Nintendo's GCNext Direction Outlined By Iwata 90
Thanks to GameSpy for its in-depth interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata regarding "what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and why Nintendo will end up on top." Iwata admits that "the competition is tougher than ever before; and in the short run, we have seen declining profitability", but makes it clear that the next-gen GameCube (which he calls "GCNext or GCN") isn't about raw processing power - rather, Nintendo are "discussing... what should be done to entertain people in a new way; and in order to achieve this, what functionality must be added to our current technology."
"GCN" already means "GameCube" (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? The GameCube is already abbreviated as "GCN". What's with console manufacturers reusing acronyms for their next-gen consoles? Sony also did it with "PSX", which was the abbreviation for the original PlayStation. Weird.
Re:What is Nintendo thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
New technology? (Score:2, Insightful)
However there is so much criticism for the lack of originality in games today, that part of me wants them to offer up this extremely unique device that will change the perspective of gamin in a drastic way. It just may be the breath of fresh air that the industry needs. Most gamers are comfortable with their current gaming, so something too drastic could also be a huge mistake.
Nintendo is in the best position, and is the best company, to attempt something like this, so I hope for the best. Our gaming future is at stake here!
Forget functionality (Score:3, Insightful)
And screw backwards compatibility. I don't care at all about it. It works with the GBA because it already owns something like 80% of the handheld market, but who actually still plays psx games on their ps2? Whoever played sega games on their genesis? Or sega cd or 32x for that matter? I don't want my cool new console to be crippled just because it has to dumb itself down for 5 year old games.
Re:What is Nintendo thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure I readily agree with this. The reason Nintendo isn't into on-line gaming right now is that they're shy about asking their customers to pay a monthly fee to play a game. Some are obviously willing to do this, but are enough doing it that it is profitable? I mean seriously, why isn't the XBOX a much greater competitor to the PS2 if all that really matters is the on-line play?
Yes, I'd like on-line play, too. But I understand why Nintendo's not keen on it just yet. It's not like people can just throw up a server and provide on-line pay for free like you can with PC games.
Will the bubble burst? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I have drifted a bit. Modern game consoles have reached a point where it's more about what the artist can do with the system than what the system can do for them. At that point, Mr. Iwata is right, competition becomes very difficult. His suggestion that there needs to be other distinguishing factors is spot on. It is, for this reason, that I think Nintendo has ample opportunity to retake the market. They, as a game developer as well as a hardware developer, know what it takes to entertain, and they certainly have the right talent to cook up those juicy new ideas. I don't have as much faith in Sony or Microsoft. Sony's too arogant (ask the developers about what making a PS2 game is like)and Microsoft is too inexperienced. Niether have any real experience making AAA games.
Maybe saying Nintendo will win back the market is a bit of an overstatement. All this talk of Nintendo losing market share conveniently leaves out figures of how much the market has grown in the last 5 years. Maybe Nintendo won't be #1 again. Maybe it'll be #2 and the market is big enough for them to be quite comfortable profit-wise. Personally, I think that's a bigger win. It means there's another company who's producing an alternative that another segment of the market likes. Who knows?
Well at this point I'm just babbling. Sorry. I just think that Nintendo has at least the right mind-set to continue to succeed. I also think that if Sony and Microsoft are smart, they'll listen to what Iwata has to say very carefully.
Re:It's called the Internet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly a bad business decision. It's not doing Sony or Microsoft a whole lotta good. Part of the reason for the GC's success is its low price. So either they'd have to include a network adapter and raise the price of the system (Microsoft's having difficulty keeping up with the GC despite having one) or they'd have to provide a peripheral system, which hasn't historically shown much success.
"Also, I question the portability issue of the cube. It's not like they got rid of all the attachments necessary to make a gamecube truly portable. You still have to hook up the audio. You still have to plug it into a DC outlet. You still have to bring the controllers along. Sure it's lighter than a PS2, but that still doesn't mean it's a whole lot easier to lug around."
