Wii 2 Unlikely For 2011, Maybe In 2012 303
An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot earlier this year, the lack of a next-generation Wii may be hurting Nintendo. That doesn't seem to concern the company's US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, who said this week that a Wii 2 might not appear until 2012. He wants to sell a few million more consoles before a successor is launched. So, no Wii 2 for 2010 or 2011 — meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox consoles get motion control support and other content enhancements. What does that mean for the success of Nintendo's gaming console business? Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One Word (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok. Great. Now, how about a few more words, because the one doesn't really help much.
Re:One Word (Score:1, Insightful)
Limited markets... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nintendo is catching up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Limited markets... (Score:3, Insightful)
My Wii sits unused (hardy har har) while I occasionally use my 360. The Wii turned out to be a gimmick. Odds are Kinect will be the same, and it will sell few games, and we'll be over motion detection for another couple generations.
I keep hoping someone will come up with a cheap eyetap so we can get into reality overlay gaming. I want more motivation to go outside. I'm imagining some kind of multiplayer wizard battle game, that's something you could meaningfully do without endangering people.
Re:Revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Nintendo obviously believed the motion controls were revolutionary - the Wii codename was revolution. Look inside the battery compartment of the Wiimote and you'll still see the code RVL-003.
In any case, it did revolutionise gaming input in a tangible way and brought a whole new demographic into gaming as a result.
In the collective Slashdot mind, once you get used to something, it never was revolutionary.
For example, Wii's controllers aren't revolutionary, we had those for a long time (where??).
Another example: iPhone was never revolutionary, we always had a lot of multitouch phones with a full browser, easy to install apps, and features that even mere mortals can figure out (which ones??).
It's best to ignore the echo chamber, they never learn.
Nintendo (Score:5, Insightful)
Nintendo has been in business for a lot longer than almost any company you can name (1889!) and have seen off some enormous rivals several times (Sega, Atari, etc.).
Nintendo make profit on almost everything they release.
Nintendo make big releases every now and again, stringing them on with life support in the form of games that turn out to become famous in their own right.
When Nintendo do plop down a new console it's invariably innovative and top-of-its-game (not necessarily the best hardware, but definitely better in gaming terms).
Nintendo is an inventor. They toil away in their little sheds for years in complete secrecy until one day they walk out, plop something into a business person's hands and blow everyone away. Then while the market are still reeling from that, they just wander quietly back into their shed and aren't seen for another few years when they rinse and repeat.
Precisely BECAUSE they aren't saying "Oh, no, our competitors have something new, we have to copy it in our own way and get back into the game" is why they are able to do what they do. They don't really care about Kinect, or anything else - they have money enough to last a decade, and that gives them a decade to make something even more spectacular without having to worry about the day-to-day running of the businesses. Wiis are still being sold but they have enough to go back into their shed and devote the next few years to R&D and playtesting which the other rivals *cannot*. They will have their own ideas, which might work (Wii) or might flop (VirtualBoy) but will be away from the conventional elements of the time that are competing in the market. And when they deliver their next invention, people will give them millions and, because of using their brains and not just throwing expensive hardware at a problem, they will invariably make profit on every unit sold.
It's also true that they decide what they want in the next, say, Mario game. They decide what they want to be able to do. Then they build a console around that, not the other way around.
You can try to make Nintendo look foolish and show how "you know better" if you want, but invariably you will end up with egg on your face. Nintendo know their market better than anyone - they almost single-handedly invented it. Leave them be. The "Wii 2" (which it will almost certainly NEVER be named) will be to the Wii what the Wii was to the Gamecube, or the Gamecube to the N64, or the N64 to the SNES, or the SNES to the NES, or the equivalent trail in the handheld markets. It will take years to arrive - you'll have just about forgotten about your Wii and Nintendo will be absent from the market for a year or so - and then it'll blow your socks off. After a few months people will complain that it doesn't do X or Y or that it's "outdated" or "underpowered" while Nintendo will have another decade's research money under their belt and be working on the next one.
Nintendo know what they are doing. Sod Wii 2. I want whatever the next stage is - which will be more advanced gameplay-wise than anything on the market in the next few years.
Re:One Word (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree.
As far as Move goes, I don't see that as out-innovating the Wii. From my point of view, the PS3 is several years more advanced than the Wii (in both the base hardware and the motion control hardware), they've had years more of research to benefit from (both their own research and what others in the industry and academia have researched and demonstrated), they have the benefit several years of sitting back and learning from the Wii's mistakes and shortcomings, and with all of that benefit they've managed to brute force a solutions that is only slightly more capable than the Wii, and looks stupid and inelegant in the process.
