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Squilliam on 15 December 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:
Hyperbole aside I do think that the Wii U is a relatively weak system. It has weak performance, high price and fewer redeeming qualities than the Wii had at launch and in my mind it shows that Nintendo are too insular and they don't really understand the needs of the wider market of developers nor the realities of how games have changed.


... and yet they are the largest videogame publisher in the world, and the market leading manufacturer in both the handheld and home console markets.

I would personally argue that it isn't that Nintendo doesn't understand the market but that "analysts" don't understand Nintendo. Between sales for the Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP and iPhone it should be clear that people want polished visuals and good gameplay not necessarily the most technically advanced graphics and gameplay. Nintendo believes that the market they alienate by producing systems like the Wii, Wii U, Nintendo DS, and 3DS is (relatively) small, expensive to keep happy, and is already aggressively targeted by Sony and Microsoft so they have ignored them; and I don't think anyone can say that this worked out poorly for the Wii, Nintendo DS or 3DS, and we will have to see how this works for the Wii U.

Ultimately, I think Nintendo is right ... Nintendo could have put together a system that was 8 times as powerful as the HD consoles, it would (probably) cost more than $500 to manufacture and they would have to sell it for (less than) $400 to keep people happy, without the Wii U tablet the average person would ask how it was different in a meaningful way from the HD consoles, and the graphics whore who complains about the Wii U still wouldn't buy it. Trying to appeal to these gamers is why the N64 and Gamecube are Nintendo's least successful systems even though they were (relative to their competition) Nintendo's most powerful systems.

A Nintendo system is Nintendo's play ground. They design their systems to suit themselves first and foremost and whilst they do let other people play there too it is an entirely different attitude to how Sony and especially Microsoft designed their systems. They have a completely different perspective and their relationship with other publishers is different to the other system manufacturers because they dominate their system software sales in a way which Microsoft and Sony don't do. This leads to a self fulfilling prophecy where other developers put their best efforts on other systems and leads to the phrase 'only Nintendo games sell well on Nintendo systems'.

The major problem with courting mainly general audiences is the way that it skews the distribution of game sales to only a few individual titles and makes success as much having the right title at the right time (luck) as it is quality game design whilst at the same time reducing the variety and the number of game studios which can survive. The hardcore gamer may be an annoying individual but he or she is the one who buys more than just the big titles and lets other titles at least recoup some or all of their costs. If you have a combination of only a few games selling big and Nintendo games with a natural advantage on the system designed specifically for those games with an audience already predisposed for them you have big problems for major 3rd party publishers.



Tease.