only follow suit AFTER his/her vision was proven.
Monkey see, monkey do.
You must be able to see what happens before everyone else does. The speculative investor knew what was hot, what was cold & saw it for himself/herself without waiting on the approval of the crowd. They disregard the crowd & envision things for themselves alone.
They VENTURED into that Mind Adventure to explore the world of what can be.
The rewards are the riches they make in the trading of stocks.
Those who run businesses must use this skill as well. They must foresee the future changes in their industries, in their marketplaces.
They must spec-ulate just the same.
Anything sounds ridiculous until it is understood. It is human nature to ridicule, to belittle, to marginalize what they don't understand.
As knowledge grows the ridicule, the belittling, the marginalization ends.
Understanding has been reached as minds expand to new possibilities.
How much do you think they ridiculed Leonardo Da Vinci & the Wright Brothers when they were trying to create a flying machine?
How did staff at the fledgling Nintendo of America scoff at the Donkey Kong arcade thinking it was a ridiculous name & premise?
How many people scoffed at the emergence of the name 'Wii' before E3 2006 because it sounded more ridiculous than 'Revolution'?
How ridiculous was the Game Boy to game industry observers when put up against the Atari Lynx & Sega Game Gear?
How ridiculous must it have been in the year 1895 to suggest that men will one day walk on the moon?
How ridiculous must it have sounded in the year 1895 to suggest that there would one day be a Black President of the United States?
How ridiculous was it to Jackie Jackson when his brother Michael wrote on his bedroom mirror 'I will sell 20 million records'? (watch from 1:21)
How badly was Robert H. Goddard ridiculed through his work with rockets? The New York Times had a major editorial on the subject!
There's one thing I know about life & that is this: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
These links showcase this reality time & time again.
Examples of vindicated "crazy" scientists?
Ridiculed science mavericks vindicated
Excerpted quotes:
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable" — J.W. Goethe
"The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have began to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated." — Wilfred Trotter
5 Famous Scientists Dismissed as Morons in Their Time
Mega Foundation.org - Genius Hall of Vindication (or the Mainstream Science Hall of Shame)
Excerpted quotes:
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." — Arthur Schopenhauer
"All great truths began as blasphemies" — George Benard Shaw
Are great scientists always heretics?
Excerpt:
Great scientists change the way we view the world.
Doing that usually means smashing an old, entrenched idea - often making enemies in the process.
Before being proven and accepted, a great theory can be subjected to harsh criticism and its proposer can be mocked, rejected, even vilified.
Sometimes a religious authority is on the attack, other times it's the scientist's colleagues - either way it takes special determination to stick to an idea others believe is clearly wrong.
The genius of the lucky ones is recognised in their lifetime but some are venerated only posthumously.
One more choice quote from that Robert Goddard guy when he answered a reporter asking about that infamous New York Times editorial:
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace."
| Mummelmann said: Let’s look at the Wii in hindsight; the impact it had was so great that Nintendo themselves abandoned the very idea and reverted to 6th gen tactics with a mock effort to reel casuals back in, casuals that aren’t there any more for the taking. They chose to forego the Wii-mote and designed their most unwieldy, ill-conceived controller yet, they went back to trusting Mario and Zelda to sell systems rather than Wii Fit and Wii Sports. Is that your revolution? A full 180 degree turn? Then what was the Wii? The only continuation between the Wii and the Wii U is the lack of momentum, this is the prime characteristic the Wii U inherited from its father. And Nintendo are now stuck in a market with no available blue ocean, a design that clearly doesn’t appeal to Playstation and One users/owners (both by your reasoning and all logic, at least you got something right), thereby excluding the possibility of stealing sales from the competition, a userbase, by the way, that isn’t just going to vaporize overnight like you seem to think, and to top it all off; they’re stuck with a platform that is now as costly as the previously bankruptcy-inducing (according to your reasoning) 7th generation. How in the seven hells is this good news at any one point? It seems more like a recipe for a slow-cook disaster.
|
•Point 1: Reviewing the Wii & Comparing the Wii U•
6th gen tactics. *Sigh* He has missed the point entirely.
EVERYBODY'S Console, Mummelmann. Everybody's Console. That's what Wii was intended to be.
The 3rd parties sabotaged this mission so Nintendo decided to create a better Wii that could circumvent that sabotage.
That was the whole purpose behind the sudden drop in promotion of the Wii in 2011 when the system was still hot.
I explained this already.
You have to let go of this "casual" stuff. You'll never understand the real picture if you keep using terms like that.
Garbage In Garbage Out. Leggo that GIGO, Mummelmann. The "casual/hardcore" dichotomy is garbage.
Put it in the trash where it belongs.
They have NOT foregone the Wiimote, Mummelmann.
They have done the unprecedented allowing absolute backwards compatibility with Wii.
ALL things Wii. The Wiimote & Nunchuk. The Balance Board. Wii Speak. Why is there a sensor bar within every Wii U package, Mummelmann?
In fact the old Wii Menu is DEAD CENTER of the 15 screens of the Wii U Menu. How can you say they have foregone the Wiimote?
When I play Pikmin 3 with that option to play with the Wiimote & Nunchuk, how can you say they have foregone the Wiimote?
What's so great about Wii U is how it gives you so many options for input interchangeably. Upad, Wiimote/Nunchuk, Classic Controllers.
Just like the 3DS with its interchangeable options between Touchscreen, Circle Pad, & Control Pad.
I play around with this interchangability all the time when I play Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
I do the same with Super Mario 3D World on Wii U.
I SEE why they called it Project Café. A sampling of different flavors & aromas like you're in a coffeehouse.
It's understandable that you can't see it. I couldn't see it at first either. I once thought the Upad would contradict the Wiimote too.
But it complements it. It's NOT SUPPOSED to be played in stackable fashion like the accessories built around the Wiimote.
It plays ALONGSIDE with the Wiimote and if it supplants the Wiimote in a certain function it's because the Wiimote was inadequate to deliver that function in the first place. You simply could not do 'Gamer' from Game & Wario through the Wiimote alone.
Just not possible.
The Wiimote was world-changing but that doesn't mean it could do EVERYTHING. No such thing as the perfect controller for all things.
The best cube makes for a poor sphere. The best wheel makes for a poor arrow. The best boulder makes for a poor parachute.
Wii U recognizes the limitations of Wii & adds new things to make the system even more well-rounded & versatile.
Yet it recognizes the good of Wii & carries that good within itself. That's why Wiimote & all things Wii work with Wii U.
Every Wii is not a Wii U but every Wii U is a Wii. Do you understand now why I said that Wii U is Wii Part 2?
•Point 2: Mario & Zelda vs. Wii Sports & Wii Fit - Nintendo the Star Maker•
As for Nintendo's game approach.
They have ALWAYS relied on Mario & Zelda & their other franchises to sell their systems & they always will.
Why? Because it works, that's why. What was done through Wii Sports & the like is them creating a NEW franchise that they can depend on to sell systems in the future.
That's why we now have the excellent Wii Sports Club, Wii Fit U, & Wii Party U selling on the Wii U.
Somewhat like the WWF (now WWE, yuck) is in the wrestling world Nintendo is the MASTER of knowing how to create Star franchises in games.
WCW made its name from past established stars from its source NWA & its competition in the WWF & ECW.
Same problem TNA has now.
PlayStation & XBox are like this too. They get their power from star franchises built before they existed like those from the NES/SNES era or they get it from franchises built in the PC world. That's why there's no real PlayStation All-Stars for Sony.
That's why Microsoft got Rare from Nintendo.
Like WCW they buy big names and/or rely on the power of star franchises originally built somewhere else to build their platforms.
And like in WCW it works for awhile until the business drops off & the bills are due.
Based on HOW Eric Bischoff got WCW over the WWF in the 1990s, it really was no surprise how Vince McMahon absorbed WCW into the WWF in the 2000s.
While WCW's Eric Bischoff was relying on NWA legends like Ric Flair & buying names built in the WWF like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, Razor Ramon (Scott Hall), & Diesel (Kevin Nash), WWF's Vince McMahon created Bret 'The Hitman' Hart, 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, The Rock, Hunter Hearst Helmsley (HHH), Chyna, 'The Heartbreak Kid' Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, Kane, Mankind, Sable, Edge & Christian, The Hardy Boyz, Kurt Angle, Brock Lesnar, & yes even John Cena (bleggghh!) right there in his own WWF.
Some of those guys on that list were thrown away by Bischoff like Steve Austin & Mick Foley (Mankind) & even when Vince brought others who made some kind of name in WCW like The Giant/The Big Show, Chris Jericho, Eddie Guerrero, & yes the man whose name shall not be mentioned Chris Benoit, Vince took these guys EVEN HIGHER when they came to the WWF.
That's how Nintendo operates.
They ENDLESSLY make their own stars & when names built elsewhere show up on their systems they take it even HIGHER.
Monster Hunter was on Sony systems exclusively at one time.
Now that it's on Nintendo, Monster Hunter is getting even MORE popular.