As far as Kinect goes, I have a lot of respect for what they've done there. Rather than just tracking the position of some sex-toy-looking orbs, it actually analyzes the scene to extract skeletal structure information from the players movement. It's quite technologically advanced. Very impressive in the way it operates and the capabilities it provides. Yet the one thing that REALLY bugs me about it is that it is a purely controller-less design. Being able to play controller-less is pretty cool, but a lot of games will suffer or be impractical without buttons to press. Using an existing controller 2-handed kind of defeats the purpose of Kinect's advanced capabilities, the existing 360 controllers aren't conducive to single-hand use, and releasing a future add-on-controller-for-the-add-on-kinect is just completely out of the question.
So no, I don't really feel that the Wii has been out-innovated much. Move is pretty pathetic and uninspired considering how much later it came than the Wii, and Kinect is really impressive and innovative in ways but has a fatal flaw. I think it will take until the next generation before someone truly outdoes the Wii (when they can combine the Kinect's sensor technology with the Wii/Move controller system)
Re:Revolution (Score:2, Insightful)
When Wii was released /. and other forums said "The Wii will fail. Nobody wants gimmicky motion controls or a measly 480p resolution. The Wii will end-up in 2nd place just like the Gamecube, while Sony or microsoft take the top spot." - So I consider it revolutionary if only because Nintendo (and some fanboys) was the only 1 who believed it would succeed. Everyone else thought motion control was a dumb idea.
As for the Wii Part 2: I think if Nintendo released it now, they run the risk that it could end-up like the N64... a flop after a major success. They are wise to keep the WII past its normal five-year-span, just as they did with the NES.
Besides if they released it now, what would be customers motives to buy it? Just to jump from 480p to 1080p? Not very convincing.
One Word and it's NO... (Score:3, Insightful)
There have been 'improvements' on what Nintendo did - but I wouldn't really call yet another motion sensor an 'innovation'. (Think how many MSFT 'innovations' you just yawned at, as they were things that existed elsewhere long ago).
Nintendo innovated the console market by bringing those controllers.
It was Sony/Microsoft who jumped on it later - to claw back marketshare lost to Nintendo.
In much the same way - in the phone world, the iPhone was the innovation. There is virtually no new phone that doesn't just try and piggy back on the path paved by the iPhone. Even if there are Android phones that have more CPU power, cheaper, ... They weren't the innovators. Someone else (at Apple) had the big idea on how to revolutionize the market, all the others came years later - then touting other features.
Take it - the fact that Android was multitasking before the iPhone wasn't as much of an 'innovation', as the iPhone itself was to any phone preceeding it.
The über-powerful PS3 or XBox 360 primarily introduced newer hardware - something that was expected to happen - everyone does it.
The Wii brought something new, something unexpected to the market - hence THEY were the innovators, and even if they aren't on the forefront now - those that are are 'optimisers' at best, but not innovators, not pioneers, not people trying something NEW.
Re:Limited markets... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I'd say it's more of a case of the competitors closing a gap on the Wii, while the Wii is still significantly cheaper than either.
Plus you have to consider that since every single Wii ever sold has motion control out of the box, every single game can be developed with motion control as a standard feature. For the PS3 and Xbox... developers have to consider developing games for consoles that may or MAY NOT have motion control capabilities. Remember folks, this is an EXTRA COST option on PS3 and Xbox... it means you can't take it for granted that motion control is available. As a developer you have to support both non-motion control and motion control controller interfaces for your games on those platforms.
From a dev point of view I'd much rather develop for the Wii than to have to take this into account. For the Xbox and PS3, the early adopters have already bought the "upgrades"... where does the growth then come from now that the honeymoon is over? I'd be interested to see the installed-base numbers of consoles vs. motion control devices sold separately. Probably not a pretty picture.
Re:One Word (Score:5, Insightful)
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Counterpoint:
No.
Nintendo pretty much has a different market segment of casual gamers. Younger kids who are into the franchise (Pokemon, Mario, etc. and other exclusives are all over the elementary schools... never heard anyone there ever mention Halo or even Final Fantasy). Kids don't care about system specs... hell, they won't even watch TV if it's not a cartoon, so I surmise they actually expect the cartoony "8-bit look" as a sign that a game is actually "for them".
Finally, the hardcore gamers will have a Wii anyway just for the heck of it.
Nintendo can milk this cow, the Wii teat, for a while longer. Then once publishers actually start releasing interesting games for the PS3 and Kinect motion controls, they can come out with the next big thing out of cycle.
I surmise it would be some kind of augmented reality thing, so they can sell more cheap widgets with each game, that the kids will bring to school and lose and have to be replaced.
Re:Revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
iPhone was never revolutionary, we always had a lot of multitouch phones with a full browser, easy to install apps, and features that even mere mortals can figure out (which ones??).
Aside from the multitouch phone, that describes pretty much any Nokia smartphone in the last 5 years.
Full browser: they included Opera, then switched to a WebKit-based browser a bit before the iPhone was released (you realise that the work to make WebKit run in something with as little memory as an iPhone was done by Nokia, right?).
