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Nintendo’s Revolution: Your New 2nd Best Friend?
By admin | August 28, 2010
Nintendo is abandoning ship. They’re bailing out. They are leaving behind that which brought them glory and gave rise to the red-capped super plumber whom we fondly call “Mario”. No they’re not going to start manufacturing playing cards again or create clay shooting ranges as they did in the past, they’re just pulling up the stakes and heading out into the wild west… of gaming. Nintendo is changing their business, they’re changing the way that they make games and how you play them. You’ve seen it with the DS, but now they want to change you some more. They want to be your new 2nd best friend. Lets start at the beginning…
It seems quite clear why Nintendo is changing directions, going in their “fresh new, creative directions in gaming”. They’ve been saying for years now that they want to be different in a big way, only they didn’t actually show it till the announcement of the Nintendo DS. Even before the Gamecube launched they were preaching change. When they first started saying that, it was just market-speak really. Clearly the Gamecube wasn’t anything new or creatively different than any of the competitions’ consoles, it was exactly the same, only smaller, shaped like a cube, and played handicapped reverse spinning game disks. It was certainly a capable machine, but nothing revolutionary. They didn’t really decide that they needed to go off in a different direction until they finally realized that the Gamecube was not going to win them back any market share and that they were doomed to lose that generation. They also had to know that Sony was preparing a hand held to challenge its dominance in the portable market, much as it had with Playstation in the console market. While they couldn’t have known how that battle would play out, they had to remember how quickly and easily Sony had beaten them with Playstation and decided that they really needed to break out and go a different, and here’s the key-word, “non-competitive” route.
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Thus, the DS was created, and Revolution is right around the corner. Neither hardware has been designed to compete with anyone, because they won’t need to. We can say that Nintendo just wants to do this so that they can be more creative, try new things, improve the art of gaming, etc. While that could all be true, they also really didn’t have much choice. Nintendo still made plenty of money in the last generation, even on Gamecube and it’s paltry market share, but it wouldn’t have stayed that way forever if they had kept trying to go head-to-head with Sony, not to mention Microsoft. In order for them to have truly competed with them, they would have to become super aggressive with their plans. They’d need to try to develop a super console, like Sony and MS have done, they’d need to sell it for a loss (which they have never done) they’d need to change the way they make games and what kind of games they’d be making (they’d need to be more adult themed) and recreate the Nintendo image in a way that they simply would not be comfortable doing.
So they more or less have decided to walk away from the gaming market as they know it and create their own, much as they did when they revived gaming with the NES. To be honest, I’m perfectly happy to see this happen. I (like all of us here I’m sure) love Nintendo and have many many fond memories with their games, and I’d hate to see them take another beating in the next gen if they had decided to simply launch a new more advanced version of their current gen consoles as everyone else has done, and no doubt about it, they would have taken a beating. Nintendo has made it clear since the days of the SNES that they are not willing to change themselves in any way, even if it would make them more competitive. I was a skeptic when the DS was announced and launched, but I bought one on day one because I believed Nintendo was finally making some good choices. That decision has proven to be a good one as the DS has become an awesome platform with some awesome games (though it did take quite a while for that to occur). I’m sure I’ll do the same with Revolution as I’m truly excited about the potential for gaming on the revolution, much more so than I was with DS.
Lastly, and this is very important, I think the Revolution is going to be positioned as the perfect “2nd console” to own. Everyone will want to own either a PS3 or 360 (or both) because we all want to get our GTA on, Master Chief, or “insert popular mainstream title here”, etc. People will likely have to crack open their piggy banks to do that considering what these consoles and games will not be cheap (My Xbox 360 pre-order for the system, two games, an extra controller and tax has already topped $600.00). So if they will purchase a second console, will they break their bank again by buying the other mainstream console, just to play their exclusives (since you could likely already play the multi-platform games on the system you bought first), or will you buy a Revolution, likely to launch at a much more affordable price (mark my words, I’m predicting $199), that will offer gameplay that you simply can’t get anywhere else, for better or worse. With that in mind, I could certainly see Nintendo retake 2nd place in the console market, with the question being who will be 1st and 3rd, though we all know how difficult it will be for 360 to unseat the PS3 for market dominance…
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Some have suggested that Nintendo should go multi-platform much as Sega did after it’s years of failed (though awesome) consoles. Nintendo would never go multi-platform, at least not now. Sega failed four different systems before eventually going multi-platform. (Which was a real shame by the way… They lost a lot of their creativity and quality when they had to abandon Dreamcast) While I’m sure they’d be an incredible multi-platform company, they just aren’t interested and I don’t think they ever really will be, not to mention that it’d be bad for the industry. Over the past number of years, it’s been speculated that they could go that route, but it’s pretty clear that it was all just that, speculation. One thing that a lot of people don’t realize, is that Sega was hemorrhaging money for years and years, constantly going farther into debt with new losses every year, and this is simply not the case for Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo has literally billions of dollars in the bank (last I heard, somewhere around 8-10 billion). They could probably launch and fail another 4 or 5 consoles before they’d be “forced” to go change their methods as Sega did.