Sega had their best selling game ever when Sonic teamed up with Mario in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
I know the wrestling world very well. I know the game world very well.
I just showed you the perfect parallel between these two worlds.
WWF = Star Maker. Nintendo = Star Maker. WWF = Franchise-filled. Nintendo = Franchise-filled.
And the punchline to this story: WWF finished the Monday Night Wars. Now mostly all wrestling is UNITED under them.
(Similarly the WWF pulled this feat off when at one time everyone thought them to be DOOMED)
•Point 3: The Revolution Beyond the Blue Ocean•
Mummelmann in reference to Wii U: "Is that your revolution? A full 180 degree turn? Then what was the Wii?"
"And Nintendo are now stuck in a market with no available blue ocean..."
That Blue Ocean book was definitely good for a lot of soundbites. It captured a unique understanding of markets that had just about everybody quoting the 'Blue Ocean' catchphrase. That 'Blue Ocean' phrase fit right in with Wii's philosophy as well as its white & baby blue color scheme.
With the bleach white Wii console, the bright blue light you bathed in from the disc slot & the indicators on the bluetooth-powered Wiimotes, the colors of a Blue Ocean Wave were signified: watery blues interlaced with white foam washing away all that was before.
Clean. Renewed. Refreshened. The freedom & peace it symbolized. The serenity.
You could hear the seagulls squee just like in Wind Waker!
But see, that's the problem with analogies. They're only approximate not exact. And people can get stuck on an analogy so severely that they fail to consider other possibilities. Blue Ocean Strategy is ONE way to strengthen your business but it's not the only way.
Playing on the metaphorical fun of the 'Blue Ocean' phrase, what happens if Nintendo creates a whirlpool in that Blue Ocean?
What happens if Nintendo dries out the Blue Ocean leaving the other ships beached & run aground?
What happens if Nintendo makes the Blue Ocean boil cooking the other ships?
Not directly competing ship to ship like a bloody Red Ocean but making the expansion abilities of the Blue Ocean limited to the competition?
They get sucked into the whirlpool, they get grounded as the ocean is sucked out, they get cooked as they try to sail the seas.
The question is what happens if Nintendo sabotages the way the others do business by making the environment poisonous for them?
What happens if Nintendo creates an environment that causes the competition to self-destruct?
These are the things that instantly came to my mind as that epiphany hit me at E3 2013 with the XBox One display.
I don't know everything but I DO know that Nintendo never sells a console at a loss.
I know that Nintendo usually goes last of the competitors.
I kept asking myself "Why are they going first knowing that the competition would copy them or play the power hype game?"
I kept asking myself "Why would Nintendo sell a console at a loss when they have never launched a console this way before?"
It just didn't fit Nintendo's usual way of doing things.
And it made me think back on why Wii was suddenly de-emphasized in 2011 to my surprise.
They had a console that was STILL hot. They stopped the momentum suddenly. A new console is launched to replace the old one.
It starts the 8th generation for home consoles. It sells at a loss. Nintendo's an efficient company with little to no waste.
All that pointed to Nintendo trying to get ahead of a certain situation. And that their focus was ALL ABOUT getting ahead of the situation even if it costed them in the short term.
They were working on a speed strategy not the usual slow & deliberate strategies they're known for.
It's like the speed of this launch was trying to force a situation into being. They were trying to create a market reality by force.
And then I thought about the realities of what happened in the 7th generation as Microsoft & Sony kept trying to recoup the financial losses from the XBox 360 & PlayStation 3. How they would benefit the longer the 7th generation went on with name value built by street cred & financial value built by the sales. With Wii out of the picture, they could finish that Sony vs. Microsoft fight as the 3rd parties play both of them to bolster their political power.
PlayStations & XBoxes ruling the landscape means that 3rd party developers rule the landscape.
What happens when that cantankerous 1st party ruins this little party?
What happens when Nintendo says "time's up!" on the 7th generation?
What happens is Nintendo forces a dilemma.
Sony's overall state is weak & dealing with the dilemma of 'recoup losses with the PS3 in an eroding generation' or 'financial strain through R&D with the PS4 for a coming generation' can weaken that state even further.
Hence the selling of those Sony HQs & major office buildings.
Microsoft's overall state is much stronger but the dilemma of 'extend American domination with the 360 in an eroding generation' or 'conflict against my American-strong 360 by making the One for a coming generation' can weaken the state of their XBox, one of their best brands.
Because of the dilemma & not really understanding how to move on from the XBox 360 (Kinect didn't take them as far as they hoped), they come out with that insanity we saw at E3 2013.
Just by Nintendo announcing intent to make a successor to the Wii, their home console competition gets caught at the crossroads.
Microsoft was content to have the 360 sell for years & years on end if need be. They pretty much already made a new console out of the old one with the XBox 360 S revision & Kinect in 2010. They had no plans on moving on especially after Wii dropped out & left the floor to the competition.
Sony needed the PS3 to sell on that 10-year plan since it took so long for it to come out of the shadow of the PS2 & since they lost so much money during the entire PS3 project. With Wii out of the picture, they could cement Japan all alone & edge out the 360 in the other regions over time.
This way they could recover the losses & restore the tarnished name value of the PlayStation.
They were not moving on anytime soon either.
Once Nintendo was sipping from Project Café, the others had to scramble out a response. That's why you saw them at 2013 not 2012.
Nobody was paying attention but it was Nintendo who set up the conditions leading the XBox One & PlayStation 4 into being what they are.
Sony once the king of marrying their media formats to their game machines is suddenly playing the safe route. No new formats.
Microsoft who did everything they could to keep the XBox 360 from looking like the XBox is now forced to come up with new ideas.
But they're not really gamemakers so all they could deliver was restrictive DRM madness, lots of TV-viewing options, and of course Peggle 2!
Because of Nintendo putting Sony & Microsoft in that dilemma, neither the PlayStation 4 or the XBox One have backward compatibility.
Why not? Because it would have drove up costs to manufacture them that's why.
Sony couldn't afford another situation like the PS3 again so they took the quick route & pretty much built a PC in console form.
But wait a minute isn't the PS4 Blu-ray just like the PS3? Why CAN'T PS3's Blu-ray game discs work in the PS4?
It's not even a format change this time. Blu-ray = Blu-ray.
For whatever reason excising backwards compatibility cut some price off of the PS4.
Microsoft was already high cost with manufacturing for the PC-like XBox One especially with Kinect inside by default.
Even so, if XBox One is Blu-ray why can't it play the dual-layered DVD game discs of the 360?
Regular Blu-ray players play Blu-rays, DVDs, & CDs. A disc is a disc, right?
Digital computerized records in these modern-day record players.
Nope. Microsoft decided to aim for a $500 price tag & took out backwards compatibility to avoid their own 'PS3 from 2006'-style situation.
Not sure if they succeeded on that...
And that leads me to a couple of other points. Sony & Microsoft did all of this and STILL couldn't get their consoles to sell above a loss at launch!
Here's an article explaining why: Like the PS4, Xbox One Being Built At a Loss
Give them credit that they may be closer to breaking even than they were with the 360 & PS3 but it just shows what a bind Nintendo put these guys in to get a console ready for the 8th generation.
That's why Sony & Microsoft opted to build the PS4 & One with off-the-shelf parts.
They had to get these machines built in a hurry & the quickest way was to just mirror a PC. That's why the architectures are so PC-like.
And that's my next point. What's the point of a console when it's just like a PC?
Sony & Microsoft missed that detail in their Nintendo dilemma.
Home consoles are not supposed to exist today. They were supposed to be made obsolete 30 years ago.
We were supposed to be playing games only on Personal Computers. That's where the market was going 30 years ago.
How is it that home consoles still exist today?
DIFFERENTIATION, that's how. Consoles must strike Distinction from home computers, personal computers to avoid Redundancy.
Who has been at the forefront of keeping the console distinct from PCs? You know who but I'll tell you anyway: Nintendo.
In truth, both consoles & PCs are computers. But consoles are UNIQUE SPECIALIZED computers focused on gaming like an appliance.
They are gaming appliances like your washing machine is a laundry appliance & your refrigerator is your food storage appliance.
When consoles become too much like PCs, they become Redundant. Nintendo's dilemma put Sony & Microsoft's consoles in redundancy.
I have personally heard account of this event in action. I have a relative who was a lifelong console gamer. He bought the 360 & PS3 in the 7th generation (he only bought the Wii for his girlfriend's sake—now wife). He sold his 360 some time back but had his PS3 & was playing on it regularly.
At the same time he was also becoming a PC gamer. He loves to build PCs & pore over the details of the parts & stuff.
Earlier this year, I talked to him & asked him what console he was interested in for this 8th generation just getting underway.
To my surprise he said that he wasn't really interested at all with any of them. I was SHOCKED! I knew he was not in favor of Wii U but I thought he would at least go for the PlayStation 4. That he would at least have a comment to make about the XBox One. Nope. Nothing.
