| nomad said: WiiU might be irrelevant, but not Nintendo. |
Quoted for truth.
The industry reports and thinks in days, weeks and sometimes months. It's a fast moving industry, but Nintendo think about what's best for the years and decades ahead.
Is it better, in the years and decades to come, for Nintendo to drop Wii U and go third party? Is it better in the long-term for Nintendo to release a new console as quickly as possible?
In the first case, development costs and required manpower will increase, an unparalleled creative and functional shift in design and development processes will be required, royalties from software will decline and revenue from hardware production will cease. Nintendo would no longer be competing on their own terms, but subject to the designs and market realities of systems they have no control over, and would be in competition with three huge multi-format publishers, plus a variety of other publishers, as opposed to operating under their own angle. It would be a tempestuous and immensely difficult transition to make in the midst of the most turbulent gaming industry since Nintendo's own entry in the 1980s. Nintendo have proven they can't manage their transition from one hardware generation to another; could we really say, with any confidence, they can manage the shift to software only publisher?
What about the latter option? Consumer confidence has already been hit by the struggles of Wii U, and launching too soon would send the message--already implied by fairly rapid price cuts for both 3DS and Wii U--that it isn't worth buying Nintendo hardware in its early months. Combined with the market failure of Wii U so far, consumers would be put off, and the press would run every negative angle because it gets hits. Nintendo would risk repeating what Sega did, launching failed portable, home consoles and expensive add-ons so rapidly that even when they did release high quality software on DreamCast, too few consumers were interested to make hardware production a viable business.
As far as I see it, Nintendo have to stick it out with Wii U for the next 3 years, while behind the scenes, they come up with something new. Focus on building software development resources, online services, publishing partnerships, branding and marketing so that during the next transition, they aren't caught so badly on the hop. Focus on creating an affordable, accessible box that plays Nintendo software. In the mean time, push 3DS as hard as it will go, squeeze every penny from it--the future of handheld gaming is far from certain, and Nintendo need as much money from 3DS as they can generate. Pump out quality games on Wii U, so that the fans you do retain in home console gaming are kept happy, and are likely to want to continue gaming with Nintendo. Nintendo can survive the failure of Wii U, but they can't survive the failure of Mario, Zelda or other franchises to please their audience.
It's also not unprecedented for struggling systems to experience a revival of fortunes. Most notably, PS3 and 3DS. Both systems overcame initial difficulties and poor decisions on behalf of their manufacturers, as well as more intense and new kinds of competition. PS3 had to go up against the success of Wii, which picked up where PS2 was leaving off by capturing the wider family market, and 360 stole a march on the 'core' market, most obviously in North America and the UK. 3DS had to enter a hugely changed market, where its predecessor was still performing strongly in the West, and where new types of devices and experiences had obviously impacted the potential headroom for portable consoles. Yet both systems have created very strong, very viable, and very successful businesses.
Wii U is obviously in a far, far tighter corner than those machines ever where. Wii U will never, ever be a market leading machine. It is almost impossible now for it to be the fairly successful 40 to 50 million selling system I hoped it could be. But in years to come it could be a niche box with a strong reputation, excellent exclusives and some charming features. It needs to be a platform that allows Nintendo to head into the next generation without too many monkeys on their back. It needs to be a platform that protects the quality of Nintendo's intellectual property. It needs to be a platform that proves, even when their backs are well and truly against the wall, Nintendo don't abandon their hardware or those consumers that bought their hardware. It needs to retain the hope that whatever Nintendo produce next is worth considering, that while Wii U is irrelevant, Nintendo themselves are not.
We're in for a few years of these threads, I expect, so get used to them. So long as good software comes, and Nintendo show that they are learning their lessons, I'll be happy. 3DS is my favourite system for quite some time, and my newly acquired Wii U is better than I thought it would be. PS4 or Xbox One will join my party next year sometime. Nintendo will remain relevant, even if their latest home console doesn't.
