Everything you think about Nintendo is fundamentally wrong

Preface translator. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced a few days ago that the current fiscal year ending in March will again be unprofitable for the company. And the web immediately appeared a lot of articles in the style of "Nintendo, the end!" Or "Never write off Nintendo from the accounts." To relate to what stands up with others with a certain amount of skepticism, since most of the authors of these articles were not even born yet when Nintendo entered video games. Despite this title, the Wired article seemed interesting to me for two reasons: 1) it quite convincingly substantiates the theses stated in it; 2) it contains interesting thoughts about the video game industry as a whole (and not just about Nintendo). Unfortunately, this is a “wall of text”, almost without boobs and completely without seals, but I still wish you a pleasant reading.

The whole Internet knows how to solve the financial problems of Nintendo - the company must immediately begin to release their games on the phones. But the Internet is wrong.

Nintendo has announced negative fiscal year results. For the third year in a row. Numerous analysts and experts decided that the company should shove their pride deeper and release Super Mario on smartphones. I have already spoken out against such a step , but to no avail. Opinion "Nintendu need to phones" has become so natural and generally accepted that it has moved from the columns about games and reports for investors in the usual news reports.

The title of the Friday article in the New York Times: “Ignoring the mobile market drives Nintendo to a minus.” Reuters is not far behind : "Nintendo is avoiding drastic measures that could boost sales." All analysts are repelled by the axiom that Nintendo should release their games under iOS.

But this generally accepted opinion is wrong. Nintendo is not at all faced with the choice of releasing games on a foreign hardware or quietly bending. Most likely, such a step would even be erroneous.
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Convinced that a complete abandonment of their hardware would be too risky for Nintendo, many analysts and commentators took a more moderate and sound position from their point of view: Nintendo should be released on other platforms only some games. This logical error is called argumentum ad temperantiam: if two judgments contradict each other, then the correct answer is somewhere between them. But to offer Nintendo "a little bit to enter the market of mobile applications" is no better than to offer a couple who are thinking about the continuation of the kind, "get pregnant a little."

Before releasing games in the App Store, a company must be prepared for competition in an ecosystem where game prices tend to zero and freemium is the standard way to make money. A company must want to learn how to make games competitive in such conditions. And this is not easy at all. This is the main problem of the generally accepted opinion: it is based on the assumption that a strong brand, getting into appstore, begins to print bags of money. We release classic games - we get a lot of money.

If I had a mobile game, the very idea of ​​“Nintenda need to release Mario on iOS and row a loot with a shovel” would be an insult to me. First, this strategy no longer works. Secondly, to make a cool mobile game - not fucking-muhry. The clumsy ports of the old games were only successful the first time: try to find at least one old game in the appstore tops - it will take a long time to roll the lists down. Everything I found there is a different version of Grand Theft Auto - far from cheap ports in a hurry: high-resolution graphics and touchscreen controls.



Speaking of management. Here, too, everything is not so simple. Super Mario Bros. 3 - matchless game. But will it be so with touchscreen control? No, it will not. You object: “But you can connect a normal gamepad via Bluetooth”. Now think about how this would change the situation: Nintendo would release mobile games for a handful of people who got an additional controller for their phone. The main reason for switching to mobile phones - millions of potential players - immediately disappears.

"Nintendo just needs to dump their old games in iOS - and PROFIT !!". Typical underwear dwarf business plan . To make a successful mobile game, you need time, work, talent and hard work. This would not be PROFIT !!, but the outflow of Nintendo resources from their own platforms.

Further. Of course, the failures of Nintendo can be blamed on phones and tablets, but the main problem of the company is not iron. Tablets are not at all ideal gaming devices, in all things unconditionally superior to 3DS and Wii U. “Nintend is necessary for phones” is a very primitive statement. Video games, essentially human-machine interfaces, are rapidly evolving in many directions. Why, instead of a host of ideas that could change the way we play games, should Nintendo choose today's trends and dutifully stand on these rails?

Nintendo does not need to go after its users, but to get them back. Or find new ones. Nintendo's problem is not the absence of their games on the iPhone. The problem with Nintendo is this: for the past few years, the company has been trying to use its $ 250 platforms and $ 40–60 games to compete with other $ 250 platforms and free games. This Nintendo fight does not win. The consumer looks at 3DS and Kindle and chooses for Kindle games not because of hardware, but because this hardware is a magical gateway to the world of free entertainment. For Nintendo to work successfully, you need to develop a strategy that allows the company to remain competitive in such conditions.

