Nintendo's back and so am I

After a brief hiatus from blogging, I’m back.  Sometimes I do this because I become oversaturated with information and it’s good to take a step back and spend time just listening, observing, and rearchitecting hypotheses. 

The folks at GigaGamez recently interviewed me for an article about Nintendo and the future of the Wii that they called, “Nintendo’s back…but can they hang on?”

I’m far more bullish about Nintendo’s future prospects than this GigaGamez article is, as my previous blog post indicates.  Jason McMaster makes some good points about Nintendo’s rather shaky past when it comes to television-centric consoles considering the long lull between the ancient success of the SNES and the recent release of the Wii. However, despite the fact that the Wii does hook up to a television and contains hardware innards that are very similiar to the Gamecube, I believe it is more the spiritual kin of the (wildly successful) Nintendo DS rather than the N64 and Gamecube.

I believe Nintendo’s prospects for the success of the Wii should be based on how they handled the DS. The way the DS game market unfolded also shows a pretty decent roadmap of how Nintendo and its third parties could succeed on the Wii platform. Like the DS, the Wii offers a new way to play games and interact with others. Nintendo translated this aspect of the DS into great success with Brain Age and other games that made novel use of the new input system to pull in the non-hardcore audience.   They seem to be doing the same with Wii Sports now, though it will take a little bit of time and a more even parity between supply and demand of the console to see if that holds up. I think it will.

The most important lesson of the DS, as it relates to Jason’s article, is that while the unique selling point of the unit is that it offers the novelty of a touch-screen interface, not every game has to use that novelty to its full capacity. Many of the greatest and best-selling games of the DS’s second and third wave of titles — games like New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart DS, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow & Portait of Ruin and Tetris DS don’t use the touchscreen for much more than a couple of token user interface reasons. And that is just fine, as long as there is also a smaller but consistent stream of games that DO use the new interface, like Brain Age, Kirby: Canvas Curse and Elite Beat Agents.

The same should hold true for the Wii. Not every Wii game needs to make the Wii remote the central aspect of the game experience. Between what is sure to be a large install base for the Wii (the system is still impossible to find at retail in many areas) and the fact that developing competitive titles for it will be far less expensive than developing AAA titles for the other “next-gen” consoles, I’m absolutely positive third party developer support will be as strong as Nintendo allows it to be. Hopefully everyone involved realizes, as they eventually did with the DS, that not every game has to be centered completely around the system’s novel interface.

The Nintendo Wii – Hail to the king, baby!

The press and Wall Street have been abuzz with debate over whether the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 will walk away as this generation’s dominant console. I think they are missing out on the fact that the Nintendo Wii has a good chance of becoming the market leader by sidestepping the battle for the table scraps of the hardcore gaming market and focusing instead on expanding the console market — similar to how Runescape and World of Warcraft have expanded the MMORPG market rather than just fighting for the hardcore fans of Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot.  

Let’s put it another way: while the PS3 and XBox360 have been busy duking out to see who can be the most tricked out consumer hardware box in the living room, the Wii might just sneak up behind them and take their lunch money.    Nintendo’s 3 ^rd place showing last generation helped pigeonhole them as an also-ran this time around, despite the fact that although the XBox outperformed the Gamecube in absolute volume of units sold, the Gamecube was a profitable venture for Nintendo, whereas Microsoft lost somewhere in the vicinity of $4 billion dollars over the XBox’s lifetime.

Why the Wii can win:

• Control system that non-gamers can instantly ‘get’
• Simple games like Wii Sports that make use of that controller
• Vast library of pre-existing games to play, from older game systems like the NES, SNES, Genesis and Turbo-Grafix 16
• Nintendo’s first-party titles (Zelda, Mario, Super Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc), which will keep bringing in the millions of Nintendo fanboy and fangirls
• Simple and portable system, can easily be brought over to grandma’s house for holiday dinners and hooked up to her crappy old SD TV.  Grassroots viral marketing!

