No matter how its console business is doing, Nintendo has always been able to lean on healthy portable system sales to prop up its finances. With the Wii U continuing to severely underperform sales expectations, though, it looks like the Nintendo 3DS is failing to pick up the slack as its predecessors once did.
Nintendo’s going to need a better strategy. Maybe the past 15 years of rehashing the same Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games is finally catching up to them.
People don’t want specialized devices to carry around anymore. Why carry a 3DS when I already have my phablet on me? Sure, I can’t play Zelda or Mario on it, but I can play a ton of other games, as well as browse facebook and twitter. And, the phablet has a better screen to boot!
Well, smartphones have crappy touch controls, so something is lost when playing a game on a smartphone, but I agree with you that only the most die-hards nowaday carry around Nintendo 3DSes and PS Vitas…
Kids don’t mind, but parents aren’t likely to buy a 3DS for their kids, when they are (increasingly likely) already carrying a phone, too.
My kid recently got a hand-me-down iPad. Hasn’t touched his Nintendo since. Can’t play BoomBeach or Minecraft on a 3DS…
Yes you can, you dualboot 3ds linux, install java and run the minecraft.jar file, works like a charm.
Edited 2016-02-27 09:54 UTC
Omg. NERD!!!
A touchscreen is a shitty interface for games that aren’t strategies, swipe games, or casino games, but it’s good enough for a lot of people when the alternative is lugging around another piece of hardware just to have a better interface.
If Nintendo can figure out how to make a phone version of Zelda or Mario that’s actually fun to play, maybe that’s the route to go where portable gaming is concerned. At this point I’m not filled with confidence they can create a portable device so amazing it will make people willing to buy it and carry it around in addition to their cellphone.
You can’t generalise like that though.
Sure, the majority of people will not buy a single use case device, but you have only to look at the Kindle to see that people will buy them if they offer sufficient advantages over their generalised device.
If you already carry around a bag with things like a notebook and essentials like moisturiser, it’s not hard to add something small and light like a Kindle or portable games console.
It just means that they’ll have to adjust to it being a more niche device, and that they should consider doing as Amazon do, and allow games to be run from within an app as well as on their official device.
I prefer to buy used cartridges old enough to have a solid emulation story and then plug them into my Retrode2 and copy them onto my OpenPandora as a way to have DRM-free backups so what I own will last while also giving the emulation section of Nintendo’s Legal FAQ the finger.
(Assuming I even have to do that. DotEmu used to have a license to sell Steam-free copies of the Sega Genesis Classics Pack and there’s a QuickBMS script to convert those data files to normal ROMs.)
There are tons of still-good games that I either missed or couldn’t afford as a kid.
On the portable side, the newest thing I have is an original DS (model NTR-001) from the days when I was a blind consumer.
Edited 2016-02-27 00:39 UTC
It isn’t this at all. Nintendo’s IP is still very popular. The trouble is, their awesome IP is more and more being the only thing that they have.
In the living room, they don’t have the hardware, and their online service is still lacking in a lot of ways.
For portables, they have to compete with cell phones, which are more and more common for children (Especially children of helicopter parents), and phones play games.
There’s fewer and fewer big third-party IP coming to Nintendo systems, too. It’s these things, that are hurting Nintendo, not “rehashing” the same old IP.
I agree, Nintendo’s properties are not the issue at all.
The issue is almost everything else: Some people are tired of the “gimmicks”. Others want more mature games. Then there is the desire for 3rd party support, which was worn thin with the last 3 console generations… Which where all decent machines, but had hardware that was behind the competition.
Maybe it’s the Nintendo fanboy in me, but I’m hoping that the NX comes out as a killer system. If the rumors are true, and it is a system that is at least “on par” with the competing consoles, yet allows you to take your games with you on a portable solution, they might have a winning combination there.
If they can get the portable unit to be the same thing at the home console, allowing you to literally take your games with you, I think gamers would like that.
Would it replace phones? No. But tablet sales have been falling, and playing most games on a phone is less than ideal. I still think there is a market for such a dedicated machine.
Indeed. It’s a pretty disappointing selection of 3rd party games for the WiiU on display in the average game shop. There were some big titles a while back (Mass Effect 3, Deus Ex etc.), but it’s very rare to see them on the shelf anywhere. For some reason, games shops seem to just want to carry the usual fluffy games aimed at kids.
