I was checking up on