I believe that was actually because EVO didn't get permission to stream the game initially. For large tournaments like EVO, organizers need permission from game publishers first to host their games.

Then we don't really disagree; I wasn't trying to discredit Yamauchi, all I meant was that it's only fair to acknowledge both his wins and his misfires.

I get your point, but what else they could have done with that schedule. In retrospect it was stupid decision for Sony to include the motion controls in the original controller, but it did make sense from the information they had back then. Wii was never about the controller but all about the games using it. However, Sony had incredibly poorly documented dev tools for third parties, who had to guess what the system could do and what it could not - and how to do it. This was mainly on PS2, but apparently PS3 aswell. So, you're correct in much more ways than you wrote about, just that given the schedule I don't think the controller was the issue, but actually everything else.

I think you're right. I believe Nintendo was pushing too hard the "competing without competing" -mantra and weren't pushing the core games to people. They did a lot of things incredibly right with their own core games on Wii, just that in the end they were left half way after a great start. When the Wii U was out, they did a complete 180 turn and suddenly it was a system for core gamers that had virtually nothing for the Wii audience to upgrade to - even the colour scheme was idiotic,  you had the white shitty system and black "good" system. I bought my Wii U for christmas 2015 because kids wanted it (and I wanted Hyrule Warriors) and had bought the system earlier but wanted to wait for the 32 gig white version. I did buy the black one as the 8 gig model made absolutely no sense at all.

Switch as a system fits the modern lifestyle better, but what I meant by "Touch Generations" was games that are designed to fit the modern lifestyle - that's what they in the end were. If you think of the core games, they are huge timesinks and do not fit the busy lifestyles people have. Of course there are some core games that you can pick up and play, such as Mario Kart, but not specifically designed for this purpose. Wii Music kind of ruined the whole idea of such philosophy, because it was marketed as one but was definitely a core game.

It's not that SIXAXSIS was a bad idea for a new feature. The problem is, Sony shoved it in to the console as a last minute addition after Nintendo showed off the Wii Remote, without consulting any of its first party teams or third party devs about the new tech. With later PlayStation hardware, hardware features would be researched, demonstrated to WWS teams, then iterated upon with tech demos and refinement. The motion controls and new gimmicks of PS4 and PS5 feel less intrusive because they feel like Sony actually gave their devs time to explore the new hardware.

And of course, as you said, Sony's dev tools and documentation for third parties in the early PS3 days were really bad, and a big reason why the console had mediocre third party support in its first few years.

I still remember all that PR about how the Wii U would "bring the hardcore back". I feel like Nintendo bought into that nonsense too much during the Wii U's pre-launch that it left the Wii U without any real direction. It's too expensive and confusing for the casuals who owned a Wii, it was too under-powered and lacking in games for the hardcore. By comparison, the Nintendo Switch returns to Nintendo's early strategy of a video game console for gamers of all ages and levels. It's a console where Nintendo Switch Sports and Just Dance can exist alongside Tears of the Kingdom and Bayonetta. If anything, it's more a spiritual successor to the Nintendo DS than it is to the Wii U.

A lot of first party Switch games are designed to have tons of small objectives to do when you're playing on the go. Take Super Mario Odyssey for instance. The game is filled with hundreds of different moons, and when you play in handheld or tabletop mode away from the TV, you can collect one or two moons and feel satisfied, even for only a few minutes at a time. The whole point of Nintendo Switch as a brand, is that it combines the short, easy-to-play nature of mobile/smartphone gaming, with the scale and depth of console experiences.

Mario Kart 8 DX is the reason the Switch was able to catch on as quickly as it did because its the game that best sells the concept of the system. It's a console-quality Mario Kart that you can play either on your TV, or take with you, and it lets you play with a friend right out of the box thanks to the two Joy-Con controllers. Mario Kart as a series, also has broad appeal because it works on two levels. It's very simple, and easy for newcomers to have fun, but also has a lot of nuances and depth that more experience players can master as well. The series has historically thrived on consoles that embody that philosophy such as the DS, Wii, and Switch.

Actually the poorly documented tools and features did not hurt PS2 and I don't think it hurt PS3 to the extent you seem to suggest. PS3 had great 3rd party support out of the gate, it just dried up after the system and it's games did not sell.

If Sony had consulted the developers, it had delayed the system if Sony had wanted all PS3 controllers to include motion controls, as Sony clearly had no idea how to use the tech as they could not just copy the Wii Remote as a PS-mote and piss all the devs and publishers who would have needed to build completely different controls to their games. It took time for Sony to learn how they wanted the controls to be used and make the required tools to make the controls work.

Of course PS4 and PS5 motion controls work much better than they did on PS3 because Sony had a lot more time to develop them. If Sony had taken a year or two more to develop them on PS3, they'd been just as good on PS3 as they are on PS4 and PS5. This is why it was a mistake on Sony's part to tack them on to a dual shock and remove the force feedback.

Well, Wii U was graphically on par with PS360, so it did not offer anything new. This was a year before the PS4X1 released. If Nintendo had delayed Wii U until the competition released, Wii U had likely done much better as we would have already seen what the 8th generation had to offer and Wii U had, at least in theory, offered something new to them. Now nobody was waiting how the Wii U gamepad could bring something new to games we had.

I actually have Mario Kart 8 on Wii U and I don't think it really is a system seller - if it was, it had sold Wii U's. Mario Kart does fit the Switch philosophy, but it's not specifically designed to it. Mobile phone gaming isn't exactly short and easy to play. For the most part they're complex timesinks, aside from a couple of games. In terms of mobile gaming, we're technically at the same point we were back in the early 90's where the games were becoming increasingly complex. The game centric computers disappeared because the games complexity reached the point where they competed the more powerful IBM clones without the same processing power. And when the 16 bit consoles came out, the computers needed to compete with simple games like Super Mario and Sonic, along with more complex ones like Final Fantasy.

