Nintendo, circa 2011: The year it was revealed they didn’t know what they were doing from the beginning.
Nintendo, circa 2011: The year it was revealed they didn’t know what they were doing from the beginning.
Hasn’t Malstrom been saying this since the SNES days?
Sure, they pitched an interesting concept…and showed no fully featured games.
They said it’s for everyone – which may end up making it for no one.
They started the Wii with the hope that it would create gamers out of everyone so that, everyone would *want* a game on in the living room. Now their selling point is a gamer can get pushed out of this space when it’s convenient for “superior” entertainment?
As for trying so hard to rope in the Core with Darksiders, et al. – what makes them think any PS3/360 game they get will be given any feature set to make their version unique? There may be some things that are neat, or novel, but nothing that would make the game reliant on the Wii U’s second screen, since that would mean a more complicated development process…or undercutting the two other versions a publisher is trying to sell.
I was way on board with the Wii – the concept and promise was exciting and new. The games they had were proof-of-concept in full form. Granted rough around the edges, but complete enough that gamers who bought a Wii bought into the promise of “realizing” the platform’s potential.
Instead Nintendo got a case of ADD or something, because they left it at MotionPlus (which they didn’t support), and started getting too involved in User Generated Content, 3D displays, and “innovation” and “surprise” simply for the sake of, rather than to actually address what their expanded audience wanted.
I was so sure things would be different – that the Wii would usher in a reboot in the games Industry like NES had. Now, it’s like we’re getting the GameCube Wii in Wii U – an errant (and possibly futile) attempt to cowtow to developers, Nintendo’s own dogma of what the expanded audience *should* want, and nothing to keep the new gamers around.
This is all high speculation though – come next year, we may see something that ties all these chaotic ideas and design directions together. But at what cost, and will people stick around to see it happen?
Indeed, Kevin.
Shorter Nintendo E3 keynote: We’re sorry for all that stuff we did between 2006-2011.