About Nintendo..... The Japanese Rot

Here’s a story on it. What does this mean?

Kiminishi says the delay is to make sure NX has more games. But why not show anything NX at E3? Wii’s controller was revealed at TGS 2005 while the console was revealed at E3 2006.

There’s a simple explanation to this. This is why you are here anyway.

The success of the Wii and the DS really made Nintendo think their shit didn’t stink. But stink it did. The 3DS and Wii U launches were terrible. So now we are in a situation opposite of last generation; Nintendo is overly cautious.

This is beyond the games.

Nintendo is scared about talking about the NX. Kiminishi even says the concept is not like a normal console. Since the Wii U was not explained well at all, Nintendo will not talk about the NX yet. Too much could go wrong in the PR side here.

I still guarantee the HARDWARE of the console will be shown. During Wii U’s reveal, the console was not showcased so everyone thought the Wii U was just a controller. Iwata had to be photographed with the console and had the photo released on twitter in order to say, “Yes, there is a new console here.”

What is so strange is that Nintendo did a GOOD job explaining the Wii. Nintendo did a good job even with the DS. Do you know why I think that is? This guy:

People joke how Fils-Aime “My body is ready” is nothing but a suit, has no real control, but Reggie was paramount in communicating the value of the DS and Wii. Iwata only talked broken English and didn’t make much sense. Miyamoto could only act like a clown. It was Reggie who effectively communicated it.

“FireEmblem_Man, it is uncouth to talk about kicking ass and playing the strong-man.” It got your attention back then, didn’t it? A similar approach has apparently worked for the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

I am sick to death of the chicken shit coming from Nintendo. Who the **** watches these Nintendo directs? What connection does NOA have with actual society?

Nintendo cannot **** up the NX launch. Fucking up the NX launch will probably eradicate Nintendo from the dedicated hardware market entirely. The DS and Wii was Nintendo being an Asian tiger pouncing from the shadows. The NX, so far, is Nintendo being a pussycat. This is what we should call Nintendo now. Pussycats. (The employees do like photos of kittens after all.)

Nintendo seems so scared right now. They are scared of their own shadow. They weren’t scared at all in 2005.

I strongly suspect that Nintendo doubts the NX, itself, will appeal which might be why they are doubling down on software. Nintendo has launched other consoles with little games. My favorite was the SNES launch. But oh, what games! Super Mario World! Yamauchi had such faith in Nintendo’s games. Today, no. Remember Iwata’s absurd prediction that Super Mario World 3D would rocket the Wii U to the stratosphere? Yeah. There has been no true killer apps on the Wii U. It’s Nintendo’s games that doomed the Wii U.

You live by the games, you die by the games. If your console ain’t selling, it has to be the games. If Nintendo is going for a mass library approach, which I suspect, it is going to shove as much as it can out there.

It’s pretty pointless to speculate what is going on internally with Nintendo. I just find Nintendo’s performance to be very disappointing. It’s like the company is facing Japanese-rot that the rest of the country is having.

This seems like it would have been pretty good as a blog post too. An unusually interesting read considering it's in System Wars.

I do agree that Nintendo should have less of the Japanese leaders and more Reggie. I can't watch these Nintendo directs with heavy doses of broken english and Miyamoto. I can relate to Reggie and enjoy his passion for all the things Nintendo does though.

The bottom line is, they would get out in front of the rumor mill going negative on NX if they had something to back it up with. The cloak and dagger shit isn't working. It's just making people give up on it before it's even shown off.

You know what murdered the Xbox One? Sure, the DRM fallout was a death blow, but months before the thing was ever shown people were already calling it an under powered cable box. What MS did was confirm everyone's fears and even dump a little extra fail sauce on top of that. As long as Nintendo tries to keep the NX behind the curtain, it shows they're not really proud of it in the eyes of people who have already been soured by gimmickry.

What they need to do is the opposite of what they are doing. Be open. Beat Sony to the PS4K punch. Get people ready for awesome and exciting a new Nintendo will be. They're stealing their own shine by having a machine that is clearly well past the concept phase but only receiving bad press because of the inability of the rumor mill to generate actual hype for the thing. At this point the NX "thing", be that which it may, will be received terribly simply because people will go negative on whatever it happens to be by the time they are arsed to show it off.

Forget Sony for a second. They're actually pulling a page from what MS got wrong when it came to marketing and messaging the XBone. The longer they let the NeoGAF crowd and the System Wars crowd spin NX into an impending nightmare, the harder their job is going to be convincing people it is not. This is a unique problem to making consoles based on anything other than traditional generational power leaps. You're designing a lynch pin into the entire business model and you shouldn't be conservative about an all-or-nothing product. Bang the gongs. It worked very well for the Wii.

