This is another one of Malstroms blog posts that articulates my thoughts perfectly. Other people have approched this but none have gone into so much detail with and this great of an understanding; atleast none that I know. I don't wan't to summarise it, I will just let the post speak for itself.
Here's the link to the post:
http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/nintendos-true-competitor/
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Nintendo’s competitor is not disinterest as some purple fog that must be beaten back by the lamp of gaming. Nintendo’s true competitor is its own shadow.
Nintendo’s past is its greatest competitor. While greater accessibility and “back to basics” has cut down walls to new consumers, it is incorrect to believe that this is the reason why consumers were being bled away from previous Nintendo systems. Consumers do go where the greater game library is, for sure, and the Gamecube and Nintendo 64 library wasn’t anything too robust. Wii cannot be declared victorious until it has competed against Nintendo’s past. The bleed of consumers, despite growth on an industry wide scale, could be seen in the below chart:
This collapse shown above is not due entirely to “less accessibility” or “going away from the basics of gaming”. From someone who participated in this ‘bleed’, it is clear to me that a big reason why is that Nintendo refused to compete with its past. The lesson of this generation is simple: people didn’t leave gaming, gaming left them. People who became gamers with PONG or Space Invaders or Super Mario Brothers have no such games offered to them until games like Wii Sports and New Super Mario Brothers. Then people wonder why these games sell so much. The “Game Industry” believed it was “progressing”, but it was only leaving people behind. Why were people being left behind? It is more than accessibility and complex gameplay. The truth is that many game makers thought their new fangled 3d games and “surround sound” music meant that they had won the war in competition to the past. After all, modern games are “better” than the “old school” games, right? Wrong. Not to many people. These “Old School” fans are not nostalgic gamers who say “older is better”. They point out that modern gaming has lost something very integral to gaming. They say that modern gaming is hollow and bloated with cinematics and “story”. These “old school” gamers do not want ‘re-makes’ in the vein of “Pac-Man in High Definition” or “Street Fighter 2 in High Definition”. They look at modern games as competing with the games of the past (even if they aren’t on the market). Every single time, the modern game loses the battle to the old school game. Nintendo has recently made comments that they see these “retro” gamers as a new front for expansion. However, if they frame it in the view of “retro” or “2d gaming”, they are getting it entirely wrong. The best example to illustrate this would be racing games. Racing games used to be either behind the car view like Pole Position or top down view like R.C. Pro Am. Racing games made a fantastic transition to 3d. No one wants to play 2d racing games. Why did racing games make the transition? It is because they retained the same gameplay from 2d to 3d. 3d racing games are still measured by their arcade qualities. And that is the key: arcade. That is what is missing from modern games is that expertly crafted arcade gameplay. Tetris has arcade gameplay. However, Tetris in 3d just blows up and becomes a very different game altogether. It loses its arcade gameplay. The same occurred with Super Mario Brothers. After twenty years, Nintendo ought to realize by now that accessibility is not what is holding back the 2d Mario audience from 3d Mario. 3d Mario is just a completely different game altogether. People are looking at Nintendo, and have always looked at Nintendo, to compete with their past. So let us go through the past and see how Nintendo is doing. Gamecube Era
Not an impressive library. The big hit games were: Super Mario Sunshine Maybe it was because it was the previous console, but Nintendo has knocked it out of the park on this one. Nintendo has put out a game that is better or at least very competitive in consumer satisfaction to the above titles. Metroid Prime 3 and Trilogy compete with the first Metroid Prime. Charged competes over Strikers. Pikmin 3 (though Pikmin wasn’t really that big anyway) will undoubtedly compete with Pikmin 1 and 2. Brawl competes with Melee. Galaxy competes with Sunshine. Twilight Princess competes with Windwaker. And Mario Kart Wii competes with Double Dash. People who liked the Gamecube really have no reason to complain. They have games on the Wii that compete with the Gamecube ones. Really, the Gamecube is knocked out by the Wii. Nintendo 64 Era
The game library is pretty insignificant here as well with the exception of Rare’s games. The big hits on this system would be: Super Mario 64 Galaxy competes with Super Mario 64. Twilight Princess (and likely Zelda Wii) will compete with Ocarina. Brawl competes with Smash Brothers. Mario Kart Wii competes with Mario Kart 64. Two big holes are remaining. There is no Goldeneye equivalent on the Wii. There is no major FPS game. This is a gaping hole. There is also no Starfox game. And by Starfox, I mean in the ship shooting stuff, not running around on a planet. The lack of Starfox is also very disturbing. For the most part, the Wii is surpassing the N64 audience’s expectations. A Wii FPS and a Starfox game would really create total victory over the N64. SNES Era