I do not know what could be such a strategy. The possibilities are endless. But if Nintendo decides that everything that it has so far resisted (cheap games, an open platform for which anyone can create games, fritupley, parity of their studios and "guys from the garage" ), it needs a company, most likely , will not go to someone else's appstore, and create your own .

The sales of games may not be very impressive, but there are still 40 million Nintendo 3DS owners in the world. Why not turn the current eShop from a fenced garden, available only for Nintendo and a few selected ones, into an open area for everyone? Instead of releasing a couple of games a week for the Virtual Console, why not do your best and release as many games from all the old consoles as possible in the eShop? And it would be possible to sell them at different prices: premium games for $ 8 (the same Super Mario World), and incomprehensible stuff - for the dollar.


From the translator: footage from the game Senran Kagura Burst, a very Japanese bitemap with busty ninja girls, who will finally be released with us (already in February) in 3D glorius!

Hell, why not throw thousands of games on the eShop shelves for the original Nintendo DS ?! Yes, I would have to again agree on licenses for games from third-party studios, but this is really PROFIT, because backward compatibility with games for DS is already built in 3DS. Nintendo itself has a huge library of DS games. And before entering the Apple and Google markets, companies need to start selling these games to their users.

Moreover, if you like Nintendo games, you need to want the company to have its own platform. I wonder if the underwear gnomes understand exactly what the feature of Nintendo games is? Big N can afford to create unique games precisely because it always controls your feelings from games - from hardware to software. It does not depend on the success or failure of other companies and continues to make its own games - other developers do not have such an opportunity. You can hardly imagine that Nintendo will just start releasing games on other platforms, and we will receive the same pleasure from them.

But if Nintendo wants to keep its platform, you need to solve the price issue. At first, they tried to make developers believe in their vision of the future, stating that Apple’s business approach in the long run poses a threat to the video game industry. It did not work. Then Nintendo made the long-awaited, but not too progressive improvements in its digital store. The year 2013 in terms of the quality of the games was incredibly successful for Nintendo 3DS. The company managed to release such hits as Animal Crossing, Pokémon and Legend of Zelda. Even if no one wanted to pay $ 40 for a new game, Nintendo would have made such high-quality games that users would have to part with their bloodlines.

Nintendo is perfectly able to overcome the force of gravity, delaying the inevitable. The main quote from that article in the New York Times belongs to the former head of EA Partners Greg Richardson. He believes that "before Nintendo breaks into pieces, it must completely fail its library of games." It sounds trite, but it is true: if the old ways to conduct business are still productive, they are difficult to refuse. Nintendo is the king of Sisyphus, rolling a heavy stone onto a mountain. Exceptionally efficiently rolling in. She can roll her stone in spite of everything higher and higher , almost to the top of the mountain.

Nintendo’s reputation is too conservative, which is true in some sense, but not always. A typical example is Nintendo 64. While the entire video game industry was switching to cheaper and simpler CDs, Nintendo stayed on expensive cartridges that she knew and loved. It was a big mistake - almost all publishers went to the Sony PlayStation. But even in such a situation, every year the life of the N64 was profitable for Nintendo, which produced unsurpassed games in its category. The same thing is happening now with Nintendo 3DS (even the game series remained the same), except for unprofitableness.


On the other hand, Nintendo 64 forever changed three-dimensional games, presenting analog stick, vibro-impact and other innovations, not to mention the fact that Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time became almost the benchmarks of three-dimensionality in games. Nintendo may be incredibly stubborn in some aspects, but it is also not afraid to implement crazy ideas. Throughout its history in the console business, Sony and Microsoft have not done anything even half as crazy as the Wii.

In the end, Nintendo had to release games on disks. In the same way, she will ever realize that she can keep a more open and flexible digital store with games without breaking the entire video game industry. If such a move does not help the Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo will release the next generation of consoles and see what happens.

And if that doesn't work, well, then Nintendo may stop making consoles. Nothing is eternal. But it seems that this is still very far away. Nintendo will have to deviate from some of its principles, but not completely abandon them all.