Been saying this more or less for years. Listen I like Japanese games a lot (good ones at least), I love me some Nintendo when they make some baller ass games, I think Miyamoto is the GOAT, however, for a fucking presentation, to people who speak English? They are bloody terrible. Not because omg "how dare those people not speak english'...but because it's a fucking presentation. When you have the resources to put your best foot forward, put your fucking best foot forward.

Put Reggie or someone articulate in English up on stage, to convey your message. Having someone where the language is clearly their second language, does hurt basic presentation because of the person presenting it is either speaking a bit too slowly or just broken grammar and such. There is a reason Sony has had cats like Phil Harrison, jack Tretton, and Adam Boyes doing these things. Beyond just their job title, they are actually pretty good presenters.

And this isn't just a Nintendo thing, it's a Japanese publisher thing. I understand the smaller devs, I'm reasonable about that shit. But Capcom and Square? **** that, they have American divisions, that clearly have dudes who are more fluent in the language, better suited for presenting their shit. In the same context I wouldn't put a dude not fluent in Japanese on stage of Tokyo Game Show, since that would be dumb as ****.

Nintendo simply failed to provide developers with a competent machine and online system in the Wii U. They were used to CPUs that gave them the kind of performance they needed for modern games (aka GFLOPS!). The more powerful graphics in the Wii compared to the 360 and PS3 wasn't enough to mean much when the games had to be paired back so much just to run on primitive proto-SIMD FPU units. Developers were not going to waste their time delivering inferior games on a machine they knew would be a waste of time.

Ninty had the chance to build a generational gap-bridging system that for a full year would've been the system for multiplatforms, and when the PS4 and Xbone came out, would've been in their ballpark of performance to still be a decently modern gaming machine. But they failed to understand this, and once again placed their bets on a gimmick. Instead of designing everything to be excellent. The CPU should've just been a modern PowerPC variant that would've likely been able to run Wii code without issue via legacy instruction set support, and Wii graphics could've been emulated just fine with a decent CPU (just look at the Flipper emulator). Going with archaic Radeon 4000 series-derived graphics was incredibly silly. Minimally, they should've gone with AMD/ATI Evergreen graphics for native tessellation capabilities that R700 did not, and employed a decently large GPU with at least 1000 GFLOPS (like AMD Juniper or Cape Verde) to put it in some kind of ballpark of where the Xbone and PS4 would be. For a whole year, the Wii U would've been enjoying multiplatform games at 1080p/60 FPS while the PS3 and 360 were struggling with 720p/30 FPS.

@nusna_moebius: What you're talking about has nothing to do with my post.... This is mere about handling PR

That is a really great point. Hell, even someone at the mid to upper management level in the business would be a better choice. These people make pitches to board rooms all the time. Spend some dough for college-level public speaking classes and you're instantly in the door. Doing otherwise has come across as trying to keep a purposeful cultural divide.

Please, like anything is going to change GAF and SW'ers minds anyway. Even if Nintendo revealed the info about NX and it was what was wanted, they'd still spin it.

It makes absolutely no sense when they wouldn't humor the idea of putting an english dude with broken Japanese on stage, even fucking Microsoft had a dude that was fluent in Japanese when they had their stuff in Japan before. Given how important the western audience is to triple A console games, Japanese games included since the console market their is...well saying it's shit, as actually a disservice to shit; is fucking unreasonable at this point.

Platinum and From Software cats not having an English dude? Fine, makes sense, they aren't exactly huge corporations. The relatively big pubs that have had American divisions for decades? Literally no excuse, anyone of your American branch dudes would be better suited than putting someone on stage where it's not a fluid presentation because there English isn't going to be as well.

Nintendo already stated why they wont show the NX at e3, in fear competition will copy them. And spoiler alert, Reggie introduced the Wii U also. Lack of 1st party Nintendo games and an unappealing Gamepad is what caused Wii U to struggle. And now that Nintendo is focusing on a strong lineup for NX, we might get what wanted.

@iandizion713: That's a lame excuse, even for you!

@FireEmblem_Man: Its true aint it, what game did Wii U have at launch? Not one damn AAA Nintendo game for a full year. Its a disgrace. I even refused to buy it at launch, i couldnt believe my eyes.

@iandizion713: For the first time, I agree with you.... But them fearing that Sony would copy Nintendo's NX design and philosophy at e3 is stupid.

