Author Topic: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?  (Read 18011 times)

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Offline EasyCure

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #50 on: March 19, 2014, 09:16:19 PM »
So, Ian, how exactly would you propose Nintendo do that without pissing people off? Yes, its usually just talk when games say things like "i'm going to boycott X because Y pissed me off!" but usually those are just games; you drop $350 on a new system, and more on some games, and suddenly Nintendo says they're dropping support for this system to release a new one, wouldn't you be pissed? Why should you give them your money again??

And what do you want them to release? Higher spec'd console without a gamepad? Higher spec'd console that CAN utilize the gamepad but doesn't make it a key feature? How do they get 3rd parties to make the games for it after they've already abandoned the Wii U? How should they market this (lol) new system to the masses, and more so how do they do it without looking foolish?

I'm sorry but releasing a new console any time soon isn't the easy fix you expect it to be. There was a thread recently speculating what would happen if Nintendo bought the Xbox division from MS, and many thought that was the answer. A lot of very good points were made, such as even if Nintendo couldn't merge Wii U and XbO  together for this generation, they would at least have tech and patents for the next generation. Yeah that'd be really cool and all but Nintendo will always have this stigma of being for kiddies/casuals/non-gamers etc. Maybe I'm cynical but I honestly picture too many fanboys rage quitting the brand simply because Nintendo is behind it. Even in the best case scenario where Nintendo does everything we know they should but don't realize is right (leave xbox live untouched for example, or leave western dev teams to do what they've been doing instead of shoehorning Nintendo characters into everything), the simple fact that Nintendo is behind the scenes would scare a lot of gamer's away, whether they'd be right to do so or not.

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Offline Luigi Dude

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #51 on: March 19, 2014, 10:28:11 PM »
They should replace a Wii U with a worthwhile product, not some half-baked product released in a mad panic.  But they should consider it a priority.  I don't think the Wii U has several years of life ahead of it.

They should have been considering a replacement once those sales projections had to be adjusted, though really they should have realized the situation well before then, that's just when they formally acknowledged it.  At the very least at this point they should be thinking "****, we have to replace this thing" and be planning accordingly.  And maybe it takes a few years to get something with a half-decent launch lineup of both first and third party titles.  It probably also takes some real analysis, potentially with outside consulting, to figure out what to do with the next console.  Frankly if Nintendo knew what sort of product to release they wouldn't have made the Wii U in the first place.

They need to do it right but they need to do it soon.  They can't wait a few years and then start serious plans for a successor.  No, they need to be working on this right now.

This is exactly what Sega did with killing the Saturn early and then released the Dreamcast and we all know how that turned out.  Doesn't matter how awesome the successor is, if they kill off their current system too early, it poisons their name.  Why should anyone have a reason to be excited for a new Nintendo home console if there's a chance it'll be discontinued in less then 3 years? 

Yeah Sega had other problems as well but the trust issue was a major one.  I remember a lot of people back in 99 being skeptical of the Dreamcast because of the Saturn's short life.  Even though the launch lineup looked strong, many weren't willing to purchase one because of the concern it might get killed early, which combined with Sega's other issues ended up making that concern a reality in the end.
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Offline Ian Sane

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #52 on: March 20, 2014, 01:36:46 PM »
So, Ian, how exactly would you propose Nintendo do that without pissing people off? Yes, its usually just talk when games say things like "i'm going to boycott X because Y pissed me off!" but usually those are just games; you drop $350 on a new system, and more on some games, and suddenly Nintendo says they're dropping support for this system to release a new one, wouldn't you be pissed? Why should you give them your money again??

No one owns a Wii U.  Wii  U owners are in the minority.  That's the whole concern.  So Nintendo should be afraid of offending a small minority of the videogame market while a much larger majority thinks their current product is a joke and wants nothing to do with it?  And I'd imagine that the Wii U userbase is probably made up of a lot of the most loyal forgiving Nintendo fans.  I ultimately just don't see how the Wii U will ever last a proper console lifespan.  The Wii was around for six years.  The PS3 for seven and the Xbox 360 for eight.  There is no way in hell the Wii U will sell well enough for stores to even want to keep it around for that long.  And what brand power will Nintendo have after multiple years of scraping by with like four games a year on some obscure console that practically no one owns?  My thinking is that is that Nintendo needs to put a failure behind them ASAP or risk cultural irrelevance, which would completely destroy any chance of any future Nintendo console getting anywhere.