Playing Super Mario Odyssey the way you described is the complete opposite to what the touch generations philosophy is, that Wii's and DS's success was build on.

Sure, the PS3 on paper, started with great support. But as you said, once the realities of Cell and its difficulties became clear, the 360 quickly took over as the third party home console of choice. The PS3 often got games late, got games somehow looking and running worse than the 360 with missing features and DLC, or just missed games entirely, with some being straight up 360/PC exclusives. They were able to get away with poor documentation in the PS2 days because there really wasn't much competition, they dominated that gen. But with the 360 having a year's headstart, along with Nintendo offering a unique and more affordable alternative, developers had more home console options than PlayStation.

This situation forced Sony to throw all its weight behind its own first party titles to cover up the mediocre third party support, and combined with better development tools and communication to third parties, slowly recover the console's reputation among developers. It's safe to say it paid off, as the PS3 ended up as a fantastic system with great exclusives and vastly improved third party ports, but it took a while for Sony to clean up that mess.

The Wii U's problem was that it was a console designed to compete with the PS3 and 360... Releasing at a time when those consoles were wrapping up their runs. It was a Wii successor that came out far too late, and as such, was stuck with an awkward, slow, and outdated PowerPC architecture that couldn't support very many engines or toolchains needed for modern development. Nintendo also naively assumed that they could go into HD using the same tools and resources they had in the Wii and GameCube days... They couldn't. So the entire company had to be restructured from within to hire more staff, and develop new tools to speed up its game development, which slowed to a crawl on Wii U, leading to games constantly being delayed and game droughts lasting up to seven months, which made its non-existent third party support that much more obvious. It didn't help that Nintendo had to also prop up the Nintendo 3DS, which was facing its own challenges at the time (Sluggish launch, exodus of third party support after the first year, similarly awkward and outdated SoC, massive competition with Smartphones).

Nintendo Switch may not be as powerful as even the base PS4, but it uses a much more modern and flexible SoC that supports the wide range of development tools needed for today's developers, which is why you see a lot of "impossible ports" and indie games on it. Nintendo themselves also has the benefit of combining handheld and console development resources into a single platform, and they've created new engines like its Bezel Engine to help get games out faster, which means the Switch has a much more consistent stream of first party games.

MK8 didn't sell Wii U's because the Wii U itself wasn't a very desirable product. It was a bloated, confusing, poorly marketed platform that most people thought was a Wii add-on. And while yes, games get more complicated over time, the fact that a game like BotW has a bunch of small challenges to do inside its big, complex open world, means that you can easily have fun with it, even for only a few minutes at a time.

And like I said, the "Touch Generations" games aren't a focus anymore because they're not a new or novel concept like they were in 2006. Today, everybody has access to games, so the idea of something designed to "expand the gaming population" like the DS days doesn't make sense as a main focus anymore because the gaming population is already expanded. Nintendo knows this, which is why the focus has shifted to expanding the reach of their wealth of iconic IP. Hence why Mario Kart 8 is pushed as a big killer app, because it's a hugely recognizable franchise that's fun for casual and core gamers, and is on a console that's easy to take around and share with a friend. MK8 feels more at home on Switch than it ever did on Wii U.

Yamauchi was amazing, if ruthless, during the NES and SNES eras. I wish Nintendo's subsequent presidents had half the fight in them that he did during that time. He was even able to bring Walmart to its knees in his heyday. Unfortunately, the N64 and Gamecube eras were misfires, though he did try to get things turned around on Gamecube, which was a system I personally loved.

Iwata was definitely the most likable as a person, and I was sad when we lost him at such a young age. Got the Wii and DS off the ground. However, I wasn't a big fan of Reggie Fils-Aime, who spent more of his time telling people what he thought they should have instead of giving them what they wanted, and Reggie was a big part of Iwata's time in office. The Wii and DS had great games but weren't my favorite systems. I actually liked the PS3 better after Sony figured out what it was doing.

I actually like Nintendo's current leadership for making the Switch such a huge success. Kimishima and Furukawa are more strictly business and aren't as personable as Iwata. They don't need to be. As long as they get the job done with the Switch 2, I'm happy..

3rd parties went to Microsoft because they weren't making money with Sony. Some games ended up looking worse on PS3 because it was easier to port games for 360 than it was for PS3 if Windows was the lead platform.

Wii U wasn't released too late, it was released too early. If it had been a year later, it would have been more powerful system than it was - and the system had benefited from the geneartion change hype. But you're right, it was a system that was designed to compete with PS360. I pointed out earlier that Iwata was good in reacting, but bad proactively. Also the controller made the system incredibly expensive, without the controller the system could have been a hundred euros cheaper, that would have been a reasonable price point for such a system.

I have Mario Kart 8, it is not a game that good that people would buy a system play it. It's the worst Mario Kart by a fair margin.

Before Wii and Nintendo DS were released, Nintendo paid attention to that people were playing games on PC - Bejeweled and such - as well as NES Classics series of games selling well. The blue ocean Nintendo wanted to tap wasn't non-gamers, but lapsed gamers. People like me who had sat through 80's and 90's with a controller in hand but had stopped gaming for whatever reason. Nintendo's expansion of gaming population was not by making games that the non-gamers would buy, but that the gamers or lapsed gamers would play with non-gamers. Just because you have mobile computer on your hand that can play games that are a huge waste of time, isn't any better than having a desktop or a laptop computer that can play games, that you could do before Wii or DS were out. Issue isn't the system, but actually the games and their values. The mobile phone games are games that are designed for 12-year olds who have all the time in the world to sit in front of a screen watching ads.