@FireEmblem_Man: Thats what they stated though. They didnt say Sony, but they did say the competition.

Yeah, great points, just another area where Nintendo are ass backwards.

I recall that WiiU reveal. After watching it, I had to Google to find out if it was ACTUALLY a new system or an upgraded Wii and/or controller.

When a hardcore gamer with dozens of systems and a thousand+ games, who JUST watched your reveal doesn't .know what it is, you could say you done goofed.

It's fair enough that they're being uber careful with the NX reveal but stony silence accomplishes nothing. The gaming world currently doesn't care what they're doing, sadly but understandably, so the ball is really in their court regarding hype and info. The NX won't actually be at any E3 if it launches in March 2017? That seems... odd.

@locopatho: How did you not know it was a new console? In the video it clearly states its a new console. Some of the first words that come out of Reggies mouth was, ..."about a new Nintendo system we knew the prevailing though would be this..."

People need to stop this..."i never knew it was a system". Lets just be real, people didnt want the Wii U cause it wasnt appealing and didnt have any appealing games. Its this simple. No marketing would have saved the Wii U from struggling.

@iandizion713: No it didn't the whole video focused too much on the gamepad, it didn't even show the console until they had to do a twitter pic with Iwata holding a console. It was a PR nightmare for them.

@FireEmblem_Man: In the video i posted you can see the Wii U console all over the video. Its white.

Since they're releasing March 2017, it really doesn't make sense to show anything too far in advance, maybe TGS at earliest. This isn't 16 years ago.

@iandizion713: The WiiU console looks physically very like a Wii. I honestly thought it was a Wii (upgraded to HD + hardrive perhaps). The entire video uses the Wii logo, and focuses on the tablet controller.

I genuinely thought the "Wii" branding meant the existing system, and the "U" refered to the tablet controller being added on, at least to begin with. By the end of the video I was confused and went Googling as I said.

You can disbeleive all you like, but I've no reason to lie about this. WiiU sucks either way, but that reveal sure didn't help.

@iandizion713: If you looked at 1:12, the first image of the Wii U was the gamepad first. That was the first mistake Nintendo did.

Also, the Wii U console looked too much like the Wii, and showing off NSMB. U looked roo much like a Wii title. All poor showing

@FireEmblem_Man: @locopatho: Nah, i see what yall are saying now. The e3 launch focused way too much on the controller. And yeah, they barely talk about the Wii U console itself. Reggie mentions it, then Iwata mentions it a little.

I disagree all over your back and chest.

Reggie is as much the reason for the DS & Wii's success as Orlando Bloom was for the success of Pirates of the Caribbean. He's got all the charisma and warmth of an ATM machine. I don't think he's ever said anything that didn't first go through 5 teams of marketing, PR, and legal firms.

The DS & Wii's success came from being able to find a gaming audience that had been ignored by the gaming industry for decades, whereas now that audience is being serviced by mobile phone, tablets, Facebook and smart TVs. It's nice to think that the Wii U failed because it didn't communicate it was a whole new console (and to a degree it is indeed a factor) but even if the broad target audience knew it was a new device, they still would look at it like an inferior version of their Galaxy Tab.

The core gaming audience had slowly been leaving Nintendo since the PS1, and the Wii wasn't them coming back, it was them being momentarily replaced by the broad audience. The "core gamer hemorrhage" was never fixed. And Reggie never helped in that regard.

@elheber: So what you're saying is PR isn't important? You got to be kidding me

@FireEmblem_Man: PR is important, but Reggie isn't fantastic at it. He's serviceable. Reggie's job doing PR can be handled by an actor doing a character like Kevin Butler. Nintendo Direct does more to convey messages to a Western audience than Reggie ever could do by himself.

He's the American face to a Japanese company and they could've picked a better face.

@locopatho: I agree with you. The UK Tabloids even passed it off as a peripheral than a new console.

Nintendo screwed up from the get go and this is coming from someone who likes the WiiU. Wasn't big enough jump, average online, WiiU game pad should been peripheral than core item, better hardware, better first party line up in the opening months, More games like Splatoon less Mario, more 3rd party games like Bayonetta, hyrule warriors.

I couldn't care less for 3rd party mostly. If Nintendo had more Bayonetta, hyrule warriors, Pokken then my Ps4 would been obsolete

I believe you missed the part when he said "I'm about kicking ass, and taking name...."