Nintendo did ditch the Virtual Boy quite quickly and that didn't affect anything.  They replaced the DSi within less than two years and got away with it.  The Game Boy Color came out in Nov 1998 and was replaced by the GBA in June 2001.  That's less than three years and, again, no one cared.  Those GBC owners were all over the GBA and unlike the Wii U the GBC was a very successful product.  Release a Wii U successor in Nov 2015 and that's a three year life cycle, same as the GBC.  Realistically I don't think they could get something out quicker.  And I would obviously suggest they support the Wii U up until its replacement.  With the Dreamcast, Sega was effectively gone for over a year and they had been losing money up to the point, while Nintendo has savings.

But I just look at the alternative as unrealistic.  How does Nintendo just stick with the Wii U for five years?

Offline Adrock

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #53 on: March 20, 2014, 04:46:40 PM »
GameBoy Color and DSi were replaced by other products which were already well into development. I'm not sure Nintendo even knew who they were marketing Virtual Boy to. It wasn't replacing GameBoy, and Nintendo 64 was already announced.

Nintendo is no where near a similar position with Wii U. How soon do you think they can replace Wii U without the successor being a half-broken piece of **** at launch? All hardware companies are working on their next product all the time so I don't know why you think that isn't happening. Even if you want Nintendo to go all full-steam-ahead, a new product is still years away. They can't just nix Wii U and say, "Eventually, we'll fill that gaping hole in our product line." Best case scenario, Nintendo could possibly have something by mid to late 2016. That's accelerating the research and development process by at least a year to a year and a half.

Offline ejamer

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #54 on: March 20, 2014, 05:59:46 PM »
...
Nintendo did ditch the Virtual Boy ... DSi ... Game Boy Color ...
...


Those are all poor comparisons, but I tend to agree that Nintendo won't be able to ride the Wii U for five years for a variety of reasons: it's not selling well, there is very limited support beyond first-party development, it has a bad reputation, and the technology it's built on simply won't be competitive for that long.


The trick is how long they can put some support behind the console and pretend that it's not a failure. The longer that happens, the better for all current Wii U owners.
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Offline smallsharkbigbite

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #55 on: March 20, 2014, 06:20:25 PM »
So Nintendo should be afraid of offending a small minority of the videogame market while a much larger majority thinks their current product is a joke and wants nothing to do with it?  And what brand power will Nintendo have after multiple years of scraping by with like four games a year on some obscure console that practically no one owns?  My thinking is that is that Nintendo needs to put a failure behind them ASAP or risk cultural irrelevance, which would completely destroy any chance of any future Nintendo console getting anywhere.

What brand power does Nintendo have now that they can't support the Wii U?  I put them at Microsoft pre-xbox level in the market.  Which means they would have to run a similar playbook (which we all know they won't) to break back into relevance.  Releasing a new system would fix at best one issue (power) and that's not going to bring back third parties. 

1.  They would have to spend a ton of money on IT.  COD, Battlefield, almost all FPS shooters need a great online infrastructure that Nintendo can't support today.  FPS are dominant in the market so you need to have them. 

2.  Spend mad money hats for third party exclusives.  The Gamecube had almost all 3rd party ports for a couple of years.  Going for ports isn't going to make you relevant.  You need to pony up to have 3-4 Titanfal like exclusives at launch in addition to 3-4 solid Nintendo exclusives. 

3.  You need to be willing to lose $ on hardware.  A year from now the PS4 is probably going to be $350 and have a one or two of the launch titles packed in.  You are releasing midstream against a console that could be PS2 levels of success.  You need to come with more power at most at the same price.

4.  You need to spend $ like mad on marketing.  Remember  Microsoft's $500M marketing for the Xbox?  Nintendo has an image problem and it's only going to go away by showing people why they need to come back to Nintendo and what they are missing.

This all leads to Nintendo being willing to come back to a bloodbath financially.  They won't do those things.  Odds are they will try to make Wii U profitable and try to come up with another gimmick to be a success to replace the Wii U.  That's why I personally think that the QoL is actually the Wii U replacement.  We've yet to see the gimmick though. 

Quote
Nintendo did ditch the Virtual Boy quite quickly and that didn't affect anything.  They replaced the DSi within less than two years and got away with it.  The Game Boy Color came out in Nov 1998 and was replaced by the GBA in June 2001.  That's less than three years and, again, no one cared.  Those GBC owners were all over the GBA and unlike the Wii U the GBC was a very successful product.  Release a Wii U successor in Nov 2015 and that's a three year life cycle, same as the GBC.  Realistically I don't think they could get something out quicker.  And I would obviously suggest they support the Wii U up until its replacement.  With the Dreamcast, Sega was effectively gone for over a year and they had been losing money up to the point, while Nintendo has savings.

It's hard to draw parallels to the handheld market.  Leaving Nintendo there really means you aren't interested in handheld gaming.  The V-boy was an epic-ally bigger bomb than the Wii U and I didn't see the others as new consoles but as existing consoles with cheaply added features.  Like the DSi, didn't that launch with no exclusive software?  You basically know you were buying a DS.  And the price gap was little and you were getting a bigger screen so it wasn't all a loss.

