The truth about Nintendo

[Zod95]

AstroGamer said:

I am going to take piece by piece and reply to each point

1.1. What Nintendo does with your dollar

Your philosophy on the game industry business is a generally bad idea. It promotes stagnancy by keeping profits low. While "$1 in = $1 out" seems like a good concept, if you cannot sustain the $1 in part, you are already close to debt. It makes that 1 flop is even more dangerous. Lots of "debt to gamers" as you put it shows health in a gaming company.  The industry doesn't grow vertically then. The danger of a flop puts the company also in a less risky mood that less creative works get created and they don't need to make the next big thing. Instead of the industry growing exponentially, it grows at a steady slope or not at all. There would be more derivative series and less Wonderful 101 or Beyond: Two Souls or Xenoblades.

Nintendo has been always in a low risky mood regardless their losses or astronomical profits. This has more to do with a company's mindset than with its profits. A profitable company may naturally engage into big projects and today there's already many ways to control the risk of a game to become a flop. What that section of the OP criticizes is the attitude of a company that makes huge profits, doesn't engage into major risks, doesn't evolve like the others do, and see its profits to go from huge to astronomical while keeping a significant part (if not most) of it on its pockets.

 

AstroGamer said:

1.2. How Nintendo has evolved along the time

I don't get why this particularly bad especially with the previous section. maybe you think that Games should be become more like movie. Is realism innovation or is that merely going with the trends. And is it objectively better. The crux of how this is bad is that Nintendo is not following the industry trends. Moving the industry forward is making your own trends. Assuming that Modnation Racers or Spore advanced the industry forward isn't accurate. They advanced the industry in a tangental direction or we would see track editors in most racing game or there would be more games like Spore. However, I don't think you are completely wrong but they still evolve in some ways.

I reply to you what I wrote to PenguinZ:

"Realism is not the keyword here. Commitment, deepness are more like it. This is a very hard thing to explain but I will do my best.

As a fan of videogaming, what matters to me is that this industry produces high-quality games. That's what really matters. But quality is about how much a game is appreciated by each person. Then, it varies from gamer to gamer, because it is about tastes. Talking about tastes is going around in circles, it's not possible to argue on this field. What is awesome to someone may be awful to another (and even if it isn't so, one can say it is without having to prove anything, "it's just about my tastes", he/she could say). So, we only have 2 options if we want to debate quality: either we say it's only about tastes, each person has his own, end of the story, let's go out of this forum ; or we remove tastes from the equation and see what's left.

For those that stay on the "quality" debate, that's the big question: what's left? In my opinion, what's left is the commitment of each dev (effort/time/money) shown on measurable (objectivity) remarkable (relevance) achievements. Once it's measurable, it's not about subjectivity anymore and thus is give us a commong ground to debate. Once it's remarkable, it proves it is related to quality. Once it requires effort/time/money, it proves it is rare (only few are willing to spend so much resources) and thus it's valuable. Therefore, any achievement one can find that fits into this criteria is proof of commitment to work towards quality. Is this a perfect criteria? Not at all. Is this a good quality filter? Absolutely.

Realism is not really necessary. A made-up city may have required as much work as a realistic one. However, it is much easier to assess commitment on realistic games, once any deviation from reality means lack of effort. On the other hand, any lack of effort on the creation of a made-up city may be seen as an artistic option. The lack of effort is disguised here. An exellent example on how realism promotes effort is The Getaway:

- They have recreated the modern London. It's one of the very few sandbox games (if not the only one) that has recreated in 3D a real modern city. They had to buy cinematic equipment to capture every inch of every street to afterwards design it in 3D. They ended up skipping many streets and anyone can easily perceive that lack of effort. Yet, that small and truncated sample of London became a unique asset of the whole industry (as far as I know, there isn't out there any better recreation of a modern city). This achievement showed a great commitment from Team Soho and is one of the greatest software benchmarks that magnifies videogaming and imposes some respect to those that despise it.