Speaking as somebody who has lugged the system around a few times, I can assure you that the GC survives movings much more readily than any other system to date. The small form and the handle are very helpful, most TVs have a video in on the front, and Wavebird controllers make the whole cable mess disappear. The PS2 and XBOX are monsters in comparison, and far more fragile. The lack of a handle on either machine is noticably painful as well.
"Get something going along networked gaming. M$ and Sony are killing along those lines."
They're only killing Nintendo in the sense that they haven't provided a service yet. Yes, you are right there. The real question is whether or not Sony or Microsoft are making any real money with their on-line stuff. I'd be willing to bet the answer is 'unsubstantial', but would welcome clarification.
"Maybe even allow independant parties to make games for your system without imposing minimums like a 10,000 minidisc purchase."
What good would that do besides tying up their publishing business?
It's in the controller not the visuals (Score:5, Insightful)
If you stretch as far back as the 70's, arcade games had very primitive visuals, but some of the better games offered sophisticated input control.
Examples:
PONG uses a rotary "spinner" control. So even though the game consists of controlling a rectangle to hit a square "ball", the input is still pretty advance, with the position of your "rectangle" moving up and down proportional to the rate at which you turn the spinner controller. Imagine if the game designers used a joystick instead. (For you younger folk, imagine the game "Arkanoid" with a joystick for input instead.)
Centipede, Missile Command:
Used a trackball for player control. So although quick reflexes are important to master a game like Centipede, there's also the skill of mastering use of a trackball controller to move the player object.
Tron: Both a joystick for player control, and a spinner for aiming your shots.
Track n Field: press two buttons as fast as possible to get your player to go fast. Imagine how boring this game would be with just a joystick you pushed left to run left.
Light gun games: Goes without saying... Light guns are one of those peripherals that HAVE made their way onto home consoles for pretty much every generation.
Racing games with steering wheels and pedals: Again, thankfully we have these available for most generations of game consoles (but not all of us bother to fork over the cash to buy such devices).
In the mid to late 80's, games tended to all use joysticks and buttons. It was no coincidence they offer little in the way of innovative control input. One exception was Street Fighter II. They introduced the concept of performing "moves", such as semi-circle motions with the joystick. I need not mention what that game "started"...
And speaking of Street Fighter... the original Street Fighter had two big huge rubber buttons instead of the 6 buttons of different strength. You'd have to literally punch the big button as hard as you could and the strength of your real-world punch translated into the strength of your on-screen character's strength. No, this didn't work that well, since you got tired or could hurt your hand (it didn't take long before these arcade games got retrofitted with ordinary buttons) but you all get the point right? There's a reason why arcade game designers even came up with new input ideas like this.
Back to consoles... When the Nintendo 64 appeared and had an analog joystick, and we saw what 3D could really offer, thanks to Mario 64, it opened up a new realm of gameplay. But I feel we could still explore new play mechanics through innovative input devices. Imagine playing a game like Super Monkey Ball with a trackball. (Or that new game from Namco where you roll around picking up everything you touch...) We need new kinds of controllers, and innovative use of the traditional analog controllers. The more games remain "push left and the thing moves left".
~RB
Re:Will the bubble burst? (Score:3, Insightful)
True. Nintendo came before either of these companies as a game maker, and therefore has the experience to know where the market is going. It's basically a sixth sense through massive amounts of experience.
All this talk of Nintendo losing market share conveniently leaves out figures of how much the market has grown in the last 5 years.
This is usually mentioned by people who are trying to declare Nintendo's downfall, ignoring the fact that they have billions of dollars stored away from previous systems and revenue still coming in from the GBA. Nintendo may be stumbling, but they're not dying by any means.
The next generation looks to be an interesting one, and with all three companies' positions in it basically up in the air. At least in my opinion.
No, no, no, no and no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless something's changed a whole lot in the past couple months, the online aspect of the other two current consoles is very visible, but the number of people who actually are participating is incredibly small in comparison to how much we hear about them. Xbox Live and some of the online stuff for the PS2 is well done, and a lot of people who have used them are impressed by them. However, the people who have even used a console-based online gaming service are a tiny fraction of the number of console gamers who never have.