I do want to brand off for a moment and discuss the “other” half of gaming. One thing that has surprised me, is Nintendo’s handling of the hand held market. It was a well-documented fact that the Game Boy Advance technology was ready to go into production long before they launched it, and that it was held back purely because their previous versions (Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Color) were still selling well. It’s also well known that they never felt the need to make big leaps in technology when it came to their hand held’s, simply because they had no competition. In other words, they could have launched an N64 quality hand held of some kind years ago if they wanted to. Then by now they could have had something similar in graphical/CPU power and functionality to what the PSP is now. Who knows, had they done that, maybe Sony would have decided to not create the PSP in the first place?
It is interesting that, while Nintendo essentially had a monopoly on the hand held market for years, that they never pushed the technology. There are different ways to look at that though. On one hand, having a monopoly does allow you to take it easy and go at your own pace, but on the other hand, you risk losing it by taking your time. Clearly the PSP has not taken the market by storm the way that some had hoped, but the DS, while innovative, just doesn’t seem like much of a response to PSP. Of course, Nintendo has made it clear that they have no interest in running a race with Sony, but of course that is exactly what they’re doing, just in a roundabout way. Personally, I believe the DS should have been a lot more powerful than it is now. Certainly the technology exists that they could have made it better, and they certainly had enough time to develop it. They’ve often released new hardware that isn’t the best product that they can make, so that they could release the better technology a few years later (making more money by making consumers buy more hardware), when it is cheaper to do so anyway. It just seems like they haven’t taken the Sony threat seriously.
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Note, I’m not saying that the PSP will win the current portable war, but we should remember how Nintendo lost the console race. Starting with the Super Nintendo, they began to lose more than half of their previous market share with each successive console. (and they lost some market share going from Nintendo to Super Nintendo as well) The Nintendo had over 90+%, the SNES had around 70%, the N64 had around 35%, and the GC has about 15-18%. So while I applaude their creativity, I’m surprised they didn’t do more to protect that which was and still is (for the moment) their turf. With Revolution, they are walking away from the mainstream console race, having fought hard for it for years, and losing in the end. They have to do this, they really don’t have a choice. The hand held market however, is (or was) dominated by Nintendo, so why would they make it so easy for PSP to step in? Who knows, if the DS continues to out perform the PSP sales wise, then maybe we’ll all see that the DS as it is now is enough to beat PSP without being the best of what Nintendo could have produced. But even then, it’s pretty clear that The DS will not maintain the Game boy’s level of market share, which was/is more than 90%. I’d just hate to think that they’re starting down the same road they took when they lost the Console race… They might want to consider their past mistakes when working on their next hand held.
To end this, I believe that Nintendo will be VERY successful with the Revolution. They will be offering an experience that has never been seen before, with their line of distinguished franchises, at a very low price (likely around $199 or so), and of course they’ll have their online service that will allow you to download and play classic Nintendo games from all (or at least most) of their previous platforms. Any of those advantages could make a new console successful, so I really think they are heading in the right direction for the first time since the SNES, not counting the game boy series. Sony and Microsoft are fighting for the same crowd, gamers around the world. This time however, Nintendo is fighting for everyone, gamers and non-gamers alike. They know that you will likely buy an Xbox 360 or a PS3, but once you do, they want to be your second purchase. This is the multi-console generation. Forgotten are the days of old where it was a Nintendo or Sega world, never both. Multi-console households are now the norm, not the exception. Nintendo knows this, and now they want to be your new 2nd best friend.
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