Between that and the fact that many people don’t actually understand what a Wii U is (a number of people I know thought it was some sort of tablet add-on for the Wii…), it’s no wonder it’s failing dismally. It’s a pity really because it’s actually a nice little machine.
I think a lot of us Android/iPhone wielding people would love to have 15 years of rehashed Marios and Zeldas. If they would make a great Mario game for these platforms without in-app purchases, I think a lot of people would drop 10-20 Euro on it without a thought.
Of course, Nintendo won’t do this, because it would cannibalize the DS and you can scrape fewer profit from a platform that you don’t own.
The problem is that they have been focussing on the low-end family market, using cheap consoles with very modest hardware. That market increasingly uses smartphones for gaming. So, I see only two possible routes: either they go to that market, or they somehow manage to go to the high-end gaming market in which Sony does well.
Although OSnews likes declaring platforms and companies dead recently, the Nintendo company is still making a profit. Ok “only” 150m but thats really not bad for a company in distant 3rd who have killed sales by announcing an upcoming product… They also saved all that good days money to the point they could operate the comapny for 17 years in its current form making 0 turnover!!!
The games they are making are still of best in class standard and i play my WiiU Far more than my Xbox One. The NX is a push to bring back in the 3rd parties back into the fold. When i say 3rd parties, i mean “yet another FPS” and “sports title 2017”.
I’m sure there are others somewhere who would say the same thing too. There always is. However, to sell games you have to sell the hardware they play on and so far the WiiU has sold a very mild 12 million and some change. You aren’t going to make any big dent in the gaming pie with those kinds of numbers.
You should look up the concept of debt… See Sony for a good example.
If a company bleeds cash on hand, it’s difficult to acquire more cash through debt. If they acquire more cash through an additional cash infusion, that’s usually by diluting stock, which devalues what the current shareholders have (though, if the company is losing money, it’s losing value, and the stock is losing value as a reflection of that).
That is true, but you don’t need to acquire more cash when you are nowhere near to running out of cash…
I’m not arguing that Nintendo is in great shape, they are not. What I am arguing is that they are in a good position to weather a few slow years (more than a few).
They are still profitable, even if it isn’t by much. And they have LOADS of cash. They have no need to acquire debt, and they are not bleeding cash – at least not yet. They just need to figure out what to do next and execute on it.
I’m just saying, they might be down, but they are no where near out.
Loads of cash doesn’t mean they don’t also have structured debt. What’s their current book value? What’s their market cap? Whats’ the current burn rate, and what a forecast burn rate given the kinds of expenditures they would need to make to become competitive in their markets again?
It’s not so cut n’ dry. Just getting a cash infusion or having access to liquidity to fund a business does not sum up to the business being successful. If the current management can’t navigate the current business environment while armed with the current war chest, do you really think investors will have the confidence to give them good terms on investment options later on?
It’s way more complex than ‘but they have lots of cash on hand’.
Cash on hand != competence.
It sure as shit doesn’t hurt though
You should pay attention to what you’re replying to. Taking on debt has absolutely nothing to do with my response and what it was responding to.
Edited 2016-02-29 17:41 UTC
Do you understand why they have sold so few Wii U’s though? There’s three primary reasons, all of which Nintendo needs to fix if they want to come back:
1. They’re targeting children. Children are by definition reliant on their parents for cash, which means the end users are not the same as the people who will be doing the purchasing, which is a very bad marketing strategy.
2. There is significant input latency compared to other current generation consoles. This absolutely kills the platform for any kind of FPS, MMO, or RTS, which constitutes a significant majority of what a lot of hard-core gamers play.
3. Internally, their hardware is horrible. The XB1 is close enough to a PC that it runs an almost unmodified version of Windows. The PS4 does similar with BSD (probably FreeBSD, but I’m not certain). The Wii U can’t even begin to try and get away with that, as it’s got 3 different processor architectures just in the console, and an entirely isolated CPU in the gamepad. On top of that, the PS4 and XB1 both use an 8-core CPU running at around 1.5 GHz, while the Wii U uses a tri-core running at 0.5 GHz. The AI in games available on both the Wii U and some other non-Nintendo platform is noticeably weaker on the Wii U.