The game library of this system is a little lopsided. While the SNES excelled in adventure games and RPG games, it lacked many of the arcade shooters and sports games that would appear on the Genesis. But regardless, it was a rich library if you like adventure and platform type games. The big hits on this platform would be: Super Mario World And many other adventure type games. You can see here how the Wii isn’t even coming close to competing with the SNES. There is no Wii equivalent to compete against Donkey Kong Country. Final Fantasy Chronicles is a sorry excuse compared to Final Fantasy 4, 5, and 6 (though, I suppose, it does compete against Mystic Quest if that is any consolation [it isn't, alas]). Super Mario Kart is actually being competing against with Mario Kart Wii (but not to the extent that the DS version did). There is a major black hole of no adventure or RPG games on the Wii. It is questionable to say whether Link to the Past is being competed against with anything. Super Mario World obviously isn’t being competed against. It is questionable whether NSMB Wii is trying to compete with it or not. It appears NSMB Wii may be competing more with NSMB DS. People who were Nintendo customers then, but are not Nintendo customers now, will point out all that has been said above. The bottom line is the lack of adventure/rpg games and 2d platformers is keeping the SNES audience away from the Wii. NES Era
This system had a very interesting and very diverse game library. The NES player would recall everything being ‘new’. No one played sequels on the NES (unless the sequel was to a NES game). No one was playing sequels to Atari 2600 games on the NES (the sequels of the Atari 2600 were on the Atari console at the time and that console failed). A big part of this ‘freshness’ was due to the Japanese invasion at the time. It might have been Japan’s first game generation, but it wasn’t in America. Yet, all the Japanese games were totally fresh to Americans and the West in general. No one in the West would have thought to make “Super Mario Brothers” of a platformer in an Alice in Wonderland kingdom. There were also a “Wild West” of peripherals to the NES. You had all sorts of controllers from light guns to power pads to flight sticks to even arcade joysticks. All controllers were welcomed. Even the Power Glove. Aside from the diverse but fresh game library and the large amount of interfaces, the big hit games of the NES would be: Super Mario Brothers The only place where Nintendo has successfully competed against the NES is in the interfaces. However, the important difference was that NES was more interface friendly. You could plug any controller in and play the game. The commercial for Metroid showed it being played with a joystick. This is not possible with the Wii. You cannot play games like NSMB Wii with an arcade stick or any other sort of controller. Unlike the NES where peripheral choice was widespread, the Wii has it more by a game by game basis. Some games do it, some do not. Too many do not do it. The most successful way Nintendo has been competing against the NES is through WiiWare type games. Only they are bringing in a type of freshness that has been lost. However, their quality is not really up to par to the games of twenty years ago. WiiWare developers must hate the Virtual Console. But if game developers can’t compete with games that are decades old, they shouldn’t be in this business to begin with. The big heavy weight on the NES is the Mario games. It remains to be seen if NSMB Wii plans on competing with them, but for the most part, Nintendo has not competed against those games which has caused millions of consumers to go elseware. 3d Mario is not a successful heir to the Mario throne. And it was more than just accessibility. When you jump on a platform in Mario, it is second hand. In 3d Mario, you feel like an idiot. Dr. Mario and Tetris are being competed against on the Wii. Old school Zelda isn’t. What makes the older Zelda games different from the modern ones is that they are arcade centric, not puzzle centric. There are certainly mazes in those games, but dungeons did not resemble a floor from the Lolo games. (Modern Zelda is “The Legend of Lolo” full of pushing blocks around, hitting switches, and just going from one room to the next in a puzzle fashion). The arcade combat that made older Zelda so much fun has been lost. (Zelda fans, don’t argue that Modern Zelda has that arcade combat. It doesn’t. Maybe the 3d motion controls will fix it for the 3d Zelda.) Wii Sports has successfully competed against the NES sports games. Wii Fit has blown away the Power Pad type games. And there are even light gun type games for the Wii. NES consumers appreciate these ‘gun games’ on the Wii. If Nintendo truly wanted to get ambitious, it could compete against the Atari 2600 and that era. It could compete against Pac-Man, compete against Frogger, compete against Centipede, compete against Asteroids. Just think of all those unlocked consumers. People may ask, “Why does this game compete against that game? Isn’t that your opinion?” No, it isn’t. It is how the developers were making the game. The big success of all of Nintendo’s games was Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart Wii. Why? It is because both of those games were trying to compete against the past. Mario Kart DS was designed to compete against Super Mario Kart. In fact, these Mario Kart games include older levels from previous Mario Kart games. This insures that the new courses have to compete with the courses from the old. It was a brilliant move. Looking at this timeline, we can see that a big gap appears with the Nintendo 64. Nintendo, like every other game company, believed that a game being in 3d means that is blows away the non-3d game automatically. Nintendo 64 wasn’t interested in competing with the SNES which is likely why they lost so many consumers. WiiWare and Virtual Console have been great moves by getting people who want those NES styled type games. The largest gaping holes are the lack of competition against Super Mario Brothers games and adventure/rpg games found on the SNES. We’ll see if Nintendo is interested in slaying their ultimate competitor: their own shadow.
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