Just recently he gave me another shock. HE SOLD HIS PS3!! I'm like WHAT?!
He had one of the ORIGINAL PS3's with the backward compatibility.
He has become a full-fledged PC gamer! No interest in this 8th gen race whatsoever.
He's like his PC can do more than any console could anyway so why waste his money on a console.
Plus he said he could build a better rig than the new consoles for about the same price.
His selling of his PS3, I suppose, was to eliminate the redundancy & free up space. He certainly would not get a PS4 OR One knowing this.
My relative's account is not the only example of this phenomenon happening. He is not alone in this belief. Watch this.
Why Gaming PCs are Better Than the PS4 and Xbox One - Why I Cancelled My PlayStation 4 Preorder (It Wasn't To Get An Xbox One)
Excerpt:
Several days ago, I made a call to Sony’s Online Store. After a 50 minute wait, a pleasant but leisurely customer service rep picked up the line and began her introductory script. Patiently, I waited until she was finished. Then I told her I’d like to cancel my PlayStation 4 pre-order.
Stunned silence. After a few seconds, she said “Really? You’re sure?”
“Yea, I’m sure.”
“Oh. Why do you want to do that, sir?”
Knowing that the real reasons would be hard to explain, I lied and told her that some unexpected expenses had come up. The rest of the conversation took no more than a minute, and I was done; the pre-order I’d excitedly placed several months ago was no more.
In truth, the reason has nothing to do with expenses and everything do with next-gen disappointment. Almost all the news since the initial announcement of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has been negative; a launch title delayed there, a feature removed here. What looked like a great leap forward has turned into a wary step that barely matches even a mid-range gaming PC. Do next-gen consoles make sense compared to a gaming PC?
Can you build a gaming PC better than the PS4 for $400?
Excerpt:
As you probably know by now, the PS4 is essentially a $400 PC. It has an x86 PC CPU, a standard PC GPU, and the same kind of RAM that you’d find on a PC graphics card. There are a few custom chips on the PS4′s motherboard, but for the most part it’s just a normal PC with some custom software. This led me to wonder… could you actually build a comparable PC for $400? More importantly, given how Sony has crippled the PS4′s home theatre functionality, is it possible to build a PC for $400 that is actually better for games and as a living room media box?...
...We’ll be using Newegg for component prices, because that’s our components supplier of choice when we build new rigs here in the ExtremeTech bunker...
...Total cost: $416, or $396 after rebate
Why The PC Is Better Than The Xbox One and PS4
Excerpt:
So in terms of raw processing power, even comparatively low-end PC processors are actually just as fast or faster than the PS4 and Xbox One, which sports a similar specification. However, it’s the graphics side of things that’s of more interest. AMD has designed custom Radeon GPUs for both new consoles, but both are similar to AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 – a mid-range graphics card that following the release of AMDs latest range of graphics cards such as the R9 290X, is now comparatively old when it comes to the hardware available for the PC.
Nintendo trapped these guys when they kickstarted the 8th generation.
Raw power didn't work against the SD-resolution Wii in the 7th gen.
Even in Wii's absence, both the PS3 & 360 are only around the 80 million mark in worldwide sales after 7 & 8 years on the market.
The Revolution from Wii caused Microsoft & Sony to come out with Kinect & Move yet these peripherals haven't quite captured the imagination like the Wiimote did & haven't really delivered any lasting oomph to their platforms.
Yet they can't let go Kinect & Move for fear of falling back into the shadow of the Wiimote under Wii U. What do they do?
Nintendo knew these guys didn't know where to go anymore. They don't fully understand what a console is & what it's supposed to be.
This was the situation Nintendo was trying to force. This was the market reality Nintendo was trying to force into being.
This ain't Blue Ocean Strategy anymore. Nintendo's poisoning the waters for the competition & wanting them to take a drink.
The PS4 & XBox One are getting to be interchangeable amongst themselves & in comparison with the PC.
Their libraries aren't significantly different from each other or the PC.
It's a lie when someone tells you that exclusivity doesn't matter anymore.
Their hardware power is virtually the same.
There's not very much that PS4 & One can give you that you couldn't get from the PS3 & 360.
The HD hype was overblown in the 7th gen but it DID create a difference between the 6th gen PS2 & XBox and the 7th gen PS3 & 360.
They're putting themselves in the same spot TVs are in.
Where the actual machines are so generalized that one is about as good as the other.
Where the brand sells more than the actual product. That brand name value is the crucial distinction between a bunch of samey products.
This is FATAL for a SPECIALIZED area of electronics like videogame consoles.
Is the Business of TV Manufacturing Worth The Trouble?
Excerpt:
The TV biz just ain't what it used to be.
Once upon a time, Japanese heavyweights Sony (SNE) and Panasonic (PC) were the cream of the crop when it came to TV manufacturers. Nowadays, the leaders of the pack are Korean conglomerates Samsung and LG Display (LPL). In an interview with NPR News, industry pundit Jack Plunkett said:
"The fact is that consumers worldwide today perceive Korean goods to be of high quality and to be very high value. So why should they pay a lot more for essentially the same product from Sony or Panasonic when they can get a great value and great quality from the Koreans?"
You talk about Nintendo being in a slow-cook disaster. Ha!
It is Sony & Microsoft who were led into a slow-cook disaster by NINTENDO.
Nintendo was willing to take a short-term hit for a long-term gain.
That's what going first was all about. That's why the decision to risk selling at a loss IN ORDER to go first was all about.
They managed to create an HD console that DID NOT cost them production expenses out the wazoo. No layoffs, no bankruptcies.
The snag was that they only underestimated the TIME to produce the games. Which is easily reversible & fixable.
Nintendo created a situation that will bust up the PlayStation/XBox platform combo the 3rd parties use to leverage their political power.
All Nintendo needs to do is to take out one or the other. XBox One only has 2 major markets to sell in.
They'll never get Japan on their side.
PlayStation 4 MUST return to the record-selling status of the PS1 & PS2 or Sony's money will start to look funny with their junk status credit.
If the PS4 makes the One redundant or One causes PS4 to bleed money in the competition, that leaves only one 3rd party console platform.
The 3rd parties depend on TWO platforms to get the sales that approach Nintendo's record-setting milestones.
With the aspect of the PC peeling off potential fanbase from BOTH the PS4 & One, the 3rd parties with even higher budgets will have a harder time maintaining the sales they made in the 7th gen.
And naturally their profit potentials follow this stagnant or declining trajectory.
That means even more layoffs, even more bankruptcies.
How long can they depend on the blockbuster First-Person Shooter to make bank?
The music game genre was worn out in the 7th gen. What dependable money maker will they have once the blockbuster FPS genre has worn itself out? What can they bring to define the 8th generation? What do they have that can change the game?
The same naturalistic 3D perspective with similar playing mechanics will jade even the most dedicated fan over time.
This is how the fighting game genre died down.
This is why Nintendo switched from 2D side-scroller platformers to 3D full-range platformers.
Rockstar keeps up the sandbox action-adventure genre BECAUSE they don't come out every year & take their time to add something genuinely fresh to the gameplay while still keeping it intact with its history.
But now you don't see as many Grand Theft Auto clones as you used to, do you?
Once these realities are apparent, once the 3rds realize they are on eroding grounds, they will have a choice to make.
And since I have already established WHY they deserted PC for the console world, that means in the end they will have only one other option.
Nintendo. Wii U. Wii Unity. UNITY. The Revolution Beyond the Blue Ocean.
| Mummelmann said: But you could never handle that; a Nintendo that makes mistakes. Even though you have previously stated that they dropped Wii support prematurely, this is all forgotten now, out of sight, out of mind I suppose. Could it be that Nintendo have failed to read the market and respond accordingly? Like Sony did in the 7th generation? Like Microsoft did in the 6th generation? Like Nintendo themselves did in the 5th and the 6th generation?
I suppose you’ll keep clinging to the facts of life though, these being; Nintendo are infallible, clearly. They love you a lot more than other gaming companies. They love games a lot more than other gaming companies. They’re a lot better at games than other gaming companies. They are in a lot less trouble than other gaming companies.
What if the Wii U fails to sell 12 million by the end of 2014, what then? Revolution postponed? What if the PS4 and the One pass it in lifetime sales by early 2015? Will you go into PS3 mode and start posting lists of upcoming strategies and software that will kill it off, even though the customer base isn’t the same, much like GTA IV “killed” the Wii?
|
•Point 1: Can Nintendo Make Mistakes?•
I'm starting to wonder if you even read the opening post of this thread.
I specifically stated that I once thought Nintendo screwed up with the 3DS & Wii U. Even once I figured out what they were doing with Wii U I said that they bungled up the transition from Wii to Wii U which is a cause of Wii U's setback. I even said "Nobody's perfect".
No person is perfect. No company is perfect. No thing in this entire UNIVERSE is perfect.
Perfection means Completion & every bit of matter & anti-matter in this universe is always missing something. Always incomplete.
