nordlead said:
Yes. Why can't Nintendo have better creative talent than anyone else? You claim that if Nintendo never existed that Mario would still be around with minor tweaks, but if that was the case how come no other company has come close to creating that 2D Mario Platforming? LBP sucks in comparison to Mario for 2D platforming and it is Mario's closest competition this generation being 10m back. The level editor is great, but LBP lacks the challenge with not enough badguys (and the stupid buttons to kill them) and floaty physics. If it was all marketing and business strategy, then Sony must be horrible at those things, despite Sony being a very successful company that has convinced consumers that their overpriced electronics are better than the competition. all those big games aren't going to end up at 20-30m because Nintendo knows how to advertise. It is because they know how to make the games that people love. |
I didn't say mario would be around with minor tweaks, I said a similarly branded product would exist. Look at animation. 10 years ago, America knew nothing about Miyazaki, yet he'd already been doing animation for 10+ years with amazing hits. The reason he never made it here was because of suppression, and then Disney bought rights to the distribution, and all of a sudden his movies appeared. What other company can you think of that controls the types of games that come out? Nintendo..ie...Nintendo seal of quality... On top of that, Nintendo knows about the tech they will be using far in advance of third parties and has been figuring out their strategy for years in advance of the third parties figuring out what they are going to do. For example, with the wii and ds, Nintendo made them because they were feeling out the expanded market. They had strong indications that people would be interested in a certain type of product. So, they build an entire line of games and concepts and tech to capitalize on it. Only several months to a year before the tech comes out do the third parties find out about it. Those third parties don't immediately say, "hey this is perfect for an expanded market", they say, "let's make some games that utilize the new technology". They fall into the trap because they haven't had the briefing that Nintendo had. It's like concurrently inventing the windshield and the windshield wiper. How is another company supposed to compete without knowing a windshield is coming out?
Back to the analogy, if Disney didn't exist, we would have had Miyazaki already. For those saying the japanese animation copied disney, think again. At the time of Disney, there were many big competitors around, Warner Brothers for example, who had very similar styles. Japanime would have come about regardless. A single person or group is never responsible for an entire trend, they were simply the ones that beat out everyone else. Ideas happen simultaneously everywhere and it's never some magical quality that makes them explode with popularity, it's strategy that does it. It's not the capability of one person that ushers in a radical change, many compete for the chance, and in the end, sometimes it is simply chance that decides it. For more examples, look at the discoveries of AC and DC, the television, integrated circuits, telephone, differential calculus. There would most certainly be similar experiences taking the place of Mario because necessity is the mother of invention and necessity is decided as a society.
Now, I don't understand how you could say they Sony is bad at marketing and business strategy using LBP as an example. LBP was successful despite going up against a 20 year old cultural icon and still managed to trump wii music in sales, another brand new ip. I think you are getting a bit confused by my poor explanation. The marketing and strategy isn't about the product itself. It's about convincing the consumer that their product is abstractly better, even if it isn't tangibly better. I'm not saying mario games are bad. They are in fact very very good...that is a tangible fact. But to think that they are somehow better, in every incarnation, than every other game (determined by sales or taste) is, naive, at best. Someone above mentioned that the Nintendo first party is so perfect that it renders buying a competitors console unnecessary. It's this kind of thinking (that there is no experience as good as the nintendo experience) that I'm referring to when I speak about abstract quality.
There is a long list of games that just cannot match up to Nintendo games (in sales)....even the games Rare made while with Nintendo, never were able to surpass mario games. Not banjo kazooie...not even donkey kong country could match mario. There is a long list of those kinds of games that were never able to match mario in sales. I would say those games were better than similar mario games, except maybe mario 64...that game really was divine. But even today with games like viva pinata, really really fun games just don't get the same kind of sales as Mario does.
See, another flaw in this entire question occurs when you look at zelda and metroid. Both of these franchises easily find competition. Zelda doesn't even appear until 57. Metroid? Past 200. If Nintendo really did have some magical quality, you would think more of their games would have it. Not just Mario, Pokemon, and blue ocean games.
(remember what I said before about knowing the tech in advance. All of these blue ocean games? It's because of Nintendo that other companies were unable to create the games. Not some godly insight into what consumers want. Nintendo simply beat them to market, and then supressed the competition. They were the windshield inventors.)
But the key, the real key, is the magic. Look at the sales, and look at the thread. The idea that Nintendo games sell the most because they are the absolute best (evidenced by some intangible quality that most in this thread cannot even describe in more detail than "something speshul", is a perfect example of this reinforcing strategy. Every game that is sold is a reinforcement in the idea of some magical quality, and a reinforcement to consumer "faith".
The thing you have to understand, is that there is no way to combat this. Sony abandoned most of its foundational franchises (mostly because they were all third party games), but the ones that have stuck around? Some of the highest selling ones. GT, MGS, Ratchet and Clank, Halo. Foundation xbox game, set records every time. There is no way to fight the Nintendo strategy, you can only be successful yourself. You call sony a failure for LBP? Sorry... but wii music.