@FireEmblem_Man: Still not knowing when Nintendo plans to unveil the NX is a huge red flag. They will do it this year, they said, but it's not coming before E3, so how long after? Nintendo cannot sit on its laurels to get the hype train moving on this thing. If they don't give consumers a reason to hold off and save, Sony, MS, and others will customers stuff to buy and will soak up the available capital.

So that begs the question: how long until after E3 are they going to wait? August? September? And worse yet, there is going to be an NX game at E3 before Nintendo even unveils the platform itself! Nintendo is being way too timid about what they're going to do and makes me believe that they don't really know how to position what they're working on.

All skeptics want from Nintendo is for them to come out and punch somebody in the face. This perceived waffling they're doing is only giving the public more of reason to worry. And I may be wrong about this but assuming Nintendo reveals in August and releases in March, I don't think any platform has benefited from a consolidated reveal-to-release window (X1 did hit the market in roughly 6 months from its May reveal, though it has been comparatively lackluster - it's unlikely a company with virtually zero momentum can do the marked opposite).

Welcome to the dark side Mesome, I'm glad you're finally seeing that Nintendo isn't as invincible as you think!

@Basinboy: That's why I've stated in the OP, Nintendo is scared. They're not scared of competition, but scared that their NX reveal will be like the Wii U as Mesome posted the old e3 unveil of the Wii U. Kimishima did state that the NX is a new concept and making the wrong PR moves could either make or break the company.

@FireEmblem_Man: Ive been a critic of the Gamepad since @bunchanumbers helped me see the light over a year ago. We believe the Gamepad is a major reason Wii U hasnt sold more then it has.

Well, that's part of the problem, the other half is the lack of games in which Nintendo thought that people cared about Software and Hardware integration. They thought all the software that was built into the Wii U would take off the console and boy they were dead wrong.

@FireEmblem_Man: I think they trusted third party too much, should have released AAA first party games at launch. Doing that along with making the Gamepad optional would have made the Wii U a much bigger success.

With that success, Wii U would have gotten more third party support. Heck, could have gotten GTA 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider, CoD Black Ops III, Destiny, Star Wars Battlefront, Madden and a whole bunch more.

Here's the thing, they never trusted 3rd parties, why else did they had a fallout with the EA deal they had? Problem is they had thought that people only want Japanese games more than Western games. They thought that their own developers can make better games than any developers. Just look at Sakamoto, he thought his game was good and that the reason why Other M failed because Samus was Female....

Link

“It is quite obvious why Other M did not succeed when compared to other Nintendo games; it features a female main character,” says Sakamoto, “Mario, Link, Kirby. Those are all male Nintendo characters that never fail to generate good sales.”

“It’s not just about the sales either,” adds Sakamoto, “The game as a whole was received fairly poorly compared to other hit Nintendo titles. I personally wrote the story for the game so I know it can’t be that. I mean, I created a strong, female character that people just could not accept. I apologize if gamers feel like they were emasculated playing the game, but that shouldn’t affect your judgment of everything else.”

He thought he wrote the story perfect, when it was completely bad! Problem is, his credibility is thrown out the window when everyone knew that Samus is Female even on Metroid Prime. Plus Kirby doesn't sell.

@FireEmblem_Man: Id have to find the interview, but im pretty sure he is troIIing. I laughed at a few of his comments, they were pretty funny.

I think what you posted might be fake, can you find the source? I think someone troIIed you.

Master Malstrom has a better source

Link

@FireEmblem_Man: I see that, but that doesnt have the fake stuff you posted above. I dont think Sakamoto would ever say that stuff, im sure there is no source for it. I tried to google the source also, but come up dry.

Either or, Sakamoto thought he was flawless with Other M and though the audience didn't understood his "genius"

Anyone else wants to contribute?

I think they might reveal the NX at TGS. Its closer to the launch date.

Nintendo needs to stop being so super secretive about the NX and just unveil the damn thing already. Preferably at E3 but god knows why they are skipping it entirely other than Zelda and probably 3DS stuff. Its getting all this bad press already and it hasn't even been shown off, which makes it harder to impress the masses.

You cant generate hype and want for your console without showing it off. I really hope with their new pres, Nintendo will pull its head out, stop pretending its still the 1990's and get with the times. Just give us a no-frills no-gimmick console.

Hype sells systems. PS4 shows us that with a massive hype machine, you can sell just about anything even without games. I didn't buy a Wii U at launch because honestly I never heard of it. Never saw a commercial. Never saw a advertisement. And when I finally saw one, I thought Wii U was a dedicated handheld because all I saw was the gamepad. The hype campaign with PS4 was massive. It was like when I lived in Iowa and I was constantly bombarded with political advertisements from politicians I never heard of before. I pretty much had no choice but to learn who they were and what PS4 was.

