Nintendo Profits Nosedive

[Kingsnake661]

It's looking like everyone who wants a Wii/DS has one at this point, so this isn't too surprising.

I'm interested to see how much the 3DS changes thing. Can lightning strike thrice?

I just can't see it... the 3d is, IMO, kind of gimmicy, and besides that, is the system really that much an upgrade form a regular DS? (i don't play handhealds that much in all honesty) It sounds to be an expensive handheld system, and it it's only marganaly improved over the DS... with 3D as it only real gimic, in this ecomnamy, i'm doubtful.

*shrug* Time will tell. I know *i'm* not intrested in them, but my sister is, so there's at least one customer.. heh.

 

[Xanthious]

Now i've played COD/MOH/TES/Madden etc but i'm smart enough to know that those games are pretty much the same whether they are on the PS1 or a top of the line gaming pc. The average Dudebro fan seems not to realise that they keep getting fed the same handful of titles over and over. What that says about them I will leave for others to decide.

Hey! I see what you did there! You said what I said but changed the games. You clever little monkey you!

I played COD back when it was developed by Rare and called Goldeneye. I even had a dual analogue set up. I feel no need to play it again just with shinier graphics, shittier story and way less fun multiplayer.

You really should of played it when it was called Doom . . . or even Duke Nuke em 3D!

The only thing you can say that currently the 360/PS3/Gaming PC trio do better is IQ.

No that's not the only thing I can say they do better. They also have better online multiplayer, better line up of third party titles, high definition support, DLC content, XBL/PSN Arcade Content, DVD/Blu Ray support and you could argue that currently they are even doing motion control better

How good a game looks is largely defined by artstyle which is purely subjective. Kirby's epic Yarn is gorgeous to look at as is DKC:R. There is nothing out on the other consoles that match these.

No, there's nothing on the 360 or PS3 admittedly but give Nintendo a few years and there will be another 3 or 4 things on their consoles that will likely match them

HD adoption rate at the time the console hardware was finalised was less than 10% and with spiralling costs to produce assets for the increase in that higher resolution it would have entailed Nintendo opted not to go down that route.
As for DVD's that was always a :S moment for me.

Kinda like how they opted not to use CD technology during the N64/PSX period, or they opted not to use DVD technology during the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube period? It might just be me but that seems like a pattern. Good thing for them there is a massive pool of casual gamers that are amused by flailing around like a monkey being attacked by bees or they would of been sucking that hind teet for a third round of consoles.

I already posted a purely financial analysis earlier on. I suggest you read it.

Bah! I refuse to allow anything like boring old facts ruin this fun. Nor will I be confused with your half truths and gorilla dust!

 

[Rect Pola]

A scaling back in price pressure?

 

[MB202]

Oh geez... I've been hearing people say they won't buy the 3DS, or at least not right away, so things look bad for Nintendo...

I have also heard these unsettling phrases, as much as it would be interseting to see nintendo crash and burn... i also don't want it to die... I like Mario.

I'm tempted to trade in my dslight for the 3DS... as well as most of my ds and ps2 games.

But I may also wait for it to come down in price..

and when I get a job...

Glad to hear you like Mario, but man, I must be the only person, besides MovieBob, who genuinely likes Nintendo.

 

[Delusibeta]

The problem isn't saturation, although I am sure many would like to believe that it is. I mean, the PS2 sold 147 million in about a decade....I think that goes to show that Wii still has a while to go before it reaches oversaturation.

Largely incorrect: the Wii has shifted more units to date than the PS2 shifted in it's first four and a bit years. The PS2 also suffered from similar slowdown in sales.

 

[FamoFunk]

This doesn't mark the end for Nintendo by any means, it's just a mere dip in their sales.

I agree though, every other person you meet, gamer or not has a Wii, they need to bring out something new (home console way, not hand held) and add a lot of improvments (with prehaps graphics, games, sensors)

I'll be helping them by getting the 3DS, don't like the price though so will be trading in my Xbox (I'm a PS3 user I don't touch my xbox) and my DSlite for it. I can't wait, they got some good deals with people for it (like Sky)

 

[Electrogecko]

snip

I'm sorry, but I have to ask, how old are you? Your doing nothing but trying as hard as you can to infuriate me and TheGuy by responding to us with immaturity and condescension. You literally sound like a 7th grader to me.

