Do you think Nintendo killed off the Wii too early

[Soundwave]

padib said:

Soundwave said:

Transitions are far, far, far, far, FAR (did I mention FAR?) more important than late gen support basically. 

No one gives a shit what your previous system's late gen was like if your next system does great, particularly if it has a great launch. 

The 1st year of a new console is really actually 90% of where a game exec should be earning their money for. That's what makes or breaks a company in many cases and that should always take way higher priority than "yeah but what did you do for year 5/6 of your previous console".

In virtually all modern hardware you can tell by the system's 1st anniversary whether or not the system is going to have a good life cycle, a bad one, or an up/down one. 

Even the DS, which had somewhat sluggish first 4-5 months, by Nov/Dec 2005 (its first birthday) you could clearly see the where the system was going. Killing the GBA off was a good call.

If you're really actually a fan of any of these console brands anyway, bitching and moaning about that is stupid. What are you crying about you know you are going to buy the next system whatever it is no matter what because you can't play future franchise installments anywhere else. 

Being stuck with the GBA until 2006 is not a good thing, and that's not anything specific even to just GBA/DS, that goes for any hardware. There's no hardware transition where the games didn't get better due to better technology. There's no one here who would rather play Zelda III on the NES instead of the SNES, or Mario 64 on a SNES Super FX chip (holy fuck would that be terrible), or Metroid Prime on an N64 (ugh), or Splatoon on the Wii, etc. etc. etc.  

The importance of transitions is huge. How that transition is executed, that's a whole expertise, because it takes into account a great number of variables.

We know that Nintendo didn't have unlimited development resources, so a decision had to be made. Where to make the games?

One thing is for sure, making all new games games exclusively for either the Wii, the DS, the 3DS and the Wii U was not going to be possible with Nintendo's manpower.

What they needed to do was to produce games that supported both consoles (Wii and Wii U, DS and 3DS), and pump a few important games on the new consoles as the old ones gracefully die out. This would ensure that the momentum is not lost, and that the dev power is not focus fired on a possibly losing successor (the case for the U). If possible, the games playable on Wii would also need a 3DS port to strengthen the library. In order to do all this, of course in hindsight they would have needed to quickly build a framework to port the games seamlessly.

Yeah it is hard, but that's your job if you're the president of the company -- you have to make hard decisions. 

For me, looking at things I would it is almost always more imperative to make the transition the no.1 priority even if it comes at the expense of the preceding system. 

The N64-GameCube transition is one example that sticks out to me. Nintendo damn well should have taken Majora's Mask, Perfect Dark, and Conker off the N64 and given those titles to the GCN. The GameCube needed those games a heckuva lot more in its 1st year than the N64 did, the N64 was what it was by 1999-2000, it wasn't going to be magically more or less successful by that point. 

Imagine a home that has one 18 year old kid from a previous marriage but also a newborn baby from the current marriage. 

At some point you have to let your 18-20 year old grown ass adult of a kid out of the house and focus more on your newborn, the newborn needs more attention/care and if your 18 year old is a fuck up, welp tough shit. You can't treat both the same way, sorry but it's impossible. If the 18 year old by that age is still a dumb ass that needs their hand held for every decision, constant attention and you have a newborn in the house you can't manage those two things without going insane. The newborn has to be the priority.

Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 August 2020