Nintendo Posts Yet Another Loss, Despite Mario Kart 8 203
redletterdave (2493036) writes Nintendo posted its third loss in four quarters on Wednesday. Even though Mario Kart 8, its big first-party game released in May, shipped more than 2.82 million copies by the end of June, the Mario-themed racing game was not enough to help Nintendo's struggling Wii U console perform in this particular quarter. The company said it lost $97 million between March and June. Nintendo shipped 510,000 units of the Wii U in the June quarter, bringing the total to 6.68 million consoles sold — it's a big jump from the 160,000 units it sold in the same quarter a year ago and a small improvement over the 310,000 units it sold in the March quarter. Still, the Wii U is still lagging behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, and Nintendo must also contend with mobile games available on Apple and Google's app stores, which cost but a fraction of a Nintendo game.
Re:They lost their market (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The market is getting tighter and tighter (Score:5, Interesting)
The leap from SNES to N64 controller definitely took some brain rewiring, but the move to analog thumb controlled joysticks is a move that the other game developer consoles made as well. It freed up additional fingers for more buttons. I get what you're saying with regard to the inability to access every button without changing up hand configurations, a problem Xbox and Playstation never had with their models. Newly positioned buttons and motion sensors don't have to be distractions once you've reprogrammed your premotor cortex and cerebellum to deal with them. I think there is an aspect of timing that was integral for many older system games that may be less important for some games now. When you look at the feature space of games in the 8 bit era, there were very limited interactions you could have. You were relegated to 2 dimensional environments and games like side scrolling action were quite common and relied on incredibly precise timing to pull off. How many people made it past the damn rocket sleds on Battletoads consistently? But newer games with immersive 3D sandboxes to explore don't have to rely on tight timing to hook a gamer. These tight timing aspects are probably what attracted many gamers to action games, and continue to make first person shooters so appealing.
As a researcher in brain computer interfaces (BCI), I have to disagree with the more literal interpretation of your statement that the best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to gameplay. I think you're getting at very quick sensorimotor contingencies, where you get 'in the zone' but there is a huge amount of somatosensory/tactile feedback that goes into these sorts of interactions that are currently missing with direct brainwave interfaces. Let alone the fact that even the best BCI algorithms can classify a handful at most different responses, you have access to more combinations of discrete input with your fingers for now than reading brainwaves.
Re:Here's an idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Shame so many of them chose death over sharing, isn't it?
The last time sharing was the norm, it caused the entire industry to collapse. There's a reason it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and not console. Nintendo, as it turns out, were the ones who led the industry's recovery, largely by instituting strict third party licensing. Sid Meier considers the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" one of the three most important innovations in gaming history because of the impact that it had.
Coming from that background, you can understand why Nintendo isn't going to take the decision to open up the platform as lightly as some open source keyboard warriors on Slashdot.
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Re:They should stop making consoles (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't try (at all) to keep up on raw benchmark-type specs. That helps them sell their consoles at a profit instead of a loss. And yet the Wii really caught on, and looked like it was going to take over the world. The pundits were talking non-stop about how genius Nintendo was... until the Kinect and Move were rushed to market in response, and took the wind out of Nintendo's sales.
Because that has worked out so incredibly well for Sega over the past decade???
You might as well say that all 3 should pack it in, and just make games for PCs and smartphones/tablets.
Re:Here's an idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, stores bought a bunch of fucking terrible games that wouldn't sell, because it was common practice that unsold units could be returned to the manufacturer for refund, so they didn't expect any downside. A ton of sham game companies sprung up over-night, unloaded a ton of merchandise on toy stores, cashed the check, and then closed-up shop before anybody asked about returns.
The stores set themselves up for a failure, and the video game industry was only involved because it was the hot market at the time... kinda like smartphones today.
Re:Here's an idea! (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's some details about modern and historical game markets that make the "Nintendo's monopolistic licensing saved the industry" story less like settled history and more like propaganda:
* European PS2 and worldwide Wii markets were absolutely flooded with shovelware and those systems did not suffer for it anywhere near the shovelware-laden Atari market did.
* Atari itself was abandoning quality control even faster than the third-party software distributors.
* The games market was not anywhere close to mature; as an offshoot of the fad-driven toy market, people left videogames because they assumed the fad was over.
* Personal computer platforms did not see the same kind of massive games crash that console platforms did, despite being explicitly designed for unlicensed third-party development *and* having even more crapware than Atari ever did.
* Nintendo's licensing program did not improve software quality. There were plenty of licensed Nintendo games which were absolute garbage. While Nintendo may have started the program specifically to avoid another Atari crash, they were sure happy to license everything LJN put out, despite said games being barely-functional licensed titles of at-best mediocre quality. The main purpose of the licensing program was to monopolize third-party software and skim a royalty fee off the top of everything.
Nintendo primarily won on the strength of their own first-party software, not because they had a stricter licensing program.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)