| noname2200 said: I found this article while looking for E3 news, impressions and analysis. It raises an interesting point... Nintendo waves the white flag at E3 2010 Now that the dust has settled after each of the three console manufacturers held their press conference earlier this week, it’s a good time to look at what has and has not been announced and what this means for the future of the video games market. Many people seem to think that Nintendo had the best show and blew everyone away with the 3DS, but they are missing the bigger picture. During the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube generations Nintendo lived off of the proftis generated by its handheld line, the Gameboy. Portable gaming is very important to Nintendo because it allows them to still play with the big guys, Sony and Microsoft, in the home console space.-(Right, these big boys are the ones who have trailed Nintendo consistently for the last four years, taking a loss on hardware while Nintendo have become the market leader in every major market for home consoles and make profit on every Wii sold. The big picture is-Nintendo's home console business is healthier than it ever has been. So is their portable business.) Naturally the PlayStation Portable poses a major threat to Nintendo’s core market. So far it sold approximately 60 million units and by doing that it wrestled away a big chunk of Nintendo’s market share that previously had been at an all time high during the Gameboy Advance era.(Market share may have been-but DS has sold 50 million more units of hardware, and made them much more profit. It's become even more successful than the GameBoy line and is on the way to outselling the PS2.) With Nintendo’s dominance diminishing drastically in the portable gaming market, they had to react quickly and announce a successor to the DS. (Their dominance never significantly declined-GBA remained a viable system on the market as DS and PSP moved in, and the DS began to outpace the PSP significantly in 2006. Despite the PSP's 60million base, DS trumps it with over 130million sold, and that gap will only ever get bigger. Even with a competitor that stemmed from Sony's Playstation business at the height of its power, Nintendo have continued to be the major player in the portable market. Let's not even get onto DS v PSP software sales.)While the 3DS looks indeed promising, it’s only one side of the coin. On the flipside, the Wii is going to suffer due to Nintendo being forced to push their new handheld as hard as possible. Additionally, Microsoft and Sony are attempting to directly compete with the Wii now and Nintendo had nothing to show to combat that. They were waving the white flag at E3. (And I suppose Sony showing no new handheld to compete with 3DS should be taken as a sign they are waving the white flag in their handheld business?)
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was the only major game shown that makes use of Wii Motion Plus and it wasn’t a pretty sight. A questionable art style for the graphics as well as, at least according to Nintendo (Source PLEASE), interferences that made the game look nearly unplayable (Hands on impressions of the game were very positive,how many Zelda players will play this game in a room with hundreds of active Wi fi devices?)were a big letdown for the Nintendo faithful who now might take another look at Sony’s Move and its games, particularly the innovative Sorcery. (The Nintendo faithful will choose Sorcery over a new Zelda? Is this guy high?) Or Kinect which garnered a mostly positive reception from the gaming enthusiast media. Even Shigeru Miyamoto was thoroughly impressed by Microsoft’s controller free gaming experience.(Nothing is said of Miyamoto's reaction to Kinect. In those photos he sure doesn't look impressed, but I am not jumping to conclusions. Unlike the author.) Facing such fierce competition from both, Sony and Microsoft, one would think that Nintendo would at least try to fight back, but yet another E3 has passed without an announcement of an HD enabled Wii coming in the near future. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter explained why he continues to believe in Wii HD, but also why he thinks that Nintendo won’t launch it. “…So I always thought Nintendo would respond to Natal and PS3 plus Move by having Wii HD ready when those two things launched. I’ve been wrong consistently and the reason I’ve been wrong is Nintendo doesn’t see the world the way I do. So the answer to your question why do I think it? Because it’s logical. The answer to your question, why hasn’t Nintendo done it? Because they don’t think it’s logical.”(How would HD benefit the Wii market? It would only fragment it and frustrate casual users who have given Nintendo such a large, profitable market. The Wii will hold its own against Kinect and Natal with a strong software line up, and a price cut is not impossible within the next 12 months.) Nobody really knows what’s going on in the heads of the Nintendo executives, especially with games like this one being made:
This may be great for Nintendo fans, but certainly not for those gamers who don’t like Nintendo’s games. On a related note, the same holds true for the 3DS and titles like Kid Icarus. At least Nintendo this time tried to get third parties on board to get some of the more hardcore stuff like Metal Gear Solid, but honestly you can’t help but think how much better such games could be on a non-Nintendo platform.(Ah, the argument further unravels. Nintendo have not just tried to get third parties on board-they have and are succeeding in gaining massive support for 3DS. The argument that 3rd parties games would be better on a non-Nintendo platform... I'm not even going to bother. We can all see how flimsy that is.) Anyways, while the 3DS seems to be good to go by the look of things, the Wii is pretty much done at this point. This year’s big holiday title Donkey Kong Country Returns is going to be yet another 2D platformer which looks like a desperate attempt on Nintendo’s part to milk the Wii audience as much as possible before those gamers are graduating to more fleshed out gaming experiences on other platforms. (It's in a genre millions of Wii users are currently enjoying through Mario Bros Wii, and is a return to a multi million selling, critically acclaimed SNES trilogy, developed by a studio responsible for three of the finest games of the past decade, and one of the highest rated titles of all time. How is any of this a bad thing?) Nintendo had a good run while it lasted. It greatly helped that they caught Sony and Microsoft by surprise with their Wii Remote controller and changed the gaming landscape, but all things have to come to an end eventually. Analyst Todd Greenwald expects Nintendo to lose market share in the near future. “I would say that Microsoft and Sony should get a pretty big boost over the next six months or so versus the Wii.” (Good for him. Nintendo have already won this generation. Kinect and Move need to move tens of millions of units, not just millions, in order to 'defeat' the Wii. I won't assert these two devices can't impact the Wii or that they will fail, but claiming Wii is doomed because of these add ons is absurd. As is the rest of this 'article') |
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