No argument. The Wii-U has far less overall horsepower, mostly because even though it has slightly more powerful CPU cores, it only has 3 of them.
Anyway, I’m not arguing your overall point. The Wii-U is less powerful hardware. I just prefer to see the argument presented with actual facts…
Edited 2016-02-29 16:26 UTC
I actually had not realized the XB1 used virtualization and ran the games so heavily isolated from the core OS. My point that porting is relatively simple for a PC game though still stands.
As far as the Wii U though, the POWER (they’re a stripped down POWER7 ISA) cores are not dedicated just to games, they also run the primary OS (the functionality of the Wii U menu and I’m pretty sure also the home screen and other overlay’s accessed through that). The ARM core functions primarily as an I/O co-processor (just like it did on both the Wii and the GameCube), but it still needs to be considered because it changes how you deal with peripherals (and it is possible to side-load code to run on it, this is how the GCN/Wii port of Linux works). The third ISA is technically the GPU, which is sufficiently different from desktop (or even XB360/PS3) usage that it needs to be considered independently. Also, there are drastic differences between the design of the CPU in the 360 and the Wii U. The 360 actually used a sub-licensed variant of the CellBE design used in the PS3, just with a different GPU. A CellBE chip consists of a single PPC core with 7 highly specialized co-processors used for specific tasks. The only similarities there are the assembly dialect and the concept of using dedicated co-processors for I/O.
Every peripheral is a distinct piece of hardware to program, regardless of how it’s programmed. While the gamepad may not be directly programmable by game developers, it still brings something sufficiently different to the console’s design that it impacts development. Secondarily, the complexity of the gamepad is a portion of the issue they have with input latency.
The PS4 CPU runs at a nominal 1.5GHz, with dynamic power management via frequency scaling based on utilization. The XB1 is fixed at 1.2GHz. If we assume regular instruction pipe-lining and other factors being equivalent to the nearest commercially available processor, they should get roughly the same number of instructions per second per Hz, not accounting for the performance improvement inherent in the PS4 and XB1 using 64-bit processors while the Wii U uses 32-bit cores, or the fact that the POWER ISA tends to do better with unpredictable branching and context switching (which are both highly prevalent in video game design). And regardless of this, ISA doesn’t matter anywhere near as much when there’s this much disparity in processor speed.
I would argue the difference is clock speed is pretty much defined by the ISA, not the other way around… Clock speed in isolation is a meaningless metric.
IMHO, they should just stop making weird hardware.
The NES, gameboy, SNES, GBA, etc … those were awesome, dedicated machines. They were very good at what they were designed for. Sure, there were some issues, but generally, the hardware kicked all kinds of ass.
I can still pick up an original gameboy today and have fun with it.
Now, they’re just all about doing weird stuff with their platforms.
DS/3DS … sorry, tried it … just too weird. Make a single screen “3D”, and i would be all for it, but this gimmicky two screen thing with the touch pen … no thanks.
The wii was interesting but got old pretty quick. Their focus on the online part of it made it even worse, because their online services are weird, buggy and not very user friendly. Remember the numeric ids? Ugh …
The Wii had it’s upsides. I had a lot of fun playing zelda and the original supermario galaxy on it. Supermario galaxy is an awesome, awesome game … but that’s despite the wii’s weirdness … not because of it.
The Wii U … i’m not even going to touch that one.
My sister has one. It’s slow, it’s weird, the tablet … i just don’t get it.
And no … phones and tablets are not a replacement for a good portable or console gaming platform. No way.
Unless you’re into RTS maybe …
No, what they should do is keep making the awesome games. Zelda, mario, etc … they don’t get old.
Keep making the games, but please … PLEASE … make a decent platform for them.
Think GBA with a large HD screen, decent battery and decent sound.
It can run android for all i care, that’s not going to be a problem for the games.
Limit the online services to what’s useful. Shop/download, savegames backup, maybe a form of chat, but that’s it.
Never going to happen, but there … those are my two cents.
Welcome to the wonderful world of PS Vita.
Yuk, exactly. The PS Vita has been a flop because it’s too powerful, too gimmicky.
