Ping: Nintendo fans

[SackAttack]

Both of you. Is this little tidbit causing you as much head-shaking as it is me?

Originally Posted by GameSpot

Iwata said the DS and PSP aren't directly competing, because Nintendo is aiming for nongamers and retired gamers with its handheld, while Sony is targeting the traditional gaming audience. He added that his company will also attempt to avoid competing in the next-gen console market.

"Similar to the relationship that the DS has with the PSP, we won't fight over the same share of the pie with another company. We have no intention of fighting over shares of the market in a way that will shrink it. For us, success will depend on whether we can call back people that have stopped playing games, and whether we can also bring in a new base of customers. That way, our share [of the market] will increase since the market will grow bigger," Iwata said.

What the hell? If you're abandoning current market share to chase a new demographic - which may well grow the market - how is your market share going to increase? Every new gamer you add to the market means that you have to work that much harder to regain your former standing, because each gamer represents a smaller slice of the pie. Now, I'm all for attracting new eyes to your product, but why simply give up competing for existing market share in the process?

[Desnudo]

"retired gamers?"

Well it's been a great 15 years, but I think it's time I finally hung up the paddle. My thumbs are constantly hurting and my eye-hand isn't what it used to be.

[CentralMassHokie]

I wonder if he means competing in the sense that they don't expect people to choose Nintendo over Sony/Microsoft, but instead alongside it. Meaning they can keep churning out the stellar first-party games and innovative gaming that the behemoths shy away from and gamers will keep buying Nintendo to sit next to their PS3 or XBox2.

I'm one of those folks - I've got my Cube next to my XBox. The Cube's probably gotten more work just out of a handful of games (Zelda, Eternal Darkness, Animal Crossing, Metroid Prime).

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by CentralMassHokie

I wonder if he means competing in the sense that they don't expect people to choose Nintendo over Sony/Microsoft, but instead alongside it. Meaning they can keep churning out the stellar first-party games and innovative gaming that the behemoths shy away from and gamers will keep buying Nintendo to sit next to their PS3 or XBox2.

I don't know. The main problem with this philosophy is that it assumes 2 things.

1) that mainstream gamers will continue to buy Nintendo hardware for the handful of excellent first-party games Nintendo puts out for their platforms.

2) that the market share Nintendo is attempting to attract will actually come.

Nintendophiles have been bemoaning Nintendo's move away from them for a while now - for this entire generation, in fact. First it was "god, they're ignoring those of us who grew up with them and continuing to aim at kids," and now it's "okay, they're on their 'screw long-time gamers' path to go get grandma to buy herself a Nintendo."

I just don't see how this is a successful philosophy unless Nintendo is either overwhelmingly successful at attracting this new demographic, or else willing to lower their price point enough to keep their current customers happy enough to stay with them, as you put it, "alongside" Sony and Nintendo while they reach out for this new demographic. Kids go with "what's cool," and if Nintendo ignores that mainstream, kids are going to pester their parents for the Sony alternative, more than they already have the last 10 years.

I don't think there's been a game company more successful than Nintendo at marginalizing themselves, and that includes the disaster Atari became in the mid 1980s.

[CentralMassHokie]

As long as Miyamoto is making games, Nintendo's got a shot. And I think they're still making money, just not as much as the other players in the market.

Right now they're like Apple. They've got a very devoted fan base, keep coming out with great products, but haven't figured out how to succesfully market anything but a handheld (iPod/GBA).

[Joe]

whats a DS and PSP?

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by CentralMassHokie

As long as Miyamoto is making games, Nintendo's got a shot. And I think they're still making money, just not as much as the other players in the market.

That's a dangerous position to be in, though. Remember Gunpei Yokoi? He's the dude who invented the Game Boy. He died in a car accident in the late 1980s; I'm not sure if he was hit by a car, or if he was in a car involved in a collision. Either way, Nintendo was fortunate that he was "only" responsible for the creation of a piece of hardware, which could subsequently be improved upon.

Miyamoto, on the other hand, is on the creative side of the business. If something similar happens to him, Nintendo is utterly fucked.

Right now they're like Apple. They've got a very devoted fan base, keep coming out with great products, but haven't figured out how to succesfully market anything but a handheld (iPod/GBA).