If you honestly think that motion controls and touch screens are gimmicks that have no possible benefit for the medium, than you are very shallow and narrow-minded and I truly feel sorry for you. You basically keep saying that every current game has a historical twin, but there are a limited number of game concepts in the world, and one of the ways to re-use them without making it seem stale is to refresh the control scheme. (I could tell you that LBP is SMB, Mario 64, is Mario Galaxy, and Halo ODST is Doom, but that would make me appear incredibly ignorant)

You think that your 360/ps3 controller is the best it could possibly be and there's no room for improvement whatsoever? You understand that at one point the analog stick, shoulder buttons, and controller rumble were all new and considered gimmicks right? I don't know why you started talking about a mouse and keyboard (which were designed to navigate operating systems and so are disqualified as adequate gaming controllers- the fact that you think the setup is better than the 360/ps3 controller only proves how much improvement needs to be done) when I compared aiming with the Wii remote to an analog stick, but most people, (especially people who've never done dualstick) find aiming with a Wii remote to be much more intuitive and accurate.

And finally, to me you appear to think that overall aesthetic quality of a game is significantly determined by the amount of polygons displayed. If you truly think that CoDBLOPS is anywhere near as pleasant to look at as Galaxy, DKCR, or Epic Yarn, then that only reaffirms my accusation of insecurity.

Now, unless you want to prove everything I've said about you in my posts correct, you'll have to respond to this (if at all) without any lame wise cracks, cursing, or saying the word "gimmick" without comprehension.

 

[ZtH]

snip

I'm sorry, but I have to ask, how old are you? Your doing nothing but trying as hard as you can to infuriate me and TheGuy by responding to us with immaturity and condescension. You literally sound like a 7th grader to me.

If you honestly think that motion controls and touch screens are gimmicks that have no possible benefit for the medium, than you are very shallow and narrow-minded and I truly feel sorry for you. You basically keep saying that every current game has a historical twin, but there are a limited number of game concepts in the world, and one of the ways to re-use them without making it seem stale is to refresh the control scheme. (I could tell you that LBP is SMB, Mario 64, is Mario Galaxy, and Halo ODST is Doom, but that would make me appear incredibly ignorant)

You think that your 360/ps3 controller is the best it could possibly be and there's no room for improvement whatsoever? You understand that at one point the analog stick, shoulder buttons, and controller rumble were all new and considered gimmicks right? I don't know why you started talking about a mouse and keyboard (which were designed to navigate operating systems and so are disqualified as adequate gaming controllers- the fact that you think the setup is better than the 360/ps3 controller only proves how much improvement needs to be done) when I compared aiming with the Wii remote to an analog stick, but most people, (especially people who've never done dualstick) find aiming with a Wii remote to be much more intuitive and accurate.

And finally, to me you appear to think that overall aesthetic quality of a game is significantly determined by the amount of polygons displayed. If you truly think that CoDBLOPS is anywhere near as pleasant to look at as Galaxy, DKCR, or Epic Yarn, then that only reaffirms my accusation of insecurity.

Now, unless you want to prove everything I've said about you in my posts correct, you'll have to respond to this (if at all) without any lame wise cracks, cursing, or saying the word "gimmick" without comprehension.

I definitely agree with you that motion controls and touch screens offer significantly more options to developers and as such can't be overlooked as gimmicks by themselves, but I would argue that their usages in the Wii and DS could be seen as gimmicky.

The touch screen on the DS does little to add to the functionality of the device because the menu systems are generally designed to be compatible with normal d-pad + button setups, and so aren't optimized for the touch screen. Also the touch screen tends to be used less than the other control methods offered, in games that I play, based on the d-pad + button setup being easier. While touch screens are great additions to the consoles capability it's only if they are used that they become more than gimmicks. That being said I've seen some great uses of the touch pad since the early days of the DS, so I personally wouldn't call it gimmicky, but it didn't live up to my original expectations when I purchased the DS and I have not played or bought a game for the DS in more than a year in part due to this.

As for the motion control it was hardly more than a gimmick when it came out. Nintendo's only contribution was implementing the motion control as part of the system rather than as an add on that was used only for particular games. If my memory serves me right motion controllers were around as early as the PS1 in the form of a sword controller. While adding the motion control as a basic function was a solid improvement it was under utilized and initially the control was very poor. It wasn't until the Wii motion plus came out that I even felt the motion control offered even an acceptable level of control. It's excusable to argue that the motion control was a gimmick only in the context that it was used extensively in marketing, but didn't live up to buyers' intitial expectations. In my personal experience I have met far more people expressing buyers remorse over their Wii than any other console, including people who own all three current gen consoles. Since the release of the Wii motion plus it has improved dramatically, but I still do not see it as a necessary or even desirable addition to most of the games that I would like to play.

