Ninty will upstream the market. the question is... HOW? Care anyone explain

[bdbdbd]

ookaze said:

@Bored4Life : I'm heavily amazed because I think exactly like you. I've made the exact same analysis, except in some cases that you analyzed more than me.
It's really amazing! So I completely agree with everything you said of course.

What's interesting too, is that you're the first person I remember besides myself, that said that Nintendo's online interface is actually better than those of the competitors. I already said it here, it's even better than XBL. But people won't believe it or even see it before it's too late. To most "hardcore gamers", best online means what XBL provides. Of course, I disagree. But for now, I'm in the vocal minority about this.

I've thought about it a little, and to me, Nintendo's online is genius, because it involves upstreaming too. In the past, Nintendo went upmarket too fast with their online interface. People fled it in drove. What I find genius with this one, is that they're very slowly and sneakingly going upmarket even with the online.
XBL is scary to non-hardcore people, so it can't be better than Nintendo's interface.
First, Nintendo try to make people want to go back to their console every day. This is the first step : giving non-gamers reasons to go back to the console every day. They accomplish this with a familiar interface. Like the wiimote, there are channels on the Wii, and people are familiar with channels.
Then, they introduce small packages you can buy from the comfort of your home, to get familiar with downloading and similar tasks.
Then, they introduce upstreaming, but not scary ones with voice chat or all kind of obnoxious friend notifications, no, just the basic, in non-scary matches in Mario Kart. They're not scary, because the system is made so that you don't have a sentiment of loss if you lose a match.
Only thing I wonder, is why Wii Fit doesn't have an online component. Perhaps they couldn't do it in time, or plan to introduce it later.

Also, you're talking about 2 upmarkets. I don't think that was part of their initial strategy to go this route with 2 upmarkets. Surely Nintendo included this branch of possibility in their original strategy, but I think that was the worst path for them. Not that they are worried, but I think they would have preferred to have only 1 upmarket to conquer. I also don't think their primary upmarket include only mythic Nintendo's loyal fans. I think it just includes regular gamers that have enough picture culture, so that they're not blinded by the HD marketing from Sony and MS. The rest are not necessarily graphic whores, but they are easily lured by "high end graphics".
I think Nintendo didn't want to take that worst path of having to expand their own upmarket, because it's harder to do, takes more time, and the worst, is that it means destroying a lot of the other upmarket, including the 3rd parties that went full head into it. Well, their mistake, too bad for them.

That's why I said Capcom are the only smart 3rd party, because they are the very few that actually covered Nintendo systems all these years. But like I said in a post long ago, they wanted to even let this go and leave Nintendo behind this gen. They nearly went the downward spiral, but thanks to being conservative last gen, they could escape the bad route by releasing RE4 and REUC.

Up til now, I had a hard time understanding how 3rd parties could manage to hold their position so well. Up to the latest FY reports. That's when I saw that some have already started digging into their assets to get going. They post bigger and bigger revenue, which is good for their stock, but in the same time, post lower and lower profits, and some are posting big losses now. Several third parties have started going the downward spiral already.
And I agree Sony have started going upstream, which was amazing to me. Because they follow very accurately the behaviour of disrupted company.
MS is also exactly in the behaviour predicted. That's to a point it's scary. They're trying to copy Nintendo and get their market. But they're several steps too late, and they don't even realize that their supposedly downmarket games are actually pretty upmarket already (like their japanese offerings were), add to that, that there is no XBL for the downmarket, so it just can't work against Nintendo's offering. To me, this means a big hard failure awaiting, and then they will flee upmarket too. Actually, they're fleeing upmarket already with other games at the same time, so I don't understand how they can hope their "supposedly downmarket games" to win anything. They also already started alienating their userbase, and they started giving up on Japan, which to me is also fleeing upmarket (JRPG -> WRPG that rely more heavily on gritty graphics).

So everything is going as planned.

Hey, i too said it a long time ago.

The two upmarkets fails in the sense, that there is only one market. We could make an "upmarket" for every developer, genre or franchise out there if we want to, but that would just be distracting from the matter. If we start splitting up the market, we would eventually end up having everyone in the upmarket, since from everyones own personal view, the person in question is always in the upmarket.