Like I said the perfect Cube makes for a poor Sphere. The perfect Boulder makes for a poor Parachute.
Perfection exists only as a concept.
I said in this very post that I while I understood their plans for Wii U that their execution of that plan was rough & wonky at first.
No, Nintendo is not perfect. Nintendo is not infallible. Nintendo DOES make mistakes.
And the competition better be lucky that they do.
If Nintendo didn't make mistakes, they couldn't even enter this business in the first place. No, Nintendo ain't perfect.
But Nintendo is damn good. They're damn smart. And for every mistake they make, they make up for it with their brilliance.
They miss a few plays but they win the game, you understand me?
The 3DS launched at too high a price with not enough compelling games at launch. That was a CRUCIAL mistake on Nintendo's part.
It was one people believed to be insurmountable in the face of the smartphones & tablets. What did Nintendo do?
They got that price right, they made early adopters 'Ambassadors', & they started pumping out those games back to back.
Now 2 going on 3 years later, they are just about even with the sales of the DS in about the same span of time.
Nintendo DS: November 21, 2004 to December 31, 2006 = 35.61 million worldwide sales (roughly 2 years).
Nintendo 3DS: February 26, 2011 to March 31, 2013 = 31.09 million worldwide sales (roughly 2 years).
Key parts of this turnaround was a Legend of Zelda remake (Ocarina of Time 3D), a price drop, & Super Mario 3D Land.
The Wii U launches at too high a price with not enough compelling games at launch. This is a CRUCIAL mistake on Nintendo's part.
It is one people believe to be insurmountable in the face of the PlayStation 4 & XBox One. What does Nintendo do?
They get that price right, they have early adopters act as ambassadors through Miiverse, & they're starting to pump out games back to back.
Key parts of this turnaround is a Legend of Zelda remake (Wind Waker HD), a price drop, & Super Mario 3D World.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
What do you think is gonna be the punchline of this story? Where do you think this is gonna end up?
Nintendo read the market correctly. They stumbled in their execution of transferring the power of Wii into Wii U.
They underestimated the TIME of game production in HD.
They were even distracted in the push to get 3DS on track during the transition.
They will correct those mistakes & are in the process of doing it right now. Once they're done, Wii U will fulfill its destiny.
You see, I know better than to underestimate Nintendo because I MYSELF made that mistake in years past.
When I read about Metroid Prime before it came out, I thought Nintendo made a mistake in trying to transfer that gameplay in a full-range 3D world.
I thought it would be better to deliver 3D perspective with tracked on-rail paths & even came up with a theory on how Nintendo could do this.
How could I doubt the ones who brought Mario & Zelda into 3D! Metroid Prime as it came out was MUCH better than my theory.
When I read about Wind Waker before it came out, I thought Nintendo made a mistake with the cartoony art style. I personally loved the artstyle but wondered if they would alienate any less understanding fans expecting more realistic art styles.
How could I doubt the ones who put Yoshi in a crayon/patchwork storybook & transformed Mario into flat 2-dimensional paper!
Wind Waker came out just fine & Link's eye focus brought more realism to the game than a mere naturalistic artstyle could.
Not keeping up with game news by the mid-2000s, I thought it was a mistake for Nintendo to put out the DS when the GBA was still hot stuff.
They JUST put out the GBA SP. Would the DS eclipse this handheld? Or wouldn't the fans be mad & stick with the GBA denying the DS?
How could I doubt the ones who have outlasted every single handheld competitor in the book & still keep trucking!
The 'Third Pillar' was just a line. Everybody accepted the DS replacing the GBA & DS broke the Game Boy's record for all-time handheld sales.
Knowing all this I STILL doubted Nintendo when they de-emphasized Wii in 2011. I understood why they focused on 3DS but I didn't think they needed to abandon Wii. Not at this crucial juncture. Once again I thought they made a mistake in stopping Wii.
The mistake was only in the execution of the transition & it took me 2 years to catch on to what they were ultimately doing.
My information was updated & I now knew that it WASN'T a mistake de-emphasizing the Wii for this new plan they have for Wii U.
Recently realizing how Nintendo works from handhelds first then goes into home consoles, underlined my updated view.
Oh, you want me to SHOW you how I know that Nintendo strategizes from their handhelds first then goes into their home consoles?
Not counting the Color TV Game of 1977, you see a pattern of Nintendo setting up a handheld first then moving toward the home console.
Game & Watch comes out in 1980. The Donkey Kong Game & Watch Multi-Screen with the first Control Pad comes out in 1982.
Family Computer/NES comes out in 1983 with a controller lining up with that Donkey Kong Game & Watch design.
Game Boy comes out in 1989. Super Famicom/SNES comes out in 1990. Virtual Boy comes out in 1995. Nintendo 64 comes out in 1996.
Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance come out in 1998 & early 2001. Gamecube comes out in late 2001.
DS comes out in 2004. Wii comes out in 2006. 3DS comes out in 2011. Wii U comes out in 2012.
And even with the Color TV Game, Nintendo worked with arcades in 1975 before they made a home console in 1977.
The Virtual Boy strategy utterly failed so Game Boy's life had to cover the N64 era. But you see each & every time that Nintendo puts much effort into their handhelds then come to home consoles after they secured the handheld.
Seeing Sony on the horizon with the PSP, Nintendo puts their focus on the DS in 2004/2005 taking away focus on the struggling Gamecube.
They secure the success of the DS in 2005 then begin to work on getting Wii up to speed.
Seeing Apple & Google on the horizon with the smartphones, Nintendo puts their focus on the 3DS in 2011 taking away focus on the Wii.
They secure the success of the 3DS in late 2011/2012 then begin to work on getting Wii U up to speed. Interesting pattern there.
We tend of think of home consoles as #1. Nintendo operates as if handhelds are #1. Maybe this is why they never lost a battle in that realm yet.
That explains the first fiscal annual loss in 30 years in 2012.
They were preparing the rollout of the Wii U & then the 3DS didn't catch on yet.
They had already withdrawn focus on Wii so Wii's sales from past momentum couldn't pickup the financials.
A perfect storm to cause losses.
Then the 3DS caught on but the Wii U stalled & the Wii was getting put out to pasture. This is what they're working through right now.
They will not post another annual loss when the fiscal year ends on March 31, 2014. Mistakes were made but they are correctable.
And WHY will these mistakes be correctable? Well you already outlined it for me.
They DO care about the gamer more than other companies. That's why their customer service is top notch.
They DO care about the craft of gamemaking more than other companies. That's why that Nintendo logo is all that's needed to sell their games.
They ARE better at making games than other companies. They are FACTUALLY THE BEST videogame developer in the business.
They ARE in less trouble than other companies. People wig out when Nintendo loses money BECAUSE it is so rare. They got reserves-a-plenty.
Sony is more dependent on the PS4 being a success than Nintendo is with the Wii U.
XBox fans better hope that Stephen Elop doesn't become the new CEO of Microsoft because that might be it for the XBox.
I don't know of too many other companies willing to waste billions again & again chasing those elusive videogame dollars.
The mistake YOU make is underestimating Nintendo. It's a mistake MANY people make. It's a mistake many people REGRET.
Never Underestimate Nintendo. Type those 3 words into a search engine & see what you find in the results.
Warren Spector told you. Spector: Underestimate Nintendo at your peril
Excerpt:
"I've been pretty up front about my enthusiasm for Nintendo. I think we need a company that's dedicated to games. Every time I visit Nintendo, I'm relieved to have spent time in a place where you can just feel how much everyone loves games," Spector said. "And, really, how many times have people written Nintendo off? I think you underestimate them at your peril."
Oh there's another answer to your sarcastic remark about Nintendo loving games. First-hand source. He saw it in action.
And I love this Kotaku article. 'Nintendo's Doomed, They Should Go Third- Party!' Said Everyone, Ever.
Some people are learning from their mistakes. That's why you see an article like that on a major publication.
Nintendo makes mistakes & they learn from them. That's how they get stronger with each passing generation.
That's why their franchises grow & get even more dominant as the years go on. That legendary 1st party power somehow gets STRONGER!
If the Wii U fails to fulfill my 12 million call for 2013, then Nintendo will correct that mistake by making the 35 million for 2014.
They miss a few plays but they'll win the game, remember what I tell you.
Nintendo didn't come here to fail, boys. Make no mistake that the plan they have for Wii U will come to fruition.
Wii U will lead the 8th generation & bring Unity to the videogame world. No mistaking that.
| Mummelmann said: Both you and Nintendo are contradicting yourselves, and neither can see it. You’ve said the same things as in the OP before, the main difference is that in the 7th gen, it could be technically feasible, although it was obviously a stretch and wrong all along. You’ll have to concede the fact that either your previous 7th gen thesis was highly flawed, or it was correct and the Wii U is doomed along with the PS4 and One due to development costs and extended development cycles for HD output. You can postpone commenting directly on the sales until January 1st if you want, it won’t make a difference.
