I am absolutely about to fan-boy here, and I am not ashamed of it.
The big three companies when referring to gaming are Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft (developers of the Gameboy and Wii peripherals, PlayStation systems, and Xboxes respectively). Over the past few years anyone who has even seen a video game or knows gamers have overheard discussions detailing Nintendo’s declining customer base and general inability to “keep up” with the progression of the gaming market. While it is true that Nintendo has had a few missteps in marketing and development in the past few years, to say that they will inevitably go under and stop producing games (an argument I have actually heard) is, in no uncertain terms, preposterous.
Nintendo as a company is no stranger to sticky situations. The company was originally developed in 1889, manufacturing and selling “Hanafuda” cards, a popular game in Japan. The company evolved to manufacture card and board games, donning the name “Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd.” in 1951. The company did not begin actually working with computers and games until 1980 when they released the “GAME & WATCH” products, a portable game LCD game with a microprocessor.
What we now recognize as the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System, was released as the Famicom, or Family Computer in Japan in 1984; this was a terrible time to break into the video game industry. With Atari’s colossal collapse due in part to the extremely costly failure of the E.T. game for the Atari 2600 (officially my favorite urban legend in gaming) coupled with the oversaturation of video game consoles in the market at the time, people just were not buying video games. Nintendo recognized the dying gaming industry, and thus decided to market their product as an “Entertainment System” or computer (in Japan) as opposed to a video game system. While anyone in the modern day would see right through that, this technology was so new that the general consumer was willing to believe something under a different name was something completely different. With the video game market crashing, the computer industry also began to thrive as people recognized that computers could double as simple gaming devices and tools for the future. Nintendo’s market doubling as the “Family Computer” was brilliant.
Nintendo is no stranger to a fickle market. Often credited with saving the video game industry in the 1980s, Nintendo has outsmarted odds on several occasions. The NES was succeeded by the SNES and the N64, as microprocessors got stronger and could render and display more bits on the screen (moving from 8-bit to 16-bit to 64-bit, respectively). 64-bit displays brought gaming into the 3D realm, allowing some of the most popular games to gain this popularity due to their extreme technological difference from anything that had ever been seen on a console before. These games included legends such as “Super Mario 64”, “Donkey Kong Country”, and “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. But if Nintendo knows how to market in less than ideal circumstances, why have they fallen so far behind in the modern market? This sad story began in 2005/2006 with the releases of the Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
In the late 2000s, began the overall transition into HD. While the only one of the three main consoles to release HDMI compatible was the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 was able to at least handle a resolution of 576i if your TV could support it. When HD rolled around the PS3 and Xbox 360 were extremely quick to release new versions of their console offering stronger GPUs and HDMI capability (among a slew of other minor improvements). Nintendo never got on board with the HD movement, believing that their innovative motion control technology would be able to maintain their console in the race with the other two. While very few 360 and PS3 games ran at the full 1920x1080, they still ran at noticeably higher resolutions than any game for the Wii.
The Wii also faced a host of other problems. While the motion controls were extremely innovative for their time (and I still uphold that they were genuinely fun), they weren’t exactly perfect. Many games featured necessary movements needed within the game that simply couldn’t be read fast enough by the controller to function within the game, leading many games to use the “Hold the Wii Controller Sideways” technique to make their games completely playable, but it also removed the innovation of motion controls. Nintendo also dug themselves the problem of not focusing enough on the importance of third party game development. Third part focus is one of the reasons why today I prefer PlayStation over Xbox, while my Nintendo love remains on the same level, not dying. (Just to touch on it, I absolutely refuse to let the whole “I threw my Wii Remote through my TV” issue to be a legitimate reason the console didn’t do well. Consumer intelligence is something Nintendo accounted for and offered a solution to.) Not to say that there were no third party games, but Nintendo also barely help their partners with market third party games, and admittedly that’s just not cool.
But I refuse to let my love for Nintendo die like so many others have greatly due to curiosity. The Wii U has addressed several problems with the Wii and fixed most of them (with the glaring exception of third party support), but Nintendo still faces an extremely unique problem. Taking the focus off of console support for a few years and focusing on the Nintendo DS evolution has left Nintendo in something of a pickle. The Wii was the best-selling console of the console generation, but because the company has been producing consoles since 1983, a large part of Nintendo’s current fan-base includes people who grew gaming in the golden age of late SNES and N64 lifespans, and now this dedicated fan-base, constructed on gaming that was technologically brilliant and an incredible array of first and third party games which included new and old IPs, has grown up. Fans of Nintendo are older now with families and jobs and, most importantly, kids. Many adults seeking to teach their kids about gaming turn to Nintendo, leaving Nintendo with a new fan-base consisting of older, dedicated fans and young, new gamers. In that situation, who do you cater to? This is an extremely peculiar situation, as the other consoles know exactly who their audiences are and can market directly to them.
Sure, Nintendo’s treatment of their future has been a little confusing, what with the rumored NX console not appearing at E3 but still slated for a March release and a consistently sporadic release schedule for anything and everything 3DS, Nintendo isn’t handling this new stress well, but being a company based on a console credited with saving an entire, modern-day multi-billion-dollar industry, I absolutely feel that my faith isn’t misplaced in believing that Nintendo will get back on the right track. Following the Year of Luigi, the absolute marketing and economic horror show that was for the company it was actually been up and up, and with a little bit of undying faith and a lot of genuine consumer feedback, I firmly believe that Nintendo will rise again.
