A few things before I begin:
1. This will be long. If you're averse to long posts containing logic and a look at the business side of things, this thread is not for you.
1b. My English sentence structures tend to be somewhat convoluted at times. It's not a failing I can correct easily for this post, so please bear with me.
2. I am not trying to make anyone like the Wii as a machine or it's games.
3. I am, however, trying to make people understand why Nintendo does the weird things it does so they could perhaps be accepted, and even welcomed. This would reduce the annoying Wii-related whining I have to endure on the boards.
4. Take off your "hardcore" glasses and keep an open mind. Be mindful that more sophistication is not necessarily always strictly better, and that value is subjective.
With that out of the way, let's begin.
The Why:
By this time, most of you have no doubt read, again and again and again that Nintendo's after new gamers and is expanding the market, etc. Why would this matter one bit? This is why: Reggie from 2005. Do not discard this as mere business droning: It is the heart of everything.
Much of that sounds rather alarming. If the gaming industry's sales increases have been largely driven by multiple console ownership and population growth with no marked increase in household penetration, how can that growth be sustained when population growth turns into population decline? More customers are obviously needed, because the current ones are going to exit the Core market sooner or later.
In light of this need, the trend of growing disinterest sounds like a nightmare. Clearly, the then-current values held by the gaming industry aren't overtly interesting to the general populace.
On the hardware side, these values would be constant, tangible increases in hardware power and increaisng online. A problem, though: The increasing graphical fidelity in games is rapidly escalating in cost as gaming approaches the Uncanny Valley.
What I am trying to say here is that making top-of-the-line technical graphics is more and more expensive. The software development takes longer, and the hardware is more costly. This problem increases exponentially with each step taken, ie. is a case of diminishing returns. You spend far more on the next little improvement than you did on the last one.
So, the gaming industry as a whole was betting on something really expensive that customers, at large, didn't value too much. They have been overshot by offering a load of stuff they don't really want, which just raises the hardware price.
The advancement in the online functionality is driving local multiplayer into extinction due to reasons that will be discussed later.
On the software side, there has been a trend towards more and more cinematicism. Game developers have strayed far from gaming's arcade roots in pursuit of art. hey desperately want to make games "art". The problem here? People don't play games for art. They play games for the sort of entertainment games can bring: Cheerful competition with friends, exploring alien worlds or magical wonderlands, those kinds of stuff. The art-obsessed designers want games to tell grandiose stories, to explore characters and whatnot. They want to earn prestige in the eyes of the industry and be recognized as artists. Some do not focus on making games movies, and make quirky, or very complex-to.play games instead. Whatever the motivation, one thing remains consistent: They make games for themselves, not the customers.
Another troublesome factor in the industry are the suits. When I talk about suits, I mean Activision's Robert Kotick and his ilk. They are people who see gaming in terms of demographics, franchises and profit. In other words, they just want to milk "demographics" of their money. Nothing else matters. When they spot a trend, such as Wii Sports selling like mad, they see a minigame collection selling, and make more of them. They don't ask if customers want it, they just see the money. Again, no customer focus.
Gaming is a market that is largely driven by content, so it is reasonable to assume that a relatively large reason for the described disinterest is the kind of games that are being offered, and the values, like online multiplayer, that the HD Twins are pushing. In other words, people do not desire intricate plots or complicated gameplay. They want something else. In hindsight, we know the answer.
The How:
If you have read the above with an open mind, a realization should be dawning on you: There is a job to be done, and that job is saving the industry. Enter the Wii. It is plain to see that the Wii was a very calculated design, one that has the potential to succeed whereas the competition is set up for eventual failure.
The Wii is pretty much the polar opposite of the current direction of the rest of the industry, forswearing large graphical updates, a significant online presence and cinematic games.
Instead, it pushes values like interface, local multiplayer, and simple, accessible games that are designed to fit into the user's life, not replace it.
And the important part: it's selling like hotcakes. Clearly, Nintendo is onto something here.
If I were to take this into a mobile phone metaphor, Nintendo are offering people a sturdy, simple clamshell phone where Sony and MS would want you to buy a smartphone when the customer simply wants to make calls. That's how radical the difference in their core values is.
Why it is ignored and hated:
This generation is interesting. So far, we have seen analysts being consistently wrong time and time again, third-party developers completely ignoring the console with the biggest installed base in years, and gamers hating the system to the point of irrationality. Why?
In the case of the analysts, it is simple: The analysts ignore disruption and Blue Ocean strategy, and instead analyze Nintendo on the metrics and values of traditional "Red Ocean" products. This will result only in failure, as the whole point of the Wii is to redefine the central values of gaming so that it can be sustainable again.
In the case of gamers and developers, they are blinded by a premise that more sophistication and advanced technology is inherently better. This is why:
1. simple games are seen as being for idiots who can't handle the real thing and have no idea of what quality is...
1b. ...which, in turn, is why many developers assign bad teams to do their "casual" titles whereas Nintendo assigns one of their best. The difference in sales is noticeable.
2. the Wii is ignored (as, by the old metrics, it seems lacking in comparison to the competition), and why many of it's best games are seen as bad.
Dropping this single concept from your view of gaming causes everything to make much more sense. Suddenly things aren't worse, just different (and maybe not aimed for you). Going back to the values of the old times isn't necessarily just going backwards, but perhaps fulfilling actual jobs that customers want to be done and offering what is important to them. Back in the arcade times games were games, and nothing else. It is what the customers want: Why would they buy a game otherwise?
Addendum: Playing is believeing
How does Nintendo manage to do that? You might notice that Nintendo doesn't really talk about demographics other than "plays", "used to play", "might play". Instead, they talk about smiles. All that talk about smiles isn't just corporate PR, Nintendo games become hits because they are tested with real people to see how they react to the game, instead of following some predetermined recipe for appealing to a demographic, Nintendo designates a job that needs to be done, makes a game to do that job - "make exercise fun", for example - and then makes people play the game to see if they have a hit on their hands.
It's the way Donkey Kong and Pong were tested, it's the way Wii Sports was tested. All three passed with flying colours. Interestingly, the old arcade games and early NES games would be very successful according to this metric. They, like many Wii games, have the qualities of simplicity, instant fun, and, eventually, challenge. This is why they succeed in the Arcade Test. It is this observation of what people do that is the heart of Nintendo's success.
The Future
Unlike people often claim, Nintendo hasn't exactly abandoned the Core gamer. As a company, Nintendo is still very much part of the Core market. It just doesn't see a long future for it, and so is performing a managed Core decline while moving into it's new Expanded Market that will eventually become the new Core. Core customers are customers where anyone else and will be serviced until it ceases to be profitable while at the same time increasing the sophistication of some of it's "New Gen"-based offerings enough to transition the Core over. ie. from Wii Sports Resort into Zelda Wii in terms of swordfighting games, and so on.
Who am I (or my gaming background, feel free to skip)
You could say I am an arcade gamer with a sweet tooth for atmospheric exploration. I started gaming on the NES and the Genesis (SMB and old Sonic games), played House of the Dead, DOA1, Time Crisis and Metal Slug in the arcades when they still existed, loved Crash Team Racing on the PS1. SSBM and Mario Kart: Double Dash are some of my most played games to date. Wind Waker's combat was extatic.
I got hooked into the exploration stuff with Metroid Prime and Golden Sun.
By the end of last generation, I was becoming disinterested in gaming. There just was less and less games that appealed to me, and I saw little in the early titles on the PS3 and Xbox 360 that appealed to me. Then DS and Wii happened, and I was playing games again.
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