PS: Looking forward to a long reply with exciting images, the same rhetoric and numbers dodging and sentiments on how I “fail to see” certain things in the big picture, just like I “failed to see” them in the 7th gen, even though it was never there. “Vide Omnia, es ubique” indeed.
|
•Point 1: Visionaries & The Blind•
It was a stretch, you say about my vision for Wii in the 7th gen.
Nintendo STOPPED Wii from fulfilling its sales potential & that is only reason it did not reach those goals.
Even now on the latest sales charts from VGChartz from November 30, 2013 Just Dance 2014 for Wii has sold 494,277 & is #3 on the charts!
The Wii Mini is STILL bringing in some numbers for the Wii & the Wii Mini is a total & absolute JOKE!!
IMAGINE what would happen if Nintendo never stopped backing up the Wii actively.
They were going to stomp all over the PS2's record.
They stomped on every other PS2 record so why not that one? Wii had that generation in the bag & I saw it early on.
I have showed you the history. I have posted the links. And you saw it in action. 240 million in sales MINIMUM was reachable by Wii.
The PS2 was once at around 120 million when I made that prediction 6 to 7 years ago & now it is at 157 million.
With Wii breaking every record the PS2 set how could you not see Wii going even further in sales? It was no stretch whatsoever.
An SD console topping HD powerhouses effortlessly every year.
All Nintendo had to do was keep backing the Wii up & those sales were a given.
Nintendo CHOSE to stop Wii & have a greater Wii better fulfill the old Wii's mission. This post & this entire UNITY thread explains that.
You don't yet have the vision to see this future reality. It is much easier for you to pile on Nintendo with the rest of the doubters.
Wii U struggles from the transition & all of a sudden, Nintendo's in a world of trouble. I know better.
We have been here before with the 3DS.
In 2011 when 3DS struggled, there was post on October 11th by moderator radishhead titled So after the NPD, is 3DS doomed again?
In it radishhead says:
"Well, it turns out that the effect of the pricecut for the 3DS wasn't as great as expected, and with Nintendo supposedly losing money of every system sold (and software hasn't been that great either) - is the 3DS doomed?"
On October 22, 2011, moderator Mr Khan posted an article from MarketWatch titled Analyst: Nintendo will be bankrupt in 5 years.
Jason Spader, the analyst of said piece, used all the popular buzz words like 'casual' & 'serious gamer' spouting off garbage like this:
Spader, reporting on a batch of companies that investors should stay far away from for their own good, added the down-and-out former video game giant among other doomed corporations such as RIM and America On-Line. In Nintendo's case, he states that the company made a half-hearted jump to follow Apple into the budding casual gaming market, but that Nintendo's business model is like a dinosaur: big, slow, out of date and doomed to extinction. "Nintendo clearly saw the market Apple was heading for with the iPhone in 2006, and retooled their struggling Nintendo DS and launched their Wii platform to buy into that market."...
..."By working their magic on casual gamers in a market that was more established, that being the console market, Nintendo was able to gain a momentary advantage on otherwise superior companies like Apple and the emergent Google." But he maintained that the market that allowed Nintendo to become momentarily relevant again is a fickle one. "Casual gamers want three things: Fast, cheap, and simple. They don't care about quality, they just want shiny, silly games. The console market is designed for serious games, and thus isn't the best to deliver the kind of games casual gamers want." As the 3G data plans have come down in cost and smartphones become more ubiquitous, the casual market belongs entirely to them now, and therefore Nintendo will have to retreat.
But Sony and Microsoft have blocked off Nintendo's path of retreat. By using sensible strategies such as the loss-leading razor-and-blade model, Sony and Microsoft can play a game of high-tech consoles for serious gamers that Nintendo cannot compete in. "With their vast pools of revenue from other ventures, Sony and Microsoft can continue to play in the video game console market, and they can and will burn Nintendo out as they try to reclaim the market that they have totally alienated."...
..."In five years the loss-leaders will have burnt them out."
That overdone Nintendoomed talk happens everytime Nintendo goes through a transition or a rough spot.
And then the doomsayers end up eating their words after the dust has settled. Read what's in that Kotaku article I showed you earlier.
'Nintendo's Doomed, They Should Go Third-Party!' Said Everyone, Ever.
Pundit after pundit after pundit, expert after expert after expert all saying variations of the same thing.
You present my visions as predictable but the only thing that's predictable is the LACK of vision when it comes to what Nintendo does.
And when enough of those blinds leading the blind make enough noise, it becomes fashionable to join the noisy crowd.
Safety in numbers.
To make up for their lack of SIGHT, they give you SOUND. To make up for their lack of INSIGHT, they SOUND OUT.
But I am immune to the noise. I can see past that wall of sound. Let them pile on & make the wall higher & higher.
I will bust through that wall.
Are you brave enough to bust through that wall with me, Mummelmann?
Or are you gonna play it safe & become another brick in the wall?
Judging by what you said on February 15, 2013 in response to another Pachter doomsday post, looks like I'm gonna hafta get out the spackle.
Mummelmann: "Their handheld business can’t save them in the face of cannibalization from smartphones and tablets" is probably the only sentence this man has ever uttered that I fully agree with.
Handhelds are going away for good, at least in their current form.
But there's hope for you, Mummelmann. In your signature right now is the following:
____________________________________________________________________
Member of GAIL
End of 2013 hardware sales:
Wii: 104 m 360: 82.2 m PS3: 81.9 m Wii U: 11.5 (Note: I have said that Pikmin 3 won't sell more than 750k lifetime) m 3DS: 39 m PSVita: 7 m
____________________________________________________________________
Wii U at 11.5 million for the end of 2013...hmm. That's only 500,000 away from my 12 million call for the end of 2013, Mummelmann.
Even if you never understood Wii U's purpose you STILL were brave enough to put down such a number & brave enough to keep that number in your signature even throughout all the doubt, despair, & doomaglooma. That shows me something.
Just like I was, just like Gamerace is, you are stuck. The epiphany hasn't hit you yet. The realization hasn't hit you yet.
You don't yet understand Nintendo's strategy & you don't yet understand what role Wii U plays in that strategy.
Like it was with me, like it WILL be for Gamerace, it will be for you too.
It will hit you when you least expect it & you will no longer be blind.
I was blind for 2 years on what Nintendo was doing & then it hit me out of the blue.
I had little taste for the 3DS or the Wii U as 2013 began. I didn't buy my 3DS until June 18th of this year.
Wii U suddenly made sense to me on June 10th during Microsoft's XBox One reveal at E3 2013.
I bought my Wii U the day I wrote this UNITY thread, August 9th. I had been planning on writing it for weeks before this but what better time than the day I get my Wii U to share my epiphany, my realization.
A bolt of lightning through my mind. It was like something took over my brain & then I saw & heard the word UNITY as XBox One was shown.
And not the Unity of the Unity Engine but a Unity that speaks to a grander more encompassing reality. A Unified Gaming Audience.
Just like when my e-mailing friend & RevPatentLeaker brought me out of apathy for the Revolution in the Summer of 2005, XBox One's reveal brought me out of apathy for the Revolution's Continuation.
All the puzzle pieces which had confused me & frustrated me suddenly fell into place. It all began to make sense all at once.
Metallicube recently came to his own realization that he details in the following thread:
At last, Nintendo (and Best Buy) have convinced this veteran cynical Nintendo fan to cave in and pick up a Wii U. My impressions.
Metallicube described himself as "once one of Wii U's biggest critics" & now he tells of his legitimate enjoyment of the Wii U.
See Mummelmann, I was once one of Wii U's biggest critics too. I told the story in the opening post. I showed you my journey.
I made the turnaround, Metallicube made the turn around, Gamerace will make the turnaround, & you will make the turnaround as well.
And then what you see as my delusional view won't look so delusional anymore.
It will become self-evident as Arthur Schopenhauer said.
| Mummelmann said: Edit; how could I forget to adress this; JL leaving the site when the revolution was put on hold. There are people who spend quite a lot of time on this site who are engineers, doctors and a bunch of other, high-tier occupations, they have no problem coming here and they even have time to play games as well. You're trying to tell me that writing for a webiste, the incredible task of online texts took your entire life into a period where you had no time to even make a slight comment in here? You still participated slightly in political threads, fairly heavy subjects that require deep thinking and concentration, yet you somehow couldn't muster the energy and time to answer to a few sales outlooks and predictions? That is convenient indeed. So much so that it smells funny, and telling people "wait in line, son" as if you were some monarch or president smacks of narcissism and a severely bloated ego. You're going the Malstrom way; picking the easiest and less important arguments to reply, a deviously clever tactic, if somewhat dishonest. For all the entertainment and debate you spark in here; this current attitude, with absolutely no grounds to exist I might add, only detracts from your somewhat intact pool of respect. If you lose your tone in debate simply for being asked to update, then you don't have much left.
|
•Point 1: Why Did I Fade Away from VGChartz in the Midst of the 7th Generation?•
I have already explained this to you but, fine, we'll pour over it again for the audience's sake. THE FULL STORY. EVERY ENTIRE DETAIL.