- They have recreated real cars and real characters. Once more, they had to buy equipment that would let them capture and render those cars and characters. They were pioneers (the first or one of the first) in the movement capture of the bodies and facial expressions. They got to know real people with real lifes that were similar to the ones of the characters from the game. For example, to play the character of a boxer that was also a gangster they recruited a boxer that was also a gangster. To play the character of a high-profile business man, they convinced a real high-profile business man to enter in the project. Etc. These real people were rendered to the game, did all the action scenes to capture their movements and did their own voices too. This whole process demanded a lot of time, interviews, cinematic preparation, performances, etc. But the end result was absolutely remarkable: an immersive game like no other on the 6th generation.

Could have all this effort, investment, time-consuming and thorough work been done on a made-up city with made-up vehicles and made-up characters with made-up lives and made-up voices? Sure. Would it be likely to happen? Of course not. The motivation to avoid effort or time or money spending when such resources become painfully expensive is too big when there is an easy alternative to disguise them as "different artistic options".

Nintendo doesn't need to go out of their comfort zone. There are still plenty of "objective quality filters" that doesn't involve realism. Fully-editable levels, like LittleBigPlanet has, perfectly fits on the criteria mentioned above. Thousands of km2, like Fuel has, is another. But the point is that Nintendo has very little to show on here. Like the OP says, they have always avoided what is massive money spending, monsters of uncontrolled quality, bold concepts that could become state-of-the-art achievements. Nintendo games are nothing more than small and conventional fun experiences that can only be praised on a subjective analysis. Objectively, they are a nullity."

 

AstroGamer said:

1.3. What Nintendo is willing to offer

The problem with this is that too many games drop in price too fast and game sales are too front loaded for most non Nintendo games. The high value of Nintendo games acts as an insurance as you can resell the game for close to the original value or if you waited a couple months down the line, you wouldn't get a better deal. With most other games, in order to get you to buy the game on day one, they throw in a day-one DLC or preodrer bonuses and tack on a multiplayer since that's when the community would be largest. These kind of practices we dislike as gamers. As for the lower cost games, we have seen that a lot in the past 2 generations ie pack in Wiimote with Wii Play as the biggest example and their downloadable offerings. they offered NSLU as a standalone $30. They don't offer their main games at lower prices because of the value they percieve themselves. they percieve Super Mario 3D World as at least the value of Uncharted or Last of Us. While i agree they should lower their prices quicker for their big games (perhaps like the Nintendo Selects), behaving like the rest of the industry who have little respect for their initial customers is not the way to go.

Following pure supply/demand logic, the games should in fact drop the price like Sony and Microsoft do. Is that disrespecting the customers? I don't think so. Each gamer can make his/her own trade-off: pay more or wait more. What Nintendo does is being stubborn in an attempt to blackmail gamers in the long-term. They are the ones that are wrong and acting in bad faith. I find Sony's and Microsoft's consoles not only better but also more affordable considering the whole investment (console +  games + accessories). Anyone willing to wait will find that too.

 

AstroGamer said:

1.4. Nintendo’s policies towards gamers

The first example is telling of Nintendo's horrible past but isn't really indicative of modern Nintendo. The second example is while bad, is more indicative of their fear of piracy than control of the consumer. And Nintendo only really divides releases into 3 or 4 main regions for physical. If you are from say Latin America, you can import all your games from America since it should work on your system. The eShop's lack of presence in several countries is an issue though. The  more worrying problem is that Nintendo in its policies towards gamers is that nintendo is causing issues with fan community particularly the video making ones. Regardless of one's opinion of Youtubers, they use Youtube to work at the thing they enjoy. And then, they almost canceled EVO last year because of Melee. They need to promote the Youtube community better since its a very valuable one now that people trust them more than actual journalists.

Like I said to other user, when they had the opportunity X, they did Y. Now that they don't have X anymore, they can't do Y. But it doesn't mean they wouldn't like to if they had the chance again.

There are other ways to fight piracy without harming who's not guilty at all.