In the PC gaming world, especially with things like MMORPGs, RTS games, FPS games, etc., multiplayer network support is almost vitally important. I don't think everyone realizes that the console world isn't like that...yet. I think it will probably become more important in the future, and any console in the next generation without good support for it will probably suffer somewhat, but at this point in time, the vast majority of console gamers are completely unaffected by whether a game or console has network support or not.
Getting back to why the GameCube was less successful than it could've been, I suspect a least a couple things had something to do with it. Launching an entire year after the PS2 definitely did not help. While the PS2 had few, if any, compelling games in its first year, the same could be said of the GameCube, and by the time the GC started getting more games worth playing, the PS2 had already been out for a couple years, had much more support, and was in many more homes.
On a related note, the GC was pretty lacking in third-party support until more recently, too. Even now, I look at which games I've been playing lately on my GC and which games I'm looking forward to, and the vast majority are straight from Nintendo. Now, if I had to pick one and only one company whose games I could play, it would be Nintendo, so I'm not too bothered by that, but it would be nice to have more stuff out there to choose from.
Regardless, as long as Nintendo gets to the party on time with the next console, instead of being unfashionably late, I think they're on the right track. I buy consoles to play games, not to watch movies on or to use a PVR or a CD player or anything else like that. I play games because I want to have fun. As far as I'm concerned, they make some of the best games that are the most fun, and anything they do to make it easier to make good games and to create more ways for games to be fun is ok with me.
Re:What is Nintendo thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? People have been doing it from the beginning with games on the Xbox. All the games are hosted on the boxes of individuals with Xbox Live providing the service for matchmaking (and, obviously, the consistent development framework). This is true for virtually all Xbox Live games. Xbox Live is, essentially, a service like WON/Steam for Half-Life where one logs on to search out an appropriate game and then connects to said game apart from the service itself.
Oh, and people are INDEED willing to pay for Xbox Live for the continuity of experience over all their online games. I expect Nintendo could expect equivalent, or even better (especially in Japan), numbers with a similar service and a nice selection of games. The fact that they haven't tried so far is an indicator of either stupidity (I don't think so) or a desire to really stick it to consumers and get ridiculous profits (like they do when they release two almost identical Pokemon games at the same time).
That is a tiny piece of the big picture (Score:3, Insightful)
Total online console gamers are around 3 million.
Understand their decision now? Multiplayer is a huge benefit for games, and will ultimately be a large part of the future of games, but not right now.
Re:"GCN" already means "GameCube" (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I can answer the 'StarCube' comment here. Around the time that the GC was shown to the public (August 01 I think?) Nintendo registerred a bunch of domain names, starcube.com being one of them. At least one news site speculated that was the name of the system. It was probably a diversion tactic so nobody'd know for sure what the final name is.
Re:It's called the Internet. (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft does not make money from their network. They are collecting monthly fees from less than one million users (only 500,000 users worldwide as of last June, Microsoft's optimistic goal is one million by this June). That doesn't even begin to subsidize their high network maintenance costs and constant XBL advertising in perpetual rotation on every TV channel in existence. But damn, they are Microsoft. They will eat losses until revision 3, as always. That's what an OS and office suite monopoly buys them, the ability to bleed money while brute forcing their way into lucrative markets.
Sony makes a very small amount of money on their network, simply because there's basically no network to maintain, unless you're only talking about Everquest. It's all about per-game servers, which is much cheaper to do.
So Nintendo has the choice of losing money on the deployment of a network, or making very little money on the same patchwork model as Sony. They chose the latter. Good move, given the extremely low number of actual online gamers compared to the hype. This is not the PC games market, Xbox notwithstanding.
