Suke said:
This guy makes some good points. |
To which points are you referring? The part where he claims that Nintendo relies solely on its old franchises while a trailer for The Wonderful 101 is showing? The part where he laments the fact that Bayonetta 2 is Nintendo-exclusive because apparently Platinum Games will be kicking themselves, and must have given in to Nintendo buying exclusivity... when Platinum Games specifically said that they tried to get other publishers to publish it, and Nintendo was the only one that was willing to do it?
The part where he shows video of X while talking about how Nintendo doesn't innovate (we'll ignore games like Wii Sports, too)? Or maybe it's the part where he complains about how Nintendo relies only on its core franchises resulting in nothing else selling well especially from third parties (hello there, Just Dance; oh, hi Nintendogs; hey look, it's Brain Training; my goodness, it's LEGO Star Wars; Epic Mickey seems to be grinning, over there)? I'm surprised he didn't try to pull out the old chestnut of "the Wii U was made weaker, and that's why EA isn't making games for it".
Nintendo does more to innovate in this industry than any other large dev company (that is, not counting the indies, etc). Almost every major franchise out there can be traced back to something Nintendo did - what is Darksiders, but a variation on Zelda? What is Call of Duty, but a refined Goldeneye?
And sometimes, Nintendo tries to innovate, and it doesn't work, too. Disaster: Day of Crisis. Wii Music. There's plenty of examples out there... but of course, those don't count because they're not annualised franchises, and thus don't get as much notice from the high-and-mighty hardcore gamer, who apparently can't even be bothered to check facts like why Nintendo is publishing Bayonetta 2.
Here's a partial list of new franchises that Nintendo has published for the Wii (not including titles with partial connection, like Excite Truck): Wii series, Disaster Day of Crisis, Endless Ocean, Captain Rainbow, Flingsmash, Zangeki no Reginleiv, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Pandora's Tower, Eco Shooter, Bonsai Barber, Rock & Roll Climber, Line Attack Heroes, Snowpack Park. Are they all major titles? No. Did they all release in America? No. Are they all going to get lots of sequels? No. But every one of them is a new franchise, starting on the Wii. Notice that I'm not even counting those that began on the DS. And for Wii U, there's already Sing Party, The Wonderful 101, and possibly X, not to mention the rumoured new IP from Retro Studios.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a publisher that produces so many new franchises. What's different is that a lot of them aren't specifically targetted at the hardcore gamer - and THAT is what the hardcore gamer hates so much about Nintendo. That Nintendo isn't all about appeasing the hardcore gamer. Never mind that Nintendo are pretty much the only company in the industry that made a large profit over the last generation. Never mind that a long list of hardcore-focused studios collapsed during this generation, and even multiple major publishers folded... and in almost every instance, those studios and publishers tried to avoid Nintendo systems more often than not.
Quite simply, the industry, and especially the media, have an absurd bias against Nintendo. Note that I'm not saying that they should be praising Nintendo - just that the attacks are absurd and unjustified, and would be called out by hardcore gamers if they were said of any other publisher. Even EA gets better treatment by hardcore gamers.
EDIT: Here's a demonstration of the absurdity of it - you've noticed, I assume, that on this message board, you see similar frequency of "PSV Doom!" and "Wii U Doom!" threads and posts, right? Now go and look for articles predicting PS Vita's doom amongst the gaming media. The system is being outsold by the Wii U most weeks, with the only reason for it being close being that the Japanese prefer handhelds over consoles at the moment, and yet you never see a single article going "XXX not coming to Vita". I'm almost surprised that I haven't seen an article going "Halo 5 not coming to Wii U". The true absurdity, though, is that most hardcore gamers are willing to admit, under pressure, that Nintendo always does well enough... and yet they continue to predict Nintendo's doom. And they denounce Nintendo when they announce new titles because "it's not Mario", and then denounce Nintendo when Nintendo shows Mario.
(mostly)
