| HappySqurriel said: In the past related to Nintendo’s game announcements is how Nintendo has moved towards a compressed schedule from announcement of a product to it being released; and this is (potentially) so that the "Hype" (for lack of a better word) and the marketing are as focused as possible for maximum effect. Now consider the structure of the release of the Nintendo DS and Wii; with the Nintendo DS and Wii there was an explanation/teaser of what the system was that was very light on details and got people interested, followed by the big showing of the system at an expo, followed a few months later by the system’s release. When you combine the two things together the announcement at the end of March may not seem so arbitrary. We got the teaser this week, and while no one knows what it means everyone is talking about it. People are looking for explanations of the technology and soon enough there will be a flood of fake mark-ups, specifications and other rumours peaking everyone’s interest. In a few months, after the initial wave of excitement has worn off, E3 will happen and people will be dying to try it out to see how well it works; and Nintendo’s E3 keynote will probably be the most anticipated event of the year. While Sony and Microsoft fans may not like to hear this, it is likely that there will be another 4 hour line-up to see the 3DS while Natal and Move are readily available to try; and a large portion of this will be that the 3DS will be an unknown commodity with unknown capabilities and (previously) unannounced games. A couple of months later, as people get tired of dissecting the expos (E3, TGS, etc.) Nintendo will shift into full launch mode and people will begin to discuss launch line-ups and the advertising; and soon after the system will release to massive line-ups and shortages.
Basically, from what I can tell, their approach may very well be designed to do a focused blitz so that the most important gaming news story for the next 6 months is the 3DS. |
I suspect that in addition to this, an early announcement and a generally positive reaction from core gamers so far has a lot to do with Nintendo wanting to entice some of the core gamer development to the 3DS from launch. They need to advertise to developers as much as to consumers as its not like the former often have any more information on these things than the latter and now they've advertised they can afford to get dev kits out wholesale.
Personally I think they've won E3 and they will likely win sole domain over the gaming market as the 3DS has probably just killed the PSPs gaming side as the other multimedia devices start to erode the PSPs multimedia/utility market segments even further. Yes its likely everyone will be talking about 3D this E3 and Nintendo has an excellent shot at this. Of course there'll be substantial excitement when GT5 is revealed with excellent 3D support however that will be tempered by the fact that a new 3D TV costs upwards of $1000 + you need to wear dinky glasses.
Given the rumours, I wouldn't also be surprised if the 3DS is repositioned as a portable 3D movie player, especially if they can put the two sub 4" screens next to each other to make a single 7" screen as there is already a lot of enticing content coming out of hollywood in 3D and the improvements in flash memory make it possible to store quite a few of them.
Tease.