You know what the Dreamcast had?  Great third party support.  In the 3 years it existed it had like 622 games.  And now that my retro-collecting is getting around to the Dreamcast alot of them were great.  And most of the crossover games were best on the Dreamcast.  And it is powerful, it looks great through VGA on my HDTV very much comparable to PS2 power which came later.  Sega would be an interesting case study.  They had other business markets that were doing poorly contributing to their poor financial position.  They also did retarded things like build a $100M game (Shenmue) for the Dreamcast.  I guess what I'm trying to say is their failings weren't the same as Nintendo and I'm not sure they are comparable at all.   

Weren't you that said no one has come back from a home console failure?  This isn't going to be easy and I'm not sure what the answer is. 
« Last Edit: March 20, 2014, 07:42:25 PM by smallsharkbigbite »

Offline Ian Sane

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #56 on: March 20, 2014, 08:01:44 PM »
Quote
This all leads to Nintendo being willing to come back to a bloodbath financially.  They won't do those things.  Odds are they will try to make Wii U profitable and try to come up with another gimmick to be a success to replace the Wii U.  That's why I personally think that the QoL is actually the Wii U replacement.  We've yet to see the gimmick though.

I suspect the QoL is the actual Wii U replacement as well but I fear it's basically a Wii Fit machine and Nintendo will no longer make "real" consoles anymore.  They noticed the popularity of "personal wellness" titles like Wii Fit and Brain Age and plan to make that their new priority.
 
A little while back some story broke from a Wii U dev who described the nightmare of developing games for the thing.  It isn't just underpowered but not properly supported by Nintendo.  The dev kit is poorly documented and if you have a question Nintendo takes days to get back to you.  I'm a programmer.  If I was working in an environment that lacked industry standard features and was poorly documented and had **** support I would be looking for the first excuse to ditch it.  It costs companies serious dev time and thus money to waste time hunting in the dark to figure things out because of poor documentation and support.  Nintendo deserves to lose all their third party support with that nonsense.  It just makes it that much harder for a third party to make a buck.  So, no, Nintendo doesn't have to hand out moneyhats to get support because a lack of bribing companies is not the reason no one is supporting them or why those same third parties support the other guys.  Nintendo needs hardware that compares to the other guys and documentation and support and policies that are comparable to the other guys.  Oh and the console has to actually sell to the general public so that there is a userbase to sell the games to.  Nintendo may have to write some cheques to get a few key games at the start but if their next console sells okay and it isn't a huge ordeal to support their console the third parties will come.
 
Right now Nintendo has the worst console with the worst sales and the worst development support for their devs.  Why would anyone in their right mind support that?  How the hell can Nintendo be the worst in every category and then throw their hands up the air and declare it all to be hopeless?  When you're the BEST and you fail then it may be hopeless but when you're the worst you failing is exactly what SHOULD be happening.

Offline MagicCow64

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Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #57 on: March 20, 2014, 10:14:54 PM »
My guess is that beyond the particularities of the WiiU's struggle, and what was fixable ahead of time and what wasn't, what can and can't be done now to revive the platform, Nintendo's looking at the broader shape of the market.

Though it has possibly caused a big hunk of their irrelevancy in the Western dominated game-o-verse, Nintendo sure did hit it on the head years ago about spiraling development costs destabilizing the industry, a trap they've avoided. So now their options are: try to finally catch up all the way, sink a ****-ton of money, sell a new console at a significant loss, hope that third parties will come back and not decide that they're perfectly happy sticking with PS4/Xbone/PC; or decide that they're done trying to claw back market share in an increasingly risky, low-profit, and arguably shrinking business sector.

Based on what we know about how Nintendo operates, which option is more rational? Japan (and soon the U.S) also has a significant aging population, just the kind of folks that Nintendo might want to target for a QoL platform. I can see them transitioning out of the console space as they reorient around a new product category, riding out traditional gaming experience on the 4DS until it too fades into irrelevancy.

Re: Why should Nintendo drop the GamePad?
« Reply #58 on: March 21, 2014, 09:26:39 PM »
The fact is the Wii U is a confusing product, with or without the Game Pad, all it does is further confuses potential buyers. When I first went shopping for one I didn't know it still had it's own Wiimote, I thought the Game Pad was supposed to replace the motion controls so another failure on their part, marketing. I don't want to own a machine that I need to read the label to determine if I have the right controller to play it, I never bought the Super Scope or those Bongos for that same reason. It isn't even about games anymore, if your machine is not appealing nobody buys it no games get mad.e
« Last Edit: March 21, 2014, 09:29:04 PM by marvel_moviefan_2012 »
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