As you read earlier in this post about my shift from apathy to enthusiasm with the Nintendo Revolution in the Summer of 2005, I began to post everywhere I could about Wii & the coming 7th generation.
I who had never thought of checking game news online in my then-4 years on the internet was suddenly all over the blogs of Joystiq, Kotaku, & every forum I could think of to post my viewpoints. I especially loved forums & considered them to be treasure chests of information.
One forum I thought would be a good place to contribute to was a place called N-Philes.com. I thought naturally that it was a Nintendo fan site & I would be speaking amongst like minds. N-Philes? Nintendo Philes? Nintendo Lovers? This turned to be not quite the case.
There were some mean muthas on that site putting me down & trying to marginalize what I had to say.
Oh I have dealt with meaner, trust me. And I could give mean right back to them triple of what they gave me. I ran across some REAL sickos on this internet before & if I could handle them I could handle anybody.
But I didn't want to bring that tit for tat stuff to N-Philes.com. So I conducted myself civilly despite the nastiness from certain posters.
Luckily, everybody wasn't nasty like that & I could carry on a quality conversation with them.
But when the moderators are a part of the nasty bunch what can you do? I had never flamed or disrespected anybody there.
I abided by the rules of the forum & treated even my enemies with respect. Didn't matter. I was banned from N-Philes.com in October of 2006.
Some of the more friendly posters there thought it was unfair & stood up for me saying that I treated everybody properly there.
Well I was like this forum ain't worth the trouble as much as I liked some of the good posters on the site. I decided to find a new venue.
I liked the more cozy intimate homemade kind of sites over the impersonal behemoths like Gamespot & IGN.
That's why I made so many comment board posts at Joystiq & Kotaku. They were big enough to be seen but small enough to be a community.
But I decided to try one of those behemoths on the eve of the Wii & PS3's debut. That same October I started posting on Gamespot.
Yes, I had my overly long essay style of writing there too but more people gave me props of what I had to say—even though with the volume of posts things tend to get flushed down oblivion's toilet. Not many people like to go to page 27 to see what people have to say.
I always liked to make quality posts over quantity posts. I wanted people to think & reflect. None of this "First!" nonsense or off-topic silly talk.
I wanted to have a real discussion instead of a chat room atmosphere. Even in a forum I wanted to simulate a one-on-one conversation.
Some appreciated my style & sent me private messages thanking me for it. I continued having discussion in those PMs which I thought would be even more useful to discuss specifics in detail. I make a good comment board post & I might get a PM where we can discuss things further.
I was enjoying my new stomping ground at Gamespot despite its impersonal behemothness.
Then in mid-to-late October I get a private message from somebody named reguy3000. At first he seemed to be another one of the Gamespot members complimenting my words & seeking further discussion on what I said on the comment boards.
But soon he asked me if I would like to contribute my thoughts to this site he had called Ultra Studios.
Now I had already seen sites like TheWiikly.com where Sean Malstrom first made his name & I had a lot to say obviously.
Over the years on the internet, people have told me I should be a writer based on how I posted on various forums.
I never saw myself as a writer really. I was typing like I was talking & thinking. And to make my long posts bearable I tried to make it fun to read.
The truth was that I was stuck in a 9-to-5 bogged down by the realities of day-to-day life. My thing was drawing & creating music.
I was an artist but it's damned hard to make a living in creative fields like those. I didn't believe in the starving artist stereotype.
I come from poor roots—a common scenario for Black people in America. I avoided many of the traps Black folks get caught up in.
I did my best to play it smart & not be frivolous or careless. No drugs, no jail, no baby mama drama with kids I couldn't afford.
When I was a young adult I had a minimum wage $5.15 an hour job, part time with 32 hours a week at best, and STILL had cable.
Paid my bills & had enough for cable too on a fast food worker's wage. I learned from childhood how to be smart with the little money you got.
There's NO WAY I would take stupid unnecessary risks with the background I came from.
But I was in a rut. I didn't draw or make songs as much as I used to. Too caught up in trying to stay above water financially.
I AM AN ARTIST. This is my passion. This is my skillset. I want to be an entrepreneur in a creative field. Making a living from my talents.
There's more to life than just paying the damn bills every month & working that 9 to 5. That's not enough for me.
I was not where I wanted to be in life & reguy3000's offer may have been just what I needed to get out of that rut.
I learned that reguy3000's name was Nathan, Nate for short. He told me he worked for a magazine named Gamefan.
That he has connections in gaming media. He told me that I would get money for my contributions & that I could write something once a week.
I wasn't expecting to get rich from doing this. I expected maybe a hundred or so here & there. Nothing major from a startup like this.
It could help me pay down my debts a little faster. The car repairs I picked up from the necessity of commuting constricted my finances.
My Dad told me to be careful & I said I'm keeping an eye out. If he ever asked me to put up cash I would know his intentions were not sincere.
Nathan didn't ask me for money so I agreed to participate. Still, from day one I went in with a mix of skepticism & optimism.
I set the ground rules early on telling him that he's not my boss & that this is more of a mutual agreement between equals.
This was to be more like an independent contractor arrangement where I could accept or refuse terms & he could do the same.
I deal with a boss on my 9 to 5. Ain't no way I'm gonna put myself under ANOTHER boss in a situation like this. He agreed.
Ultra Studios would now be my outlet for creativity. I would approach writing just like I did drawing a picture & playing a song.
I made email contact with Nathan's friend Richard who was to run Ultra Studios with him.
The site was plain & basic but that was OK. It was a startup & everybody has to start from somewhere, right?
For my first contribution, I delivered a post I made on N-Philes about Nintendo's history of controller standards naming the article "Control".
I was going to have self-drawn pictures demonstrating this evolution & how the Wiimote follows that legacy.
My next contribution was another N-Philes repost I titled "Why graphics don't mean as much anymore".
Once again I was going to show pictures demonstrating my point with graphical displays from games of different generations.
I was feeling good about myself. I was doing a home business kind of thing writing articles & sharing my thoughts on an internet platform.
Then Nate tells me that there was a breakdown with the Ultra Studios project. Him & his buddy Richard had a falling out.
This would be the beginning of many breakdown announcements from Nate over the years & the red flags were beginning to show up.
But snafus happen, right? Nate was trying to assure me that the project would still go on & in November of 2006 here enters PopZart.
PopZart was some name Nate came up with from some old idea of his & he had a new braintrust with this guy named Braden.
PopZart was a little more colorful & more produced than the bland Ultra Studios set up though still pretty basic.
Since I was an unabashed Nintendo fan, I was represented on the site with a crude picture of a Black Luigi as I posted under my own name.
I resume posting articles to the successor of Ultra Studios & wanted to see the money begin to flow as the site began to grow.
December 2006 is when I LUCKILY get my Wii & began to have posts on this new site PopZart. I wanted to share my thoughts on Wii here.
Nate encouraged me to not only post about videogames since he didn't want PopZart to be a videogame only site.
I could write anything I wanted culture, politics, media, whatever. Just as with Ultra Studios, I would email my writings to him.
Nate would edit them (not to my liking sometimes) & then they would populate the PopZart site alongside his articles written under the banner of Mr. Universal & his other buddy Herman who calls himself Namreh. Braden was the financial backer & technical guy who would post rarely.
PopZart also had a site mascot named Sgt. Spiffy & Nate wrote those articles in the character of Spiffy.
It looked to be one happy family. One tight together team. I felt that PopZart would take me where I needed to go.
It was around this time of late 2006/early 2007 that I discovered VGChartz. I probably found it wanting to see how much Wii sold that Christmas.
This was a good discussion ground & I liked the more community-focused intimate homemade setting the place had.
I lurked & listened to nature of the conversation until someone talked about Wii not outdoing the XBox 360 in a March 2007 thread.
That inspired me to come out lurk & make my first post here on March 14, 2007. I came here independent of my dealings wih PopZart & wanted to discuss things live in a forum full of people with various views. Different than posting into the feedback-less void of PopZart.
At the end of that first post I put a link to an article I made on PopZart called "The WiiDS Phenomenon" to underline my 20 million prediction.
Instead of explaining it all out, I would just refer the readers to a ready-made breakdown they could read on their own.
I used it to make my point even further. And perhaps with me writing about Wii on PopZart, I could use other articles to make my points.
PopZart was a business venture. VGChartz was a fun adventure. And with me only writing once a week for PopZart, I could spend my other time having discussions on the VGChartz forums. But it wouldn't be long before PopZart began to suck up my time.
Nate AKA Mr. Universal was trying to get me to post newsbites to help the site build traffic.
I'm like hey that wasn't what we agreed to.
He said it was necessary to build the site & if I wasn't interested he would have to find another contributor who did.
This was another one of the red flag moments I dismissed. Here I have a creative outlet I'm enjoying & that may get me away from the 9-to-5 & now the webmaster is trying to pull a switcheroo on me. But I wanted to make this thing work so I agreed to it.