Easy to install apps? Sure, just copy it across and hit install. Can be accomplished via bluetooth (select the file, hit 'send to device' on your computer - no wires), by copying it to an SD card, or by copying it via the supplied USB cable. No iTunes store, but no harder than installing an app on Windows.
Features that mere mortals can figure out? Kind of vague, but syncing the address book and calendar is a one-click operation (via bluetooth, no cable required, unlike the iPhone) from my Mac, and apparently it's similarly simple under Windows. Calling and SMS are pretty simple to use. The music player is a single button away, and integrates with the FM radio if you get bored with your own music. Note taking is pretty easy too.
Multitouch was new, although Apple's gesture interface had been demonstrated almost a decade earlier by in academia and even in TED talks by the people who actually invented it. Capacitive touch screens were not invented by Apple, and they weren't cheap enough to use in a phone until around the time of the iPhone launch, so they'd probably have shown up soon without the iPhone.
That's not to say that the iPhone isn't a good implementation (largely a good implementation of other people's ideas, but you can't have everything), but calling it revolutionary is pure fanboyism.
Re:Uh, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't care what age a game was designed for. If it's fun, it's fun. If it has a good mechanic and control scheme and lets me skip any cutscenes that piss on my mind, it's a good game. Better crap graphics than crap input. I want my framerate, but other than that, for some games the graphics on the Atari VCS are overkill.
Re:Revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from the multitouch phone, that describes pretty much any Nokia smartphone in the last 5 years.
Wait, are you using Nokia as an example of 'great smartphones we had before the iPhone was released'? Nokia, of all cellphone manufacturs?? You mean NOKIA, which is now struggling to stay relevant because they didn't have a single real touchscreen smartphone worth a dime until the N900 came along? Nokia, who only introduced their first decent touchscreen phone less than two years ago?
That's hilarious... I've owned at least 6 Nokia phones over the last 10 year, and if there is ANY phone brand that has missed the smartphone boat completely, it's Nokia. Their dumbphones and feature phones are great and I loved them, but please, if Nokia is what you first think of when someone takes the first iPhone as the benchmark for all later smartphones, you either don't know Nokia, or you don't know the iPhone. The last Nokia I bought was a 5800, which is only 1 or 1.5 years old, and while it was a pretty decent phone for calling and texting, it can't hold a candle to even the first generation iPhone. The browser was near-unusable (slow, buggy, didn't render many sites properly), the touchscreen was pretty unresponsive (resistive) and there were almost no applications available that used the touchscreen properly (which wasn't surprising because it was the first S60r5 phone, which was the first symbian version to even support touchscreens in the first place).
I have to concur with the PP, people get used to revolutionary products so fast they assume there was nothing revolutionary about it in the first place. The iPhone is a good example, but there are many more.
Don't Forget About The 3DS (Score:1, Insightful)
Nintendo successor to the DS, called the 3DS, is scheduled for release at the end of February in Japan at a price tag around $300. I would assume they would launch in the US and Europe in the following months. They would be stupid to try to put two devices (hand held and console) on the market around the same time. This is especially true when they will both cost $300+.
My guess is that they would not release their next console for a minimum of 2 years after the 3DS.
No need to rush (Score:2, Insightful)
They aren't too excited about rushing a product to sale for a couple of reasons
The main reason is...they don't NEED to. The Wii is still the number one seller out there, and has universal appeal. The PS3 is the elite blue ray graphics console, and the 360 is the FPS console. Both have their niches. The Wii won't be in trouble because everyone, from 8 year olds to grandmas in assisted living centers, can and does play the Wii. Yeah, the "gamer" niche isn't there, but really, that market isn't that big in comparison. Plus, you still have to shell out $500-$600 for a DECENT 360 or PS3 with motion control, whereas you get a Wii for half the price, complete with access to all Nintendo's proprietary games.
The second reason also goes to the PS3 and, especially, the 360. When the PS3 came out, it was priced way out of reach, and manufacturing wasn't yet up to par with mass production for a good price. They lost money. The 360 was made by Microsoft. In other words, like their OS's, it was buggy as hell and had its own version of the BSoD(red ring, anyone?) The Wii? smooth release, no major issues, priced for volume, and fun for a broad audience. I guarantee that, when the Wii 2 or whatever it is called comes out, the same will be true.
Nintendo has been in this business for decades. They know what works, and they listen to what works, not a bunch of flamers looking for the next big shiny.
3ds (Score:3, Insightful)
"Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"
Umm, in case you didn't notice, the 3DS is Nintendo's next big innovation. The next Wii will follow after that. Nintendo doesn't just throw a bunch of shit against the wall and sees what sticks, like Sony does. They make a concentrated effort and focus.
Re:Revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
"Wii was the first console I've bought since Atari 5200. Made a 9 year old really happy!"
I understand that but what you're referring to is demographic shift - i.e. everything old is new again, bot for long time gamers who've grown up with games, the quality has been going down and that is quite worrisome, for those who are new and whose first games are recent releases, they do not have the experience to judge what has occurred.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)