Should Nintendo Stop Innovating And Make A Traditional Console?

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RolStoppable said:

Hynad said:

I don't agree with that. The SNES was iterative. It was a more powerful, more advanced NES, with improved controller input. The N64 was the same, wih the addition of a true analog stick. The gamecube was a further enhancement of that concept. It's only with the Wii that Nintendo tried to break away from the mold. And it managed to win its bet. The Wii U was a conceptual mistake. It had the right ideas, but the execution was a disaster. And now we have the Switch, which is what the Wii U should have been in the first place. Among all of their home consoles, only the last 3 may align with your assessment that Nintendo differentiates itself from Sony and Miscrosoft's iterative methods.

But PlayStation and XBox also align with what you call "ever-evolving pieces of hardware". The PS4 allows for gaming experiences that weren't possible before it, like the PSVR. The Xbox 360 and XBox One also had Kinect which provided something unique when it comes to motion controls. Then you have to factor in the actual user experience allowed by those console's UI, which indeed appear as being PC-lite, but also more user-friendly then them, which is something that has always been an objective for home consoles. Point in case: the Famicon wasn't given such a name for no reason. For as long as consoles have existed, they've always been "dumbed down PCs". And Nintendo's consoles are no different. The question is why would you consider this to be a bad thing?

As I once told you in the past, I think you don't give enough credit where credit is due and are quick to unfairly dismiss Sony and MS. 

If you look at the images of all the controllers one after another, you'll easily notice significant differences in the Nintendo line while Sony's and Microsoft's history is pretty much the same thing every time. If you look at Atari and Sega, which I mentioned in my post, they have significant differences too. Whether controllers were good or not is irrelevant here, what matters is that change has been the norm, and having the same controller every time only became more common after traditional console manufacturers were pushed out of the market. But as long as Nintendo remains, the original tradition remains intact and Sony and Microsoft should be viewed as the companies with the non-traditional approach.

Peripherals, as you pointed out for PS and Xbox consoles, do not counter the point I've made. After all, peripherals have also been released for PCs, but the standard input methods remained keyboard and mouse while the eventual controller standard became the Xbox controller.

I don't consider it a bad thing that Nintendo is not like Sony and Microsoft, although I am unsure what exactly you mean with your question. A Nintendo console is not a dumbed down PC, because the way that games are played as well as how the games are designed is notably different. A Nintendo console is not going to substitute the PC experience and the same obviously holds true vice versa.

Seeing as how none of the system really use any custom silicon (Switch is a Tegra X1 and ARM CPU ... you can buy a Google tablet and Nvidia Shield that has the same chip, you couldn't buy anything really in 1996 with an N64 chip inside of it), not sure if any of this even matters. The days of companies using exotic, non-standardized tech that was specific to a console and unlike any other product in the market are long over, largely because it doesn't make any damn financial sense to not use off the shelf components anymore.