Battery life is what matters. Gaming on a phone leaves you with a dead phone when you most need it, a dedicated gaming device is still a good idea, but we’ve got to move on from 4-5hrs battery life.
Sony should have re-engineered the PSP, bumped the specs only a little and focused on battery life.
I have one of those too.
Gave it away. Terrible battery life and very poor offerings from sony on the game side.
Not my experience. My Vita’s battery life is about 5 hours, my 3DS XL doesn’t give me more time.
Plenty of excellent games on the system (as on 3DS, both of these consoles have really excellent games).
I had the original fat version with the oled screen. Maybe you have the newer version?
I also use the FAT oled 1000 Vita.
Well, the battery lasted 2-2.5 hrs for me, not more.
They should have invested in VR tech. Could you imagine Ocarina of Time or Super Smash Bros in VR? They gave us interactive gaming’s first step with the Wii. It would make sense for them to put out a console with VR tech built in. They could also put out a DS with a screen you can clip in to a VR head set.
Alas, I’m sure they won’t go that direction. Get ready for Pokemon Obsidian and Super Smash Bros 25.
A DS? So like VR in 400x240px? It’ll be like living inside an animated GIF!
I’ve tried an Oculus Rift. IMO you need extremely high resolutions to make 3D work.
I’m with Thom on this one. If the Wii U had something other than slightly updated versions of the same games every previous Nintendo console had, I might have bought it.
People love Mario and Smash Bros, fine (I don’t), but I bought an SNES to play Secret of Mana and the Final Fantasy Games.
When all the developers moved to PS and Xbox I moved with them.
A Zelda rehash and Mario game won’t make me buy their unimpressive console.
Does Super Mario Maker count as a rehash of old IP to you?
No, it’s Nintendo scaring off the author of a massively popular non-profit fan-game (Super Mario Bros. X, written by Redigit before he did Terraria) and then making a knock-off on their proprietary platform and claiming it as their own inspiration.
Redigit managed to talk Nintendo out of demanding that he hand over the domain to his fansite but the community ignored his request to not repost SMBX and built a new website for it:
http://www.supermariobrosx.org/
They even managed to make a 1.3.0.1 patch release without access to the source and are currently working on an open-source v2.0 based on reverse-engineering the level format used in 1.x.
(If I understand it correctly, by migrating incrementally to a completely legal, general-purpose, open-source RPG Maker-esque solution that just happens to be compatible with resources grabbed from SMBX.)
Edited 2016-02-28 02:26 UTC
Correction: Based on reverse-engineering the level format and algorithms. (They want 100% compatibility, which means reproducing all of the algorithmic quirks that levels may rely on to achieve interesting effects)
Quite a number of mid-level Apple executives have been spending quite a large amount of time at Nintendo’s office in Redmond over the last several months.
Take that for what you will.
While Nintendo has lots of issues, people getting tired of their game franchises is not a significant part of it…
Their biggest issue is the lack of non-Nintendo offerings on their systems. And even when a company does something for the Wii U or 3DS, it’s usually an afterthought once they have something for the other current console systems. There are multiple reasons for this, but I think the biggest is that Nintendo’s hardware is horrible compared to a PS4 or XB1. The PS4 and XB1 both use a custom AMD designed 8-core processor running at over 1GHz with mostly conventional internal hardware (which means they’re easy to program for if you are already writing something for the PC). By comparison, the Wii U uses a custom IBM designed tri-core CPU running at 0.5GHz with a dedicated I/O co-processor which uses a different ISA, and a cheap custom AMD GPU which has a drastically different API from most GPUs, plus a unknown CPU in the gamepad (probably a single or dual core Cortex-R or Cortex-M derivative), all using a semi-custom internal architecture more similar to embedded systems. This means that :
1. The Wii U has significantly less processing power compared to the PS4 or XB1 (and for single-threaded stuff, it actually has less processing power than the original Wii did), which in turn means that the AI will almost always be weaker on the Wii U compared to other consoles.
2. Programming for the Wii U is significantly more difficult than the PS4 and XB1.
Overall, combined with Nintendo’s younger target audience, this means that there are fewer incentives for third-party developers to make games for the Wii U. A similar situation exists for the 3DS relative to smart phones and stuff like the OpenPandora.