Wii U might be the biggest advertising and branding flop in gaming history. The games are excellent. The hardware is actually pretty decent for what it does. But the advertising campaign was near nonexistent and the branding was just plain awful. Perception is reality and advertising tells you what your perception is. Nintendo didn't learn this lesson with Wii U. I hope they learned it before NX launches. I actually hope that they use all $500m + they got from selling the Mariners and set it aside towards advertising NX for all of 2017 and into 2018.

Lol, still living in that nutter fantasy land? In 2016, Metacritic shows PS4 has 65 games rated 70 (Good) or above. The WiiU has 3.

Gamers aren't stupid. They go where the games are. ALWAYS.

Its launch lineup was pretty flat. Not to mention the launch window games were not all that great either. That was what I was referring to when I said the hype machine. PS4 now has games. It just had squat at launch and for the first couple years. Nintendo needs to do a advertising blitz like they never have before when NX launches. They need to blast it in our faces so that its in our minds every minute of every day. The war of perception will be their biggest battle ever. Not only do they gotta show that they are up to date with NX, they also gotta battle the perception that they are more than a kiddy game company. Its a battle they've been fighting for years.

The thing is, launch titles actually don't matter, even though everyone here is obsessed with them. Like you say, it's the hype that sells consoles at the beginning of its life, regardless of whether or not it has a good lineup, but that hype, while communicated through advertising, will only actually exist if there's the promise of games in the future. Sony didn't really need to prove anything, they just needed a few PS4 posters at bus stops because everyone knows the PlayStation brand; that's the thing people play videogames on.

Nintendo could've done a better job at marketing the Wii U, but it wouldn't have helped a lot. There was no way for them to convey the promise that there would be games because it was never credible, and if their aim was to sell the Wii U to the same people that bought the Wii, then they would've had a hard time doing that anyways, because the Wii was nothing more than a fad. Nobody who bought the Wii for the bowling and the archery minigames was gonna go out to buy another console.

Exactly why I hate Directs. They should allow their international branches to do their presentations and handle marketing. Say what you will about Angry Joe, but the guy understands how to make entertaining videos. He conveys emotion well, he's spontaneous and unpredictable. I wouldn't have any problem with Directs if they were actually fun to watch. But this shit....

.....is insufferable. It's culturally clueless. I don't care to see some businessman in a suit sitting there stiff as a statue struggling through broken English giving me a damn history lesson. This isn't exciting, it's boring and hype deflating. Nintendo needs to recognize that different cultures have different demands. And to think they're more than likely going to use this format to unveil the NX. Christ man....

Back up what you're stating, because the wii fad is as the same as the ps4 fad right now. Wii sold not only by hype, but Wii Sports was a killer app for its launch despite being included to every console. When the NES came out, what was the hype for it? Was it just Marketing? In North America, there weren't any good console games to play in the mid 80's due to the market crash. Super Mario Bros. was the must own title. As for the PS4, it was marketed as the next CoD and Sports console to own. Not to mention that Nintendo and MS floundered with their poor marketing showing of the XB1 and Wii U. Also, there are more software sales on the wii than people just buying it for Wii Sports.

it could be very clever or really badly thought out in the end...we shall see.

you need hype to get a console off the ground and build up momentum and you need games to keep the momentum going.

on the surface it does indeed sound crazy that nintendo wont be showing the NX at E3. its the place to do it.

but there are a couple of thigns to note:

1) we know nothing about the system and we are still taking about it. NX threads are one of the most popular on gaming forums.

2) the media are going to do everything they possibly can to drag any scraps they can out of nintendo about the NX at E3...which means lots of, mostly, pointless NX related articles.

so nintendo can still get people taking about the NX without showing the NX or giving anything away.

it is frustrating as f*BEEP* though and the big danger is that hype could build beyond all expectations and that, no matter what the NX is, it just end up dissapointing. its better to have people thinking "oh...they have no confidence in it...its going to be pants" and having them surprised at the reveal.

@MirkoS77: The year of Luigi was absolutely ridiculous and a person that wants to invest would find it very cringe worthy. Who were the audience for those directs? They made them seem Japanese only people would enjoy them, not everyone outside of Japan.

Those directs are a joke. I don't want to see business men dress up in cat suits and mario hats.

They don't understand North America at all. Keep that garbage in Japan. Hire someone normal to speak for NA. Not Reggie either. He is a liar.