Ever wonder how all the PSO games work on GameCube? It's the Sony model! I've said it before with different words, but I'll say it again: When it comes to online gaming, Nintendo is doing the same thing Sony is. It's just that Sony is the market leader, while Nintendo isn't. Publishers are not touching the GCN BBA simply because of the perceived wasted resources that are involved in porting network code to the second place console, particularly when Nintendo isn't advertising the BBA or promoting its use to developers. Clearly a chicken and egg problem. Sega is the only one that's tried, but they're pulling it off, oh, somehow.
And just remember kids: MS has between 500,000 and 1 million online gamers by their own admission. But Phantasy Star Online eps I & II for _GameCube_ has sold 200,000 (!!!!) copies. Whether every copy is online is another issue, but it's not too shabby compared to the hype.
Re:No, no, no, no and no. (Score:4, Insightful)
But people THINK that it is.
Best Buy/EB Games/Gamespot/etc have done a great job convincing people that being able to watch DVDs and play games online (even though 95% of the system owners don't use those features too often, if ever) is really important and "where it's at." I don't think Nintendo made a poor TECHNOLOGICAL decision leaving online games pretty much off the GC, because almost no one would take advantage of it. But consumers have a mental impression that they 'need' online gaming, a DVD player, a harddrive, a coffee maker, and the kitchen sink in their videogame system.
So while I will still probably buy Nintendo's next system, just like I've bought all their past systems - whether or not it has online gaming or not - I think having online gaming is a 'state of mind' that a lot of consumers find really important.
Just my 2 cents
-Trillian
Re:No, no, no, no and no. (Score:2, Insightful)
When I went to buy my GC at Best Buy, I asked if they carried the Component Video Cable, so I could get 480P. The guy insisted that GC had no such thing, and it "didn't do High Def, only PlayStation and XBox do." But, many GC games can run at 480P, which isn't quite HD but it's in the right direction. Oddly no one in town carries the Component Video cables, I had to order them directly from Ninetendo, and the still haven't arrived. This makes no sense to me. Almost every GC game I own says it supports progressive scan on the box, yet without these cables I'll never see it.
Re:New technology? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its only a gimmick until it succeeds, then its "being ahead of the curve".
I think you guys are missing the point: (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare the games of the SNES to the NES: The SNES has higher quality sound, more colorful graphics, the ability to display more textures, the ability to add more input into a game, with more buttons on the SNES controller, longer, bigger games, bigger levels (compare Super Mario World to SMB 3).... overall, barriers were removed, the possibilities for games were broadened.
: Ok, now, compare the N64 and the PS to the SNES/Genesis:
The full shift to 3D graphics, and optical based media becomes the new standard, allowing developers to make games bigger than ever before. Among the features that become common in this era are: full motion video, 4-person multiplayer gaming on the N64, orchestrated soundtracks (there are several examples on both platforms), even more buttons on a controller than before, and the use of both joysticks and d-pads is introduced. These technological leaps remove all technical barriers that prevent the games to potentially portray the real-life world (by that, I mean the fact that now all 3 dimensions which we live in could be rendered in our games, surround sound that makes games' sounds be expressed from all directions is brought in, etc. Basically, now, the only things left to do are increase the power of the currently-existing technology)
Now, compare games from the N64 and the PS to the games on the DC, GC, Ps2, and X-box.
The difference in graphics is less noticeable than ever before, with the only changes being smoother textures, better SFX, more polys: basic upgrades of current technology that have always happened over time. It's even harder to notice differences in the sound and music areas of games. The controllers for today's consoles have just about the same amount of buttons as last generation, and support the same number of players. The biggest change made is that development has become more complex than ever, with game budgets ranging in the multi-million dollar ranges, easily, and even longer development times are present. Basically, the basic hardware upgrades (more ram, more storage), with increased difficulty and prices to develop.
What Nintendo wants to do is make hardware changes that can help games become better on different scales, like adding 3D, or four-person multiplayer, or making a portable system with two screens. To keep things fresh, and keep people's interests Yeah, there will be the hardware upgrades, there will be more memory, more storage, more polys. But in addition, these new dimensions will be added to the hardware, adding new functions to our games.
THAT'S what Nintendo is trying to do.