| The_Liquid_Laser said: The N64. Nintendo betrayed me by taking gaming in a radically new direction that was also not fun. |
I agree that the N64 was a major turning point for Nintendo. Up until that point, Nintendo had been the ultimate innovator, that what Nintendo did determined the video game industry as a whole. The N64 is where that changed, While the use of analog sticks was the right interface direction, the holding onto cartridges was a backward approach which only had the benefit of saving some load time.
This is also where the toxic Nintendo fanboyism began, where Nintendo fans attacked disk technology for its load times and flimsiness, some people saying they liked how they could leave games all over the floor and not worry about stepping on them - arguments that were even too much for Nintendo fans. But the truth is, for Nintendo, the only thing they cared about was owning the format because after the start of the GameCube generation, Nintendo’s third party royalties dropped substantially... and this was with significant revenue in the handheld industry. But, one major issue with the cartridges is the price, a game company could only make a profit with an extraordinarily high minimum price, and anything below it was losing money to cut losses and clear stock... the result, few third parties wanted to do much work with Nintendo, and the N64 had the lowest number of game releases of any Nintendo home console, by far. The GameCube was the second lowest, it took until the Wii for Nintendo to begin to show recovery with third parties not named Ubisoft, and on the Switch, the recovery from that colossal N64 blunder continues to this day.
The other part of the N64 that was really problematic was this is where the “BURN THE LAST GEN DOWN!” strategy began. Nintendo basically abandoned the SNES in order to put all efforts into the N64, the SNES should have had support for no less than 3 more years...
That wasn’t the only thing, Nintendo began to shun 2D games and RPGs, with statements from their CEO calling all RPG gamers as basement nerds, effectively (ironic, because Nintendo was heavily pursuing first person shooters at the time while Pokémon was their biggest franchise of the time and 2D games were about all they did on handheld). Again, another trend that continued through the GameCube generation - though, not as fervently, especially since Yamauchi had stepped back and eventually down, and the era of Iwata began; but it’s a slow ship, and it wasn’t until the Wii That the true reversal began to be seen, when Nintendo again began to embrace the 2D style of design and pursue bringing RPGs to their home consoles, their strongest statement here is was the purchase of one of the most highly regarded RPG dev studios in the world, Monolithsoft. Of course, the Switch is where it all really came back together.
But the Wii generation wasn’t perfect, Nintendo still utilized the BURN IT DOWN strategy at the end of the generation and killed off a successful market in order to force a new generation, the Wii U, that I don’t think people were quite ready for, yet. While home console sales had slowed, they were still relatively high in 2011, and software sales were some of the highest Nintendo had ever experienced on any console, ever, yet Nintendo cut down all of their services on Wii, stopped supporting VC, and stopped their major first party releases. Wii U, in many ways, felt like the N64 all over again. Although, I think there was a lot more hope this time because instead of Nintendo saying something like “screw all those people who left, they were losers anyway” it only took a few months for Nintendo to seemingly acknowledge “We have something else coming along” - they somewhat admitted their failure in the most corporately acceptable way possible. IMO, Nintendo was saying to their Wii DS fanbase “hold on, I know you don’t like this Wii U thing, but we’ve got something coming down the line you should like quite a lot... oh yeah, Project NX”
I think they wanted the Switch all along, but the Wii U was a compromise, and so they fabricated “asymmetrical gameplay” as a means to explain this weird half-bakes design. And it just didn’t fly.
Anyway, I’m ranting and could go on forever, so I’ll stop here.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