Nintendo’s brilliant strategy is making some Wii games extremely easy to play, simple even for people who have never before played a videogame. Consider Wii Sports, which ships with the console – bucking the trend of the console industry, which hasn’t seen a manufacturer do a factory game pack-in for a new console in a long time.  Wii Sports is a collection of sports games including Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, Golf, and Boxing. Playing a game of tennis on the Wii is as simple as grabbing the Wii remote and swinging it around as you would a tennis racket.   Playing golf is as simple as swinging a golf club.  Social and simple with low user commitment – exactly the right strategy.

Photo: Wii Sports Tennis

This may seem overly simplistic to hardcore gamers, but the mapping of your real world movements into the game (albeit it in a highly simplified fashion) is just plain fun! More importantly for Nintendo’s bottom-line, it is just incredibly easy to understand.  Your mom can play the Wii.  Your grandparents can play the Wii.  Your 4 year old niece can play the Wii.  Heck, even my fat cat can play the Wii – though he hasn’t proved to be very adept at running after the ball. 

If you put such simplistic, easy to play games on the PS3 or the 360, you would still run into a LOT of people who wouldn’t even take your word for it that it was simple to play.  They would take one look at the controller, with its approximately 500 buttons and go into that “I can’t do that, that’s too hard” mode that non-geeks go in when confronted with anything technical that can’t be easily parsed at first glance.  The Wii Remote bridges over that, because the average person can see you swing the device and see your little Mii swing at the same time.  They then feel they can do it too, because they can understand how it works.  

A lot of the battle here for non-gamers is psychological – it’s a matter of convincing people who were never into games or ex-gamers who abandoned games due to the rising complexity levels to pick up the remote and give it a few swats to convince themselves that, yeah, they can do it.  And boy, it’s fun too!

Nintendo has already successfully executed a similar market expansion strategy in the handheld device space with the Nintendo DS.  The DS’s trick was a touch-screen with pen based input.  From a technical perspective, this is nothing new -the PalmPilot and WindowsCE devices have been doing that for ages.  But Nintendo is the first major company to build a focused gaming device around this idea and it paid off, launching the Nintendo DS into the hands of young and old, gamers and non-gamers.   Kotaku writes about how the DS and the game Brain Age ‘exploded the notion of what a game really is’.   (yes, others like Tapwave tried but failed because they didn’t understand the unique advantage that the pen-based input gave them, not to mention the fact that they were way overpriced and lacked developer support.)

People know how to use a pen, they can see someone playing Brain Age or the Sudoku minigame within it and just instantly understand how it works.  There’s almost no learning curve, and the Nintendo DS has been an immensely huge seller because of that, thrashing the Sony PSP which followed the Xbox360 and PS3 route of focusing their competitive advantage around advanced graphics for hardcore gamers.   Nintendo succeeds because they are focused on solving the core user need – helping average people have a lot of fun – rather than becoming hopelessly mired in a feature / functionality battle with historic competitors.  (MMO developers, consumer web product designers - are you paying attention?)

Nintendo hasn’t forgotten the hardcore Nintendo fans either.  The #1 selling Wii game at launch is the latest installment of the epic Legend of Zelda game series and IMO, this is the best Zelda yet.  I’m 20 hours into the game and still having a blast.   And, other than Knights of the Old Republic and a few other anomalies, I pretty much hate most single player games.  All of the usual suspect Nintendo franchises such as Metroid, Mario, Super Smash Brothers, will be coming to the Wii as it is also backwards compatible with the Gamecube.
 
Of course, nothing is perfect, but Nintendo is really on track to accomplish what it set out to do with the Wii – grow the overall console gaming market.  When I show my Xbox360 running Gears of War to my non-gamer friends, they’re all very impressed by the realistic graphics but few become compelled to actually try to play the game themselves.  When I show my Wii running Wii Sports and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz to the same crowd, everyone wants to play (those extra 3 wii-remotes and nunchuks come in hand for doubles tennis) and after a few minutes of playing they all ask the same questions: “How much does this thing cost?”  And after I say $250, they then ask, “Where can I get one?” 

Photo: Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz – Anyone can hurdle! Even monkeys in transparent plastic balls! Whee!

[Random: I love Super Monkey Ball!  When I went ornament shopping for my Christmas tree earlier this week, I really wanted AiAi and MeeMee ornaments. Does anyone know of anyone that sells such a thing?]