In response to you're comments about keyboard and mouse setups as being "disqualified as adequate gaming controllers", their initial purpose doesn't disqualify them as being better at something else than a tool designed for it. For example if you drop your phone in water and use a bag of rice to dry it out is that bag of rice inferior to the commercial moisture absorbent materials solely because it is originally intended as food. The mouse and keyboard setup has persisted mostly because it has incredible functionality both in its use as operating system navigator and in its use for gaming. There is no way to map the sheer numbers of commands to a controller or motion control device that you can map to a keyboard and mouse combo.

Also as for the aesthetic quality of games, do you not agree that the same artists that did Galaxy, DKCR, or Epic Yarn could not have made the games even more beautiful if they didn't have to work within almost precisely the same constraints as the gamecube? Had the Wii been brought up to current gen graphical standards those games would have the potential to look even better than their current incarnations. Dismissing the number of polygons as something that doesn't factor into the games visual potential is too much despite the fact that the artists working on the game have much more to do with how well it looks than the machine it's run on.

 

[Xanthious]

I'm sorry, but I have to ask, how old are you?

It's ok, I understand and forgive you. However, now that you got that out of your system do you feel better?

Your doing nothing but trying as hard as you can to infuriate me and TheGuy by responding to us with immaturity and condescension.

Nothing gets by you I see. . . . and you forgot to add tomfoolery.

You literally sound like a 7th grader to me.

How do you know what I sound like? Are you spying on me? If so, did those assless chaps I wore last night make my butt look too big?

If you honestly think that motion controls and touch screens are gimmicks that have no possible benefit for the medium, than you are very shallow and narrow-minded and I truly feel sorry for you.

Sorry enough to send me money? Cause if so that would totally rock! But to your point, I do in fact believe that motion controls are a passing fad the way Nintendo and Sony are doing them and touch screens are better left to phones and tablet PCs.

You basically keep saying that every current game has a historical twin, but there are a limited number of game concepts in the world, and one of the ways to re-use them without making it seem stale is to refresh the control scheme. (I could tell you that LBP is SMB, Mario 64, is Mario Galaxy, and Halo ODST is Doom, but that would make me appear incredibly ignorant)

No you mistake my sarcasm I see. What I meant was Nintendo has been milking the same damned properties (Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Pokemon, Metroid, etc) for the past 20 years or better and rather than make new fresh properties they choose to keep throwing out games we've already played before over and over.

You think that your 360/ps3 controller is the best it could possibly be and there's no room for improvement whatsoever?

You know just because I dislike Nintendo doesn't mean I have any more or less fondness for Sony or M$. That logic is just silly.

You understand that at one point the analog stick, shoulder buttons, and controller rumble were all new and considered gimmicks right?

Ah yes let's look back and reflect on how controller rumble has revolutionized gaming . . .ok all done.

I don't know why you started talking about a mouse and keyboard (which were designed to navigate operating systems and so are disqualified as adequate gaming controllers

Disqualified by who? Are you taking our arguments in front of some anonymous forum judge or something I don't know about or just making these rules up as you go. I bet I can guess!

the fact that you think the setup is better than the 360/ps3 controller only proves how much improvement needs to be done)

Proves how? All it proves is I prefer to play FPS games with a mouse and keyboard.

when I compared aiming with the Wii remote to an analog stick, but most people, (especially people who've never done dualstick) find aiming with a Wii remote to be much more intuitive and accurate.

Again, who is this majority you keep invoking when you say "most". Because I've found that "most" people prefer to play games wearing womens' undergarments on their head using a dead tuna to wildly slap the controller. See I can do that too. If I'm incorrect and you are some strange person who goes around and throws people in a room with a Wii and makes them fill out some sort of survey afterwords I apologize.

And finally, to me you appear to think that overall aesthetic quality of a game is significantly determined by the amount of polygons displayed.

I was hoping to appear to you as a half goat half gorilla type of thing wearing boxing robe and a tiara.

If you truly think that CoDBLOPS is anywhere near as pleasant to look at as Galaxy, DKCR, or Epic Yarn, then that only reaffirms my accusation of insecurity.

Having never played any Call of Duty game but maybe once a long time ago I can't say but you could be right. Doubtful, but anything is possible I suppose. But I do think the Wii looks like absolute tripe on most televisions and no amount of bright colors and cartoonish characters will change that in the least.

Now, unless you want to prove everything I've said about you in my posts correct, you'll have to respond to this (if at all) without any lame wise cracks, cursing, or saying the word "gimmick" without comprehension.

And unless you want seven years of bad luck you need to send this post to 10 random people who will then each send it to 10 more.

<3

 

[Jumplion]

Ow, that's got to hurt.

