Anti-(Me Too) – Nintendo’s Value
There is a TLDR section at the bottom.
In 2006 Nintendo’s major secret was revealed in the Wiimote the method to the Wiimote allowed high broadband access to gaming. What this achieved is easily understood as separation in goals, to be accomplished all goals need direction and to achieve direction a model has to be present to stay the course and values have to be sustained along the way. By changing the goal of their platform, Nintendo announced new functions to achieve that goal and this in turn led to starting from scratch.
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/12/29/impending-video-games-industry-boom/
(^ The above link shows just how long the meme’s have been around. Joystiq seems to be a shadow of it’s former self now – they deserve more attention I guess. But it shows that someone other than Nintendo knew what Nintendo was gunning for since back then and wanted to pigeonhole that company since then.)
The gaming industry has become so loud that a measure has been put in place based on the old goals and all the functions therein. Investors who now sustain the industry require insight to determine where to go to turn the most money as the last thing they want is a job, the ‘ruler’ for our industry used a series of tools to come to it’s accurate measurement based on the industry most obvious trends. From this the values of Sony seemed the strongest and the innate technologist nature of Microsoft had them as near dead even, with Sony out selling the latter on just brand and catalog.
Edit--
To delve deeper into the investors dilema I will explain how and where the challenge of placing money and tradition has confounded them: Western investors like to see share values rise that they own on yearly basis, the goal is the recieve results yearly, the intention is to keep up to date with the model presented initially by tracking revenue. Larger companies actually from time to time have a 0 profit decision making model where they bite the bullet to in time reep the rewards - however no investor likes this kind of investment (for obvious reasons) as they must conffer and explain these models due to OPM (other peoples money) being used in the investment. The major thing here is that the 0 profit model actually payed off in the past within this industry, and the paradigm was actually in favor of such logic. (Below I describe how this logic could have come about.) The purpose is always to make money, but first you must place your money somewhere for it to earn wealth and that is where analysts come into play; these people put to words what the tradition of the gaming industry is and explain where the money will be based on this. But with the recent upset in the 0 profit model not working, they must not know if it's not working, as it's a 0 profit model, which traditionally takes time to yield high profit.
(If I were to view this individually between Sony and Microsofts current platform cycle's history it would seem like I'm totally off. But looking at the present what I'm saying holds a lot of water. Specially with Microsoft's Investors finally wanting to see profit after nearly 8 years. They must of thought Microsoft had it in the bag with the one year advantage.)
(We have all seen the links to the Analyst predictions of 2006 and 2007 far too many times)
There are two sides to the industry of electronic interactive entertainment: the technologist end and the game developers end, the combination of the three lead to a system of checks and balances when you add the consumer. Technologist who become game developers tend to require more power to accomplish their vision while game developers find new tricks with old tech, the difference is found in consumer acceptance as mindshare for sequels seem to either be pro or con. ie. Devil May Cry, Mario, Madden and so on and so forth, some revere Final Fantasy 7 as being the best in the series, sales reflect this as almost 10 million copies were sold to date, every main line Final Fantasy has sold significantly less regardless of having similar or relative to Final Fantasy 7 much more marketing muscle behind it.
http://www.vgchartz.com/games/index.php?name=Final+Fantasy&console=&developer=&publisher=&genre=&keyword=&order=Sales
^Vgchartz own figures.
Of course the opposite could be argued but any argument opposing this would more than likely be speculation as what I’m am stating deals with timeline and technology more than just sales figures. Each Final Fantasy was overall technologically superior to the last but sold less that FF7, which had a major marketing push. What can be accredited to any bump in what could have been a downward slide would be due to consumer awareness and acceptance. Outside of Mario or GTA series Final Fantasy is the best as far as quantity sold so that is why I chose it also many are aware that in their main line games Square considers technology to be a major weapon for delivery.
(I won’t cover publisher(s)’s history as I sort of did in Investors.)
Publishers have to satisfy their Investors, to make this post shorter I’ll just add a link that put’s EA under the microscope:
http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2007/02/ea_revisited_pl.html
(^That article was written in foresight of EA’s “All” brand.
It also expresses the situation of publishers very well, in relation to the dilemma they face, by not jumping on the boat they allow others room, it would be a balancing of the playing field or they would have to reshape their own ‘goals’ and all functions therein.)
*Wiimote like controllers are the new in thing; internet blogs and articles are constantly referring to them as being close to release, these controllers have been in rumor since summer 2007, when a fan took a picture of himself holding a black Wiimote playing an unknown game on his PS3, since then the mystery mote has always encompassed using both the Wiimote and Nunchaku in one. Technology like this by itself is meaningless without direct support of software – the selling point of the Wiimote is that it works with the direction; in itself for Nintendo it was no more than a value and not the goal nor the direction. The reason why 3rd party games haven’t shared the quality of Nintendo games as well as they could is because of this fact also, they consider the Wiimote to be the direction to follow when it’s no more than a value to their direction.
Conclusion and tldr:
The Wii’s success was brought on by the checks and balance system – technologists became entrenched in their development, the gaming industry saw high revenue high profit – the large sums of money being transferred caught the attention of outside investors which brings in analysts who articulate the industry’s trends, the game developers strive to achieve the new goal until it becomes the norm. Consumers supply the revenue needed for system and what the Wii did was taking the scenic route in other words different goals in order to avoid being a Me-Too console.
Shigeru Miyamoto has said that Nintendo makes games to sell Wii’s not Wiimotes. It’s about the white box and not the controller that comes with it; the goal of that machine is the result of the shared corporation of values to sustain direction to follow models.
My 2 cents
I'm Unamerica and you can too.
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