| Soundwave said: What exactly is the difference between "considering making games" and "waiting until launch to decide?"? Seems like the same thing to me and sure NX likely will encounter some skepticism (deservedly so) from some third parties after the Wii U debacle. Beyond that Nintendo could simply have instructed third parties to answer vaguely about NX, I don't think they want developers making concrete statements about a platform such as "yes we're making games" that hasn't even been formally unveiled. I think the "real" Animal Crossing was in development for Wii U at some point ... but Nintendo moved it to NX (portable + console) and that's absolutely 100% the right business move. AC is like Nintendo's 2nd or 3rd largest franchise (portable) in Japan, they can't afford to just "waste" one on Wii U to make a very small part of their fanbase happy when it would sell far, far more on the NX. It's just not good business, that's really all I think it comes down to. Just pure business logic, nothing personal. Nintendo is a business not a charity or a non-profit organization for their fans. Amiibo Festival is the Animal Crossing that Wii U fans are going to get, they're just going to have to accept that. If they "waste" an Animal Crossing on Wii U for 2016, that means the next one probably won't be ready until 2019 or so ... and NX needs its heavy hitters much earlier in the console cycle than that. If NX fails, that's basically it for Nintendo as a hardware maker IMO, that means they need more of their big gun IPs early on. Abandoning the Wii U Animal Crossing is absolutely the right move. In hindsight Zelda: Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark, and Conker should have been moved to the GameCube launch window too ... maybe Nintendo could've beat at least Microsoft that gen and discouraged them from staying in the business, but they let themselves get beat by MS and that gave the XBox division confidence as in "hey if we can beat Nintendo" and that's eventually snowballed to the situation today where Nintendo is basically locked out of the entire core gaming market. Never should have let MS gain that much traction. |
The difference between them is between making a decision and not making a decision. Waiting until launch is a decision - they aren't going to develop for the system until they're confident that it will perform well. Considering developing is the absence of a decision - they need more information before deciding how they're going to approach development.
And if Nintendo instructed them to be vague, they'd say things like "We are evaluating the opportunities that NX presents us". The wording is key - "considering developing" translates as "we're not even sure we're going to support it", whereas the phrase I provided translates as "we'll be developing for it soon". It's the difference between saying that you're planning to have children, and you're considering having children. The former implies concrete intent, the latter implies uncertainty, even though "planning" and "considering" function to mean roughly the same thing.
There's no real benefit in "moving" Animal Crossing to the NX, rather than developing for the Wii U and then expanding on the NX afterwards. Animal Crossing does better on handheld anyway, and the design would have to be different on a handheld as a result. So if they had it in development for the Wii U, it would be more efficient to finish the game on the Wii U, rather than going through all of the extra rigmarole of porting after a significant amount of development. Handheld AC tends to do 2-3x as well as console AC. But we're pretty confident they were making a console AC. A far smarter approach would be to make the whole AC game for Wii U, release it in 2016 (assuming, as I've said, a 2017 NX launch), and in the meantime develop also for NX Handheld. NX Console would be able to just be a Wii U port without a problem, anyway, so might as well provide it on both systems.
Keep in mind that Nintendo has been shifting a lot of their development responsibilities into third party partnerships. This makes it easier for them to make more of their key franchise titles, like AC.
Let me ask you this - why did they make Amiibo Festival? What is the benefit of making it? They could have used any of their IP for an amiibo-focused party title, but they chose Animal Crossing. Why? It meant a heap of new amiibo, of course... but it's quite unlikely that they'll limit the use of them on Wii U to this title (plus minor uses in cases like Super Mario Maker). There's good reason to think that they'll have another title making use of them.
I always find it funny when people try to assert what "good business" is, call out Nintendo for bad moves, and then assert that their pet beliefs are going to happen because Nintendo is going to do what they call "good business". And always, along the way, ignore ACTUAL good business, like ensuring that fans of their products aren't dissatisfied, because the worst thing you can do is piss off your fans.