He sent me an old laptop among other little gifts he would send over the years. This made me think that he was more sincere.
By now I was pretty certain that he might not be as much as he made himself out to be but he DID have connections.
Maybe I could help TURN this site into a success & the money would come from the site getting popular.
I would take my new old laptop to work & type up regurgitations of news articles from bigger sites hoping to get the traffic up.
The nature of my job at the time allowed me to pretty much work on the site from home or job so my free time wasn't cut into too badly yet.
Thank goodness because this newsbite stuff was tedious. I wanted to write original stuff not this time-consuming tripe.
But I didn't know anything about the workings of gaming media so I trusted his judgment, the guy from Gamefan magazine.
He got me into this NPD thing saying it helps with the traffic too. I hated the newsbites but the NPDs I could have fun with.
I could make it more into an editorial. Instead of just posting sales numbers, I could provide a commentary to put the numbers in context.
The April 2007 NPD done in May was my first posting of this monthly chart. I pretty much had the basic format down pat right there but had refined it as the years went on. An intro paragraph detailing world events or history or the seasons. Second paragraph with a teaser of the information that follows. A paragraph for each console from top-selling to bottom-selling all relating to each other & their previous sales performances. Last paragraph with a summary of the games making impact that month. The basic list of chart numbers were to be posted last at the end.
I wanted to have fun with the NPD pieces by putting fun pictures that mirrored something I was saying in the piece or the piece's working title.
I was especially proud of the picture of Don Knotts & Andy Griffith as Barney Fife & Andy Taylor in May 2007 NPD.
I called it "NPD in the bud".
I made the NPD my premier piece & I was proud of the work I was doing with PopZart.
I thought things were beginning to work that Summer of 2007 when the PopZart folks paid for me to travel on a trip to ConnectiCon.
This would be the first time I got to see the PopZart staff in person. I thought we were going places at last!
Braden was trying to push this gadget or application or something while Nathan was trying to promote PopZart at the panels.
A bunch of other related minor PopZart staff (and somebody's girlfriend) was there & when we traveled it was like clowns in a clown car!
7 or 8 people sleeping in a hotel room. I sat upright in a plush chair. I don't know these people! Hahahaha!
But soon it became obvious to me that the happy family, the tight together team I imagined wasn't reality.
These guys were fractious & there was simmering bad blood underneath the surface. I wanted this thing to work so I played peacemaker.
I enjoyed my first time at a comic book convention with all the half-naked girls & other costumed folks running around.
The games to play, the cards to exchange, the buttons to pass out, it was fun to me.
Nate looked down on the folks calling 'em a bunch of nerds.
I didn't like how he kept putting these folks down especially since he was doing business at this ConnectiCon full of "nerds".
After ConnectiCon was over I felt satisfied that I patched up the fractures within the PopZart team.
Nate complimented me on what I did.
I expected that success was right around the corner & the money would soon flow in after our ConnectiCon showing.
Then in September, Nate drops another bombshell on me.
There was a big blowup with Braden & now Braden's taking PopZart with him!
You see this Nate character had some legal trouble in his past & had other people put in ownership of the site.
The financial backer took control of the site I spent nearly a year putting my works on!
I should have gotten off of this ride right then & there.
But Nate told me he found a new backer & that we could continue on over there. All we had to do was find a new name for the site.
He asked me for ideas. I liked the PopZart name & wanted to come as close as I could to it. I thought of African-sounding names.
Popzaya, Popzaba, Popzala, Popzada, Popzara. That was it! We settled on Popzara. PopZart became Popzara that same September.
We rushed to make copies of the webpages & salvage our work made over the past 10 months. Problem was Nate worried that if we reposted too much of the old PopZart material that Braden could cause trouble for us. He could potentially shut us down.
We moved into the new site in a hasty unfinished way that wouldn't set right with me for years. I would ask over the years when could we restore the PopZart articles & Nate would deflect the issue saying that we would restore them one day but for now we needed to concentrate on moving forward.
I didn't like that answer since I pride myself on a stable history of works but I went along thinking of making the site successful to get the cash.
With the new backer in Joel Teply, Nate rolled out the planned graphical overhaul intended for PopZart & used it for the new Popzara.
A much more colorful comic-book like look. All of the contributors with updated cartoon characters as their avatars.
That crude Black Luigi picture I had on PopZart became a much better illustrated Black Luigi cartoon character on Popzara.
Mr. Universal went from some strange sneering pointy-headed blob to a hulking White superhero in a blue & yellow suit.
Namreh went from smiling purple worm to a Black cowboy with a with a black hat, face-covering bandana, trenchcoat & light gun.
The site mascot Sgt. Spiffy went from some green Yoshi-faced worm to a green dinosaur wearing a red military cap.
Maybe NOW this project I took on would finally pay off with this new website design. Once again my mission was to MAKE it a success.
But not long later my job situation changed.
My schedule & work duties would no longer allow me to post virtually around the clock like I did before.
After this change in November of 2007 splitting my time between my job, Popzara, & my spare time was getting tricky.
I'm still trying to keep up with the constant newsbite memos I would get from Nate in email. I'm still trying to write original stuff.
I'm still doing my premier piece, the NPDs.
When I wasn't taking to Nate through email, I'm talking to him on the phone or by Google Talk.
The frequent emails, phone calls, & instant messenger conversations were increasingly consuming what little spare time I had left.
As the year of 2008 began, I'm beginning to resent this project & its demands on my time. This was supposed to be a once a week deal!
I'm spending more time WRITING about games than PLAYING them. I was starting to withdraw from friends & family doing this project.
That's why any of you who befriended me on my Wii Friend List back then hardly saw me after awhile.
THAT'S why my presence at VGChartz began to wane. I was being swallowed more & more into the vortex of Popzara.
Frequent arguments on the phone were a regular occurence when Nate tried to push more & more demands onto me.
I would frequently & sharply remind him that he ain't my boss & I'm on this project voluntarily.
I reminded him that he ain't paying me a dime.
Nate would go passive-aggressive starting out tough then ending up concillatory. He would apologize for coming off so bossy.
I would lean to my optimistic view of the guy thinking that his heart was in the right place. He worked a 9 to 5 like me & was not rich.
And he DID give me SOMETHING for my efforts even if it wasn't money. I got that DS Lite I mentioned earlier from Nate at Popzara.
I like harmony & people getting along so I tried to reason with Nate saying that this newsbite thing is not where the site needs to focus.
I told him that we're not big enough to be on the inside track with news. That we're operating as bottom-feeders skimming hits.
I told him that Popzara's focus should be on more thoughtful original content that you can't find anywhere else. Editorials, Opinions.
That would make us unique. That would make us unforgettable. Just like Nintendo, I knew that DIFFERENTIATION was the key.
If we went this route I could stop doing the pointless newsbites & return to that feel I had in the PopZart days writing original material.
By now I believed Nate to be utterly flaky & not nearly as in control as he originally presented himself but his connections were real.
I would no longer just sit in the backseat & trust his judgment alone. I would make more input on the Popzara project.
I can't let all this time I put into this thing go to waste. I now treated Popzara like it was my own creation.
Not just a contributor anymore.
Still holding a healthy skepticism I wouldn't give away ALL of my ideas for a website. But I offered some suggestions for Popzara.
Missing my adventures here at VGChartz as Popzara drew me away from the forum, I told Nate that Popzara & VGChartz needed to tag team & do a cross-promotion. I had always stood up for VGChartz in Kotaku & other sites when someone put the place down & I felt that VGChartz was important functioning for videogames as Billboard does for the music industry, Nielsen does for the TV industry, & Box Office does for the movie industry.
I had already made Popzara articles with shout-outs to VGChartz speaking highly of the site in the commentary.
It was a natural fit in my view.
If VGChartz gets big, it promotes Popzara. If Popzara gets big, it promotes VGChartz. Win-win situation. Who could hate that?
That's how you saw me post stuff like this Sean Malstrom interview on both sites. I could be at VGChartz & Popzara at the same time!
Another suggestion was inspired by the frequent heated arguments me & Nate had on the phone.
We would always go off into tangents in conversations leading to politics & kinds of stuff & sometimes the debate got heated.
I said why not bring our style of conversation to Popzara? Since the site was mostly about videogames overall, I decided to give it a videogame-style name that best represented our verbal sparring matches. PONG? PING/PONG! Like a back-and-forth tennis match!
We would set a topic & have an article debating & discussing that topic in a conversational style. THIS is the kind of stuff I envisioned when I started with this Ultra Studios/PopZart/Popzara deal. Fresh ideas & fresh viewpoints that would be memorable with the audience.
I thought AT LAST this would be the ticket to finally making this damn thing a success! Naïve Johnny-Boy...
It took me years to realize that this thing was a pipe dream all along.
Nate conflicted with the VGChartz staff & the tag team broke down.
There would always be some kind of crisis at the most inopportune moment jeopardizing the future of the site.
Nate & Joel Teply butted heads. Nate wants to "fire" his friend Herman AKA Namreh.
