| Nem said: Err... with that money they could have bought ATLUS themselves instead. What is Nintendo doing?! -.- |
Investing in the future, 15 years too late...
Since 1989, Nintendo's whole businessplan has been standing on two separate legs; their home console business and their portable business. In reality you can actually say that they have two parallell businessplans running along side eachother. And those plans rarely cross paths.
Building a business on two legs like this, was the right thing to do back in 1989 when Game Boy was launched, because with Game Boy the market became clearly devided between those playing home consoles and those who played handhelds. Mostly girls and young children played Game Boy, while boys (mostly teenagers and some adults) played home consoles. Very few of the overall market played both on a regular basis. This continued throughout the 1990s, and a few years into the next decade.
But in the late 1990s, when everyone started getting cellphones, it was clear that in the not too distant future the market for portable devices would merge with the market for more stationary devices. Everyone interested in technology knew this was comming. Connectivity between devices would be the future. Every large hardware manufacturer knew about it. They most likely also had test environments running in their R&D facilities as early as 1996/97; including Nintendo.
But the fact that Nintendo's whole businessplan was built on two separate legs, each leg a successful moneymaking environment on its own, was a huge problem. Nintendo saw great short term risks in changing that businessplan into a one leg solution. Instead they decided to go for a hybrid solution, where they kept their handheld division separated from their home console division, but instead encouraged them to work together on various projects. This is how Game Boy Advance and GameCube came to be.
The problem with this hybrid solution was that it caused more internal problems than it actually solved. The miracles promised by connectivity between Game Boy Advance and GameCube quickly turned into consumer nightmares. Very few games used the features, and those who did either did so as a gimmick, or in a very expensive way. The fact that Nintendo tried to create connectivity within the framework of two businessplans, was what qucikly doomed the GameCube.
Had Nintendo instead used connectivity as the framework for GameCube and Game Boy Advance, and built a single market businessplan within it, then I believe GameCube would have become a huge success.
Instead Nintendo came to a horrible conclusion after evaluating their connectivity failures, and decided to separate their handheld division even more from the home console division. That is how DS and Wii was concieved (The R&D team responsible for DS had virtually no idea about the Wii, and vice verse). Even though the whole market, actually the whole western society, was pointing in the oposite direction, Nintendo firmly stuck with their two leg solution. Luckily, DS and Wii where huge success stories on their own, but this led to Nintendo believing even less in a one leg solution.
Now, 15 years late, and in the wake of the early failures of 3DS and the later failures of Wii U, Nintendo has FINALLY cought up with reality.
Building a new headquarter for 1500 employees, aimed at merging Nintendo's handheld division with their home console division, is probably the most important business decision Nintendo has done since Yamauchi devided his R&D division into smaller competing software division in the early 1980s. As I said before, this building represents a whole new way of thinking at Nintendo. It's MUCH MORE than a building. It's where our future as game consumers will be decided.
We will see the first baby steps of this new way of thinking with the release of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS later this year. But the real deal, the magic of connectivity, won't be seen until a few years, probly with the successor to Wii U and 3DS.