Not entirely true. Nintendo was a marketing behemoth from 1984-1995. The problem is that they made several mistakes with the N64, and since then the philosophy seems to have shifted from a Khrushchevesque "We will bury you" attitude towards their competitors to "Don't try, don't make waves, let Sony do their thing and we'll find a market niche of our own."

It's not terribly inspiring, and I wonder how much of that relates to the fact that Hiroshi Yamauchi and Minoru Arawaka are now retired, and Howard Lincoln's role in the company has been reduced. Those three made Nintendo into the force in the gaming industry that it once was, and since NOA passed from Yamauchi to Iwata and Miyamoto, things haven't really been the same.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by George W Bush

whats a DS and PSP?

Nintendo DS = two-screen handheld. Bottom screen is a touch-screen, and the system also has a built-in microphone and WiFi connectivity.

PSP = Sony's "Walkman for the 21st century." It plays games on mini optical discs, and will play movies on the same. It can connect to a PC to allow you to transfer music files, home movie files, etc to the system for portable consumption. It has wireless connectivity, and will presumably connect with PS2/PS3 much the way that Game Boy Advance currently connects with GameCube. Oh, and since its architecture is so similar to PS2, you're going to see some of the huge PS2 franchises ported. Grand Theft Auto will be making an appearance, although it will be an original GTA game rather than a port of GTA 3, Vice City, or San Andreas.

[sterlingice]

*sigh* I've said for quite a while now that Iwata has no clue what he's doing and he tries again and again to do crap like this. Then it's really funny to watch Reggie Fils-Aime have to try and spin this. Funny in a sad and massochistic sort of way *goes off to weep in a corner*

SI

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

Nintendo DS = two-screen handheld. Bottom screen is a touch-screen, and the system also has a built-in microphone and WiFi connectivity.

PSP = Sony's "Walkman for the 21st century." It plays games on mini optical discs, and will play movies on the same. It can connect to a PC to allow you to transfer music files, home movie files, etc to the system for portable consumption. It has wireless connectivity, and will presumably connect with PS2/PS3 much the way that Game Boy Advance currently connects with GameCube. Oh, and since its architecture is so similar to PS2, you're going to see some of the huge PS2 franchises ported. Grand Theft Auto will be making an appearance, although it will be an original GTA game rather than a port of GTA 3, Vice City, or San Andreas.

Yeah, and this is the perfect illustration of a lot of what Nintendo has done. You have someone in the "gaming media" who can tell you tons of speculation and hype about the PSP despite it not being out in the US and then two sentences about the DS despite the fact that it's from the market leader, oh, and it's already out in the US and has sold over 1M units worldwide despite having been announced less than a year ago.

Never mind that it's got built in wifi and a secondary wireless protocol, will release lots of Nintendo franchises, and will presumably connect to Nintendo's next generation system and has an mp3/mpeg player peripheral already out in Japan that plays on common SD media (wow, that sounds a lot like what you said about the PSP but it was strangely absent in your description of the DS).

Thanks, SA, you're always there to help me illustrate points about media bias.

SI

[Eaglesfan27]

The retired gamers is an interesting phrase. Both my wife's grandparents and my own grandmother really enjoy playing the Super Nintendo games. Perhaps, they are intending to pursue the geriatric population.

[CentralMassHokie]

There are some major downsides to the PSP:

-Battery life seems to be pretty short
-Doesn't play DVDs, obviously, so you'll either have to purchase special PSP videos or put music/videos on a memory stick. A Sony proprietary memory stick, which will likely cost you as much as an iPod Shuffle for about the same memory size.

I'm not sold on the DS, but it's unique and the demo of Metroid plays insanely sweet, almost like using a mouse for a shooter. Nintendo just doesn't have any games out for it that are system sellers. Hopefully that will change shortly.

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by Eaglesfan27

The retired gamers is an interesting phrase. Both my wife's grandparents and my own grandmother really enjoy playing the Super Nintendo games. Perhaps, they are intending to pursue the geriatric population.

I think by "retired" gamers they are not looking for retirees, but simply gamers that have retired [from gaming]. Seriously, I think some *do* exist.