I'm sure other people have stated this before, but I'd reckon that stagnation is afoot. If VGChartz didn't decide to not make charts anymore (stupid tables, data tables are not fun to look at nor to the provide a good representation of time!), I'd be able to see more clearly how much it has stagnated, if it stagnated at all.

Still, those are some harsh blows from last year. Nintendo is not out of the game by a long shot, but these are still not very nice numbers.

 

[Electrogecko]

snip

Xanthious could learn a thing or nineteen from you about responding intelligently. I don't know about the DS, but the Wii certainly hasn't lived up to it's potential as far as utilizing the control scheme goes. Most of the time the accelerometer substitutes for a button or d-pad press and that's about the extent of the implementation, but I believe that the gyroscope provides much more accurate control and has much more potential. I would say that the best uses of the Wii remote have been in NSMBW, Epic Yarn, and a fantastic WiiWare title called Fluidity. All these games use the gyroscope on top of the standard buttons to add another layer of control that could be manipulated while simultaneously jumping and running around- something that would not be possible or as fun or intuitive with the 360/ps3 controller. There are moments when the controller genuinely enhances the experience, but I agree that these moments are much too few.

And yes, I understand that processing power increases the visual quality of a game, but I would also argue that the amount of time necessary to bring any game past the visual quality that we have now could be better spent adding extra levels or improving control and performance. I think that most of today's gamers dismiss great games simply because they're not HD, and these same gamers convince themselves that a game is good simply because it looks good and has action packed and voiced over cut scenes.

 

[RadiusXd]

snip

Xanthious could learn a thing or nineteen from you about responding intelligently. I don't know about the DS, but the Wii certainly hasn't lived up to it's potential as far as utilizing the control scheme goes. Most of the time the accelerometer substitutes for a button or d-pad press and that's about the extent of the implementation, but I believe that the gyroscope provides much more accurate control and has much more potential. I would say that the best uses of the Wii remote have been in NSMBW, Epic Yarn, and a fantastic WiiWare title called Fluidity. All these games use the gyroscope on top of the standard buttons to add another layer of control that could be manipulated while simultaneously jumping and running around- something that would not be possible or as fun or intuitive with the 360/ps3 controller. There are moments when the controller genuinely enhances the experience, but I agree that these moments are much too few.

And yes, I understand that processing power increases the visual quality of a game, but I would also argue that the amount of time necessary to bring any game past the visual quality that we have now could be better spent adding extra levels or improving control and performance. I think that most of today's gamers dismiss great games simply because they're not HD, and these same gamers convince themselves that a game is good simply because it looks good and has action packed and voiced over cut scenes.

snip

I'm sorry, but I have to ask, how old are you? Your doing nothing but trying as hard as you can to infuriate me and TheGuy by responding to us with immaturity and condescension. You literally sound like a 7th grader to me.

If you honestly think that motion controls and touch screens are gimmicks that have no possible benefit for the medium, than you are very shallow and narrow-minded and I truly feel sorry for you. You basically keep saying that every current game has a historical twin, but there are a limited number of game concepts in the world, and one of the ways to re-use them without making it seem stale is to refresh the control scheme. (I could tell you that LBP is SMB, Mario 64, is Mario Galaxy, and Halo ODST is Doom, but that would make me appear incredibly ignorant)

You think that your 360/ps3 controller is the best it could possibly be and there's no room for improvement whatsoever? You understand that at one point the analog stick, shoulder buttons, and controller rumble were all new and considered gimmicks right? I don't know why you started talking about a mouse and keyboard (which were designed to navigate operating systems and so are disqualified as adequate gaming controllers- the fact that you think the setup is better than the 360/ps3 controller only proves how much improvement needs to be done) when I compared aiming with the Wii remote to an analog stick, but most people, (especially people who've never done dualstick) find aiming with a Wii remote to be much more intuitive and accurate.

And finally, to me you appear to think that overall aesthetic quality of a game is significantly determined by the amount of polygons displayed. If you truly think that CoDBLOPS is anywhere near as pleasant to look at as Galaxy, DKCR, or Epic Yarn, then that only reaffirms my accusation of insecurity.

Now, unless you want to prove everything I've said about you in my posts correct, you'll have to respond to this (if at all) without any lame wise cracks, cursing, or saying the word "gimmick" without comprehension.

i love minecraft AND crysis, graphics aren't the end all and be all of how i determine a games value, but its not unreasonable to expect consoles to fit within the current power curve, or at least give a good improvement on the last generation they pumped out, especially when it cost as much as the Wii.
BTW i HATE gamepads for FPS games.
my ten cents.

