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hinch on 05 August 2013
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Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:
Too much listening to the customers is indeed a bad thing (listening to the vocal minority is what got Sony stuck where they were with PS3, which took them a long time to sort out, and listening to the complaints of the vocal minority in lieu of their own success is what produced the Wii U, when a Super Wii would have been the wiser route)

I don't think either of those is a good case of listening to the customers, though. With the PS3, I get the feeling Sony was just listening to themselves and drinking their own Kool-Aid. Much like MS with the Xbone. With the Wii U... well, I don't really know who Nintendo was listening to there. It doesn't look like anything that anyone ever asked for, and they don't even seem comfortable with their own product.

In the PS3's case, it was a clear love letter to the "bigger is better" design mentality embraced by many core gamers: Blu-Ray wasn't just a trojan horse, it had the ability to bring bigger games than anyone had ever dreamed of, and the CELL would be a supercomputer in your console. With the Wii U, it was all the yelling about how Wii was missing out on the third party games because it wasn't HD (when we can see now that the third parties are determined to move their goal-posts) and needed a more normal controller, though enough of Nintendo's design team seemed to understand that was a bad idea, so tried to come up with a concept that could justify a console that was half Wii HD and half proper Wii successor...

Well noone asked for a $599 console. Remember Ken "get a second job to buy a PS3" Kutaragi? The PS3 like the PS1 and PS2 was his vision for Playstation. It was the be and to be-all entertainment system and it had to be cutting edge - from the CPU to the optical drive.

Personally, I don't see a problem with console manufacturers making more of the same and not innovating in the hardware department, because as long as the Software releases and remain new and fresh people will buy them. Hypothetically, if Nintendo released a traditional console without the Wii U pad (or 3D in the 3DS) it would still sell so long as they release Mario, Zelda or Donkey Kong on it, regardless of what innovation is pushed onto us.

The thing with trying to innovate with the sake of innovating is that more times then none it usually falls short of expectations. It could be that the the concept is not compelling enough to convince its audience, or that it was not a good idea in the first place. Moreover, R&D will take longer and will cost more than more proven methods.