I said you can't do that, he's your friend & he's one of the originals.
Nate comes up with the awkward "Popzara Blogs" sub-site still trying to do that fruitless newsbite thing (he had a new mule plowing that field).
Nate couldn't get the programmers to install a particular update or glitch fix or site overhaul & wanted to fire them.
He's not paying 'em, how can he fire 'em? Nate couldn't get the site artist to draw up some new graphic & he wants to fire them too.
Nate teams up with this game-trading site named PlaySwitch & that's a fiasco too.
We're posting articles & not knowing if it's making impact.
He still keeps trying to push his weight around with me & I ain't having it. He gets new contributors but complains about them too.
He keeps talking about the Alexa rating going up & I take it with a grain of salt. Ho-hum.
Let me know when the feedback matches the rating.
This site STILL hasn't made me any money.
I get gifts like pen drives & Photoshop programs & games & iPod Shuffles & books & headphones.
I appreciate the gifts & the frequent praise from Nate saying that I'm the best writer on Popzara. The carrots on the stick.
Those carrots kept me trudging it out. Nate's a flake but if I could just do something to turn this into a success, it would all be worth it.
Now I was pretty much justifying my years & years put into the site. I couldn't turn my back now. I spent too much time on this thing!
2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, every year so much promise, every year so much disappointment. This thing is going nowhere fast.
Nate even tried to get me to co-write a book about the Blue Ocean phenomenon & Wii/DS.
I did the research for my own purposes but I never went full out on the project until I got something guaranteed in writing.
I was already wasting enough my time writing for virtually free with the Popzara project. No way I'm gonna do that for some book.
My skeptical view of Nate always ran aside with my optimal view of him.
Sometimes I saw him as a friend, sometimes I saw him as a sneak.
I suspected that he would ultimately have me write the book then cut me out of the credit & take all the money for himself.
I was conflicted because he never asked me for money to run the site & even though he didn't make good on his lofty promises when I first ran across him with the Ultra Studios thing he always gave me SOMETHING for my efforts.
But for some reason I just couldn't 100% trust this guy.
We talked about our lives on the phone & I felt sympathy for his legal situation. He said he had been through some hard knocks & that Popzara was a way for him to get out from all that rubble. This sympathy I had caused me to ignore the many red flags that popped up over the years.
I didn't want Popzara to be a success just for me. I wanted Popzara to be a success for EVERYBODY involved including him.
I wouldn't go all in with the book deal but I was still committed to making this Popzara project work no matter what.
That dedication to Popzara began to interfere with my family life. In 2009, I would begin to look after my elderly great uncle.
He was like a second father to me & helped me get my phone turned on, helped me buy my car, gave me my first job.
He was a Korean War veteran & he had gradually become legally blind as a result of things that happened back in Korea.
He could still get around but I would come over to assist him by driving him someplace he needed to go, helping him financially if he ran short of money, & just spending some quality time with him playing dominoes or whatever.
It wasn't so time-consuming at first but soon my adventures with my uncle began to take up my time just like Popzara did.
I'm putting out fires when my uncle butted heads with his caretakers, I'm buying him groceries & supplies, I'm taking him to the emergency room (we don't trust the hospital in our county), I'm taking him to doctor's appointments.
Then on top of all this comes my mother's sister, my sickly aunt, who helped raise me when I was young.
In 2010, she was sent to live in the house of my great uncle & now I was looking after TWO relatives.
I'm now juggling the needs of my great uncle & aunt, my 9 to 5, & this failing Popzara project. Family, Job, Popzara, Me?
What time DO I have to post on VGChartz during all of this?! I'm barely playing my Wii much less having time to talk about it on VGChartz.
I COULDN'T juggle all of that & one by one the balls fell to the ground. I got burnt out, Mummelmann.
Aunt was put in a facility after suffering a stroke.
Uncle was taken in by his younger sister after he had a MASSIVE stroke that left him invalid.
This was 2011. I'm still paying down debts. Looking after my family curtailed my ability to save money.
And this project still didn't pay off.
Then lastly the Popzara ball fell.
In December 2011, ANOTHER bombshell is revealed when Nate tells me that he & Joel Teply fell out.
The Popzara train may be over, he says. He doesn't have the money to keep the domain going without his financial backer.
I just spent 5 years busting my tail trying to make this work & we got ANOTHER one of these situations????? HELL no!!
Zodiac stuff may not be exactly true but what they say for the Taurus sign really describes me. That trademark Taurus stubbornness.
Sometimes that stubbornness pays off & sometimes it gets you stuck.
I was too stubborn to let all that work I put into this just go like that.
Like a fool I went against everything I was not supposed to do & gave Nate the money to keep the domain going.
He was to pay me back later.
Without the family distractions anymore, maybe I had one last shot to power this through. HA! Shows what I know.
Late March 2012, Nathan, Mr. Universal, this reguy3000 character I met almost 6 years ago on Gamespot suddenly told me that I no longer had access to the site. Nate cancelled my login & editing abilities.
Then pretty much said "SUCKER!" about repaying the money I gave him for the domain.
My skeptical side was right. He WAS a sneak. I had been played. I didn't HAVE to give him money before. He was taking up my TIME.
He wanted to build his name on the backs of the people who worked on Popzara. Now he found a new horse to ride in Peter Skerritt.
Naturally I told that piece of "sheisse" what I thought about him & warned the other contributors against working with him as a parting shot.
Wiped my hands clean of this damned albatross & felt so relieved it was over. No more endless emails, phone calls, IM conversations.
Let him keep that little bit of chump change. I was almost through with my debts anyway.
I didn't need Popzara's invisible money anymore.
With me not yet being in tune with Nintendo's strategies with 3DS & the coming Wii U, I took a break from gaming news & just played games.
I wrote about this stuff long enough, I'm tired of it. John, just play your games again & begin to build your savings after you finish your debts.
I spent the rest of 2012 as free as a bird with hardly a care in the world.
But had no interest in the current gaming scene just like the start of 2005.
Outside of the glancing information I heard from co-workers & friends, I was pretty much unplugged from the gaming pulse.
Reconnected with family as 2013 began.
My great aunt, the younger sister of the great uncle I had been looking after, retired & moved to my town.
She brought my great uncle with her. Soon I'm getting involved in ANOTHER relative-helper situation & I go over to her house pretty much leaving my house behind to help her out with him. She's able-bodied but she's no spring chicken.
Turns out it's his last days on Earth.
He died this June. Now I'm worried about his sister, my great aunt who retired. She's the last one of that generation.
I wasn't even home enough to post anything for most of this year. So that's why you didn't see me much early this year either.
But while I was at my great aunt's house, at work somebody played the XBox One conference on their phone.
They were all oohing & aahing.
I was absolutely unimpressed. They were talking about everything except games!
This whole 8th generation was turning to crap! All of 'em!
Once I left the employee lounge where co-workers played the XBox conference, the Epiphany hit me out of nowhere. UNITY!
Just like in 2005, I was absolutely unplugged from what was going on in the business. I had burnt out with gaming news anywhere.
Didn't even wanna talk about games. But this revelation that hit me put me right back into the mix! I was on FIRE with this!!
I took one of my occasional visits back to my own house on August 9th & wrote the opening post of this thread.
It had been in my mind for weeks & now I had to tell somebody. THIS time I took my enthusiasm to the RIGHT place: VGChartz.
I NEVER needed Ultra Studios/PopZart/Popzara. I should have been here all along.
Once I finally came home (after having $3000 worth of my stuff burgled from my great aunt's house including my newly bought Wii U), I decided to revel in the discussion brought about by the UNITY thread. And that's where I am today.
Is this story good enough for you now, Mummelmann? Do you understand now? Do you STILL think I "ran away" from the site?
Will you continue to chastise me for not participating at VGChartz after knowing this?
I didn't run away then & I'm not gonna run away now. There is no more Popzara interfering with my life. My family situation is calm.
I WILL BE HERE THROUGHOUT THE 8TH GENERATION debating & discussing this videogame thing with anybody who wants to talk.
Hope that settles that point.
•Point 2: Why I Told Seece to 'Wait in Line, Son'•
When somebody is badgering you, heckling you, blowing up your wall constantly, what reaction do you think someone like that deserves?
I'm not gonna entertain that kind of behavior so I told him to wait in line until I dealt with the people ahead of him with VALID discussion points.
A performer's on stage & some audience member is just rudely heckling the performer. Trying to disrupt the show.
The performer cannot focus on the attention-hungry disrupter. The performer must serve the rest of the audience interested in the performance.
Performers CAN show up the heckler & make a spectacle out of him but the VGChartz venue doesn't allow for that possibility.
So instead I will talk to those LIKE YOU with a valid discussion point aggressive as it may be. Once I'm done doing that, then I will address Seece.
The "son" part was just for flavor.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
There you have it, folks. The longest post in VGChartz HISTORY!
Was it worth the read?
John Lucas
Words from the Official VGChartz Idiot
WE ARE THE NATION...OF DOMINATION!