 

[Leg End]

Well of course they did. Almost everyone on the fucking planet has a Nintendo Wii + DS.
Seriously. Walk down my block. Pokeymanz everywhere.

 

[Mr.Numbers]

*snip*

Oh another child who can't respond without resorting to name calling, how cute. Must be another Brit, from the word usage.

But yeah, I neither want, nor need your acknowledgement of my being right. I know I'm right. Personally, I'd be happy if people just took a little more time to write what they meant, and not some retarded generalization that's completely wrong. Is this a British thing?

I'm Irish...

some retarded generalization that's completely wrong

... Do I have to fetch a definition of irony or can you pick that one up on your own?

Bravo good sir, have an internet.

I just wanted to support this epic post, before the muck raking continued and it went downhill

I apologize in advance if this isn't towards the topic and compensate thusly:

At least they aren't doinng the notorious cash grab tactics of the Sims expansion packs...Besides the peripherals...Hmm...Oh well, a DS is good to take on a bus regardless.

 

[kitsuta]

Try the word 'Family'. That's one word that not only indicts the console with the value of 'Casual', but also the value of 'for the general public'. Imagine a G-rated movie. How much audience did they get? They don't get major horror movie genre fans, or mystery fans, or romance, or thriller fans, they just get more audience from smaller children than anything else, and I can't help but think that Nintendo saw it coming. It was designed similarly to a G-rated movie. Everyone can enjoy it. Just the hardcore gamers will walk away dissatisfied.

Nintendo definitely has that reputation, which they certainly supported in the days of the SNES when they refused to allow developers to include blood in their games [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat_(video_game)], but they don't seem [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MadWorld] to be so [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Heroes_(video_game)] hung up about that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops] anymore. No denying that's their reputation as it stands now, but I'm concerned with how deserved it still is.

G-rated is definitely very restrictive for movies, since movies are rated PG for "peril and action." [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1049413/] But the problem is... Nintendo doesn't just make G rated games (E). They make PG rated games (E10+) and PG-13 rated games (T). They don't make M rated games, but a movie doesn't need to be rated R to have mass appeal. Many of 2010's top grossing movies [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films] were PG or PG-13 rated, and hey, so were the games. [http://www.vgchartz.com/article/83386/top-selling-games-of-2010-multi-wii-ps3-psp-ds-x360/] So even if movie ads use 'family' as a euphemism for 'targeted at young children and no one else,' that doesn't mean Nintendo has to use it that way. G-rated games are pretty limited, but that's not all Nintendo makes, and even when they do make G-rated games they are still high quality. Other developers, however...

There are many bad games, and very few good ones.

No disagreement here. That's actually what I was alluding to earlier with the quote from Miyamoto. Nintendo's problem is that, with very few exceptions, Nintendo is the only one giving a crap about games for their console. Far too many other developers looked at Wii Sports, looked at Wii Sports' ridiculous sales numbers, said to themselves "casual = gold mine," and churned out the crap that floods the market today.

But there's really no denying that part of it was the motion controls. The same thing happened to the Nintendo DS, though thankfully that ended before it became a problem... except that it kind of didn't. Look on Amazon and you'll see dozens of cheap, low-quality generic games. But other, respected developers started giving a damn and making good games. Frankly, I'm not going to guess why that happened to one console and not another, but there you go.

Stuff about the wiimote tech

Agree and disagree. Nintendo, in their typical way, definitely cheaped out on the motion sensing tech - hence the Wii MotionPlus we got later, that brought it up to that 1:1 motion they originally promised. I personally do not have fatigue issues, though I apparently am the only one. Not all games implemented motion sensing with any competence, but the ones I played did it just fine and used quick flicks of the wrist, not wide exaggerated motions.

That being said, I don't have any particular investment in motion-sensing technology as the Wave of the Future. I believe it was an honest attempt to push the boundaries of what gamers, developers, and hardware manufacturers thought of as in the realm of possibilities for game control. Same goes for 3D. But... not necessarily an innovation comparable to the D-pad.

So while many of your points are perfectly valid, I don't see much "narrowing of the market," but rather quite the opposite. Nintendo said many times they intended to expand the market, to get non-gamers to try gaming. Accessibility is really what Nintendo was talking about when they introduced motion controls - they wanted to ditch the intimidating eight buttons and three directional controls found on standard gamepads. And, well, they kind of succeeded.

That is my problem with people ragging on Nintendo for "ditching" core gamers for this mythical casual market they have never (AFAIK) talked about. That's not to say the Wii is perfect in every way or Nintendo can do no wrong, but what the heck are we doing criticizing them for experimenting with new controls and trying to make more gamers?