I mean, I look at myself. Like GWB, I have no idea what half of the terminology in the thread is. The last system I bought was a Playstation, and really even then I hardly played that. Just like I only marginally played my SNES before that. The last system that I truly feel like I played was the original Nintendo. For whatever reason, I've gotten out of the gaming mainstream. Maybe it's because I didn't have money in college, and maybe because after that I didn't have much time because of having kids. Who knows. But I'm 31, and right now I feel like I'm outside of gaming's primary audience.

At this point, sure, I guess I'll play some of the newer games when my kids get old enough and we buy them for them. But I'll likely feel just as lost as my parents did when I would beat them 99-9 at Intellivision Baseball. Now, if they rereleased some older titles (gee, Techmo anyone?), hey, I might buy those (I still like consoles better than playing emulators on the computer).

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

Thanks, SA, you're always there to help me illustrate points about media bias.

Believe it or not, SI, I have higher hopes for the DS in the long run than the PSP. But it's as much about what you put out there as what you actually have. Sony has made much of the PSP's other media capabilities, so when I sit here and try to describe them off the cuff, I have more to work with.

Now you have DS, on the other hand, and most of what it can do is squarely in the form of "potential." It's an "okay, here's this technology, now what are we going to do with it?" situation. Can you show me an example of something Nintendo has said "We specifically intend to do this" with? I'd be surprised.

It's not media bias. It's what information is available to the media. I will pick up a PSP eventually, for two reasons: 1) so we can cover the games at Gamenikki, and 2) for Nippon Ichi's Makai Wars.

DS, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to the new Castlevania, the new Mario Bros, the new Advance Wars, and a handful of other titles, plus I have a burning curiosity to know what Nintendo will be able to do with DS' capabilities beyond the obvious.

But when Nintendo themselves aren't forthcoming about their plans, what can I say? "It has wireless gameplay, two screens, one of which is a touchscreen, and a built-in microphone, and graphical capabilities slightly better than N64." Those are the facts I have to work with. I can speculate, but all of that speculation would be based around what I'd like to see, rather than what will actually transpire.

You look at PSP, and Sony has these clearly defined plans for the handheld. Maybe they'll actually follow through, and maybe they won't. I think we all remember how long it was before they bothered to release the hard drive. But the fact is, they've got something out there that I can work with and talk about.

Media "bias" is often just as much about what you give the media to work with as it is about any inherent predilection towards one or the other.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by CentralMassHokie

There are some major downsides to the PSP:

-Battery life seems to be pretty short

Indeed. That's what happens when your system has moving parts. I had hoped Sony would try to address this with better battery efficiency, but instead they've asked developers to avoid streaming directly from the disc, and they've announced plans to sell an extra battery pack separately, so that you can swap one for the other when the one in use dies. Kinda like a cell phone.

-Doesn't play DVDs, obviously, so you'll either have to purchase special PSP videos or put music/videos on a memory stick. A Sony proprietary memory stick, which will likely cost you as much as an iPod Shuffle for about the same memory size.

That's not a drawback of PSP. That's a drawback of handheld technology. It's just not feasible to create a handheld game system with media that large. The movies that PSP will play will be released on the same UMD discs that they'll use for the games, and the aforementioned PC connectivity will allow you to transfer mp3s and certain video filetypes to the Memory Stick Duo Pro. The MSDP, incidentally, will also be required in order to save your game information. That's one of the drawbacks of trying to shift from the cartridge/chip based media Nintendo have always used to an optical format. Well, it's a drawback for you and me, but it's more money in Sony's coffers.

I'm not sold on the DS, but it's unique and the demo of Metroid plays insanely sweet, almost like using a mouse for a shooter. Nintendo just doesn't have any games out for it that are system sellers. Hopefully that will change shortly.

So far, a lot of the games planned feel like tech demos. Nintendo's own Pokemon Dash seems to be the same as what Sega showed off for Sonic the Hedgehog - rub the screen to make your character run really fast. WarioWare seems like a natural fit for the DS technology, since it's always been minigame-driven anyway, and I'd not be surprised to see card-based RPGs such as Yu-Gi-Oh carve out a profitable niche on the system, either. Pac-Pix looks like a neat twist on the Pac-Man franchise, but it's no more a system-seller than Pac-Man Vs. was for GameCube. We'll see what sort of games ultimately settle on DS in the long run, but in the short term, the games offered aren't going to be able to compete terribly favorably with Gran Turismo 4 Portable, say.