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Soundwave on 01 June 2015
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Illusion said:
Soundwave said:

I think NX is going to be a bigger change than what some Nintendo fans expect.

Personally I think huge changes are happening within Nintendo right now and they have accepted that their old business model will not work for them in the future. I think they have accepted this internally probably within the last year or so, but it was brewing before that. 

That even goes for the same ol' "just making a Playstation-killer! But with Nintendo games! And market it!".

That is also outdated thinking. Things are changing. 

Going Android could be a game changer for them with third parties too. I think third parties themselves will eventually start to revolt against the traditional console model. Traditional home console games have become too expensive to make and if one flops it can sink a studio. Nintendo for once might actually be ahead of the curve on something. 

I could very easily and honestly see a company like Square-Enix saying "y'know instead of PS4/XBox One we've decided to make Final Fantasy VII/VIII/IX Remakes for the NX and Android platforms instead". 

PS4 has an instal base of maybe 40-50 million in a year or two. Android has hundreds of millions of users. As Android phones/tablets get more powerful better and better games will start showing up and if NX has some early success, developers can easily add in physical controls to many of those games (that's like 3-4 days worth of programming, super easy). 

This is an insightful post.

 

Nintendo has already tried the playstation-killer option with the Gamecube and it didn't work.  The Gamecube was a ps2 killer when it came to technical specs but it really didn't really stop the gradual movement of third parties away from Nintendo.  People still thought of the Gamecube as the kiddy console even though it was powerful.  More importantly, The Gamecube sold worse then it's predecessor which is what might happen to the NX if Nintendo tries to repeat this formula (imagine, a console selling worse than the Wii U!)

Nintendo needs to get back to what they do best and that's making games.  They cannot compete with the platforms that Sony and Microsoft offer and I don't know if they need to.  I'm not quite sure what a Google/Android-based console will look like, but it sounds like a brilliant way to get Nintendo away from the nitty-gritty details associated with developing a modern OS environment and get back to making fun and unique games that are accessible to a large audience.

The GameCube could have worked, but only if Microsoft didn't enter the business. 

Once there was *both* Sony and Microsoft to deal with, it just became too much of an uphill climb to provide the same group of people a third option they simply didn't want. 

Simply put in a traditional console sense, Nintendo needed to bloody Microsoft's nose so bad in that GameCube gen that they would retreat and say "you know what? Making consoles isn't for us". But Nintendo didn't fight hard/smart enough that generation and the repurcussion is they allowed both Sony and MS to walk onto their territory and now there's no moving them. Once the mistake of letting MS get too comfortable in the game business was made, there was no undoing it. Genie came out of the bottle. 

Ultimately that's the problem with the "C'mon Nintendo! Make a An Aweomse Third Party Console (read: a Nintendo Playstation)!". Two's company, three's a crowd. If MS wasn't in the business then Nintendo would have some room to maneuver, but since they are, it's just become impossible basically. 

In hindsight, they should've just accepted MS' initial offer of putting Windows CE on the GameCube and made them an ally rather than another enemy that they didn't need. I still don't even know what the hell Windows CE did on the Dreamcast anyway but it didn't seem to negatively impact the games any, so who cares.