Erik designs the Wii 2

[Erik Aston]

RolStoppable said:

I don't quite agree. While I do think that first party games should be designed to be killer apps, that only goes for new IPs. It's very rare that an existing series suddenly explodes in popularity, because often enough taking off would require the series to cease what it is. The goal of a business is to make customers, more specifically to create passionate customers, because nothing else sells products better.

Most of Nintendo's properties are not killer app material, but which company can claim otherwise anyway. However, many of those second and third tier series have the ability to keep the fire burning. The passion that got fired up by a killer app like SMB. Pilotwings doesn't serve the job of selling the hardware, but it satisfies customers who were looking for what else gaming has to offer. While the experience may not be as intense as the one of a killer app, it's still good enough to keep the person buying and playing more video games.

This means the real problem with Pilotwings Resort is not the game itself, but the absence of a killer app whose job it is to sell the hardware first. The other problem is that Nintendo doesn't show much interest to keep serving the people who were drawn in by 2D Mario and their sports titles. There is nothing inherently wrong with continuing to make 3D Marios, Metroids, F-Zeros etc, it's just that it seems to be all Nintendo wants to be doing. Which is all the more questionable when you consider that the potential audience for games along the lines of 2D Mario is considerably bigger.

Okay, that's a good distinction. It's not about sheer sales, it's about passionate customers. Passionate customers are the ones that pay for the hardware, and a game which sells less may sell more hardware than one that sells more.

But I would still say that Nintendo has at least 5 existing 2nd and 3rd tier franchises that have a possibility to be a killer app if they simply got back to their roots and beefed up the content. 3D Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country. DKCR at least got kinda close, but I think the developers got in their own way in that case, talking themselves out of the Kremlings and other classic characters and generally overdesigning the game. But the way DKCR got back to classic 2D platforming and upped the number of levels from 40-50 in the old games, to 70-80 in DKCR, is generally the right model. NSMBW got the gameplay practically perfect, but didn't beef up the content. That's why I call for a SMB with 120 levels.

And then there are quite a few series which don't have killer app potential, but do have passionate customers. Of those, most of them, like F-Zero, Metroid, Paper Mario, Pikmin, and Wario Land are either off-track or being neglected. Only the more recent creations like WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven seem safe from Nintendo.

Pilotwings... well... I'm not going to keep going on about 1 little game.