burninmylight on 28 August 2013
| Ponyless said: Why are you posting a NeoGaf thread from a month ago? Anyways i thought this was a good response by tehrik-e-insaaf that for some reason no one responded too : Much of OP is revisionist history trying to explain "third-party" decisions - this is flawed because the bulk of today's third parties are primarily PC-driven developers who never had any relationship with Nintendo. The few remaining like EA were always closer to Sega/Sony which both had California-centric executives who all lived in the same neighborhoods. Some of the empirical evidence cited is really dumb. Yes Nintendo built lock-out chip, but it was in direct response to the flood of crap that destroyed the Atari 2600. There were many pleased third parties even if there were some that were dissappointed. The licensing fees that developed from maintaining the proprietary nature of the platform kept the format alive and gave birth to the idea of subsidized hardware that Sony pushed when the Playstation came out. As far as the revisionist history of the Gamecube. The mini-disc format did not matter as most games were well under 1.5 gigabytes at that point and compression was a cakewalk. Third parties supported it well frankly who were traditional console developers - where Nintendo failed was in bringing over the Goldeneye market to the Gamecube by dumping Rare and losing their party-game shooter Perfect Dark that had a shot at recapturing that market from the N64. Microsoft came in with with Halo and Nintendo was left with a console that didn't have its traditional dominance in local multiplayer nor the novelty of DVD. Nintendo tried to fit into industry conventions and failed IMHO with respect to gaming hardware because they were fighting on multiple fronts. I would argue that even having DVD would have made little difference. Sony had two things: Grand Theft Auto III exclusive for the first few years, and second, exclusive Japanese games that Nintendo wasn't gonna get since Sony had an iron fist in Japan. Microsoft realized the problem with getting Japan since Sony had a brutal lock on everyone there, and courted PC developers to prop up the Xbox after they realized it was going to be difficult. They also bought off Peter Moore to effectively destroy Sega's US base in exchange for a job offer. Nintendo was squeezed as the Western relationships they had cultivated were poached away (including a ton of people at NoA) in a few months by Microsoft and getting back into Japan was going to be a difficult process with Sony's mega-dominance of that territory. Listen, forget the revisionism and all the other side show drama. There is a very simple reality here. Nintendo doesn't have third parties because they have decided there are better places they can spend their time and money to get a return, and they get loads of attention from MS (and Sony to an extent). NIntendo has to do two things: first show there is a market for non-Nintendo content currently on the platform by actively co-promoting third party games and building a userbase for those games. They are doing that by taking localization risk for certain games from Japan, and promotions like the SMT IV eShop credit that will likely convince Atlus that releasing console-content is worth the risk. They could do a few more things which I won't delve into here. Second, they need to have a better on-the-ground presence in the markets where most of the executives and developers are so that there is momentum on their side (California mostly). In the past they delegated those tasks to NoA - but faced poaching by MSFT pre-Xbox release - and the new Japanese management couldn't just rebuild NoA overnight and get those institutional relationships back. NCL has now incorporating those relationships directly through Japan because they don't want another NoA-like situation. These things will come in time as NCL is now becoming a more global company rather than offloading regional work to silos abroad (Nikkei has an article on this if anyone is interested) - in any case I think depending on PC developers and EA is a poor strategy to rely on fixing the issues with the Wii U - because there are already lots of alternative places to play that content - and most people are not going to buy a Wii U to play those games on a Nintendo console (although it might help). To turn things around, my view is that Nintendo should stick to generating more first-party content, focusing on diversifying their own lineup, growing indie relationships (perhaps by having an indie center in Austin in proximity to Retro Studios and really funding smaller projects that take advantage of the GamePad), focus on locking up interesting content that they know will be a good fit for the userbase from Japan where they have a better presence and localizing it, expanding retail by growing the Nintendo World format and controlling the experience of buying a Nintendo console more closely, and pushing their own last-gen tie-ratio beyond 10 with most it being their own software. The word from Japan is that third parties are finally getting back into 3DS development - it took Nintendo's sheer willpower to get the content out that made it attractive. Now Nintendo needs to focus on getting the Wii U business back and I think they are on the right track - they are releasing games that their own base will consume far quicker than the Wii - and they are rolling out the red carpet - once the momentum comes back they can focus on doing riskier projects and really push third-party collaborations. At the end of the day,even with all the Wii U's issues, I think it will clear around 40 million consoles and end up being *far* more profitable than the Gamecube was for Nintendo. |
Your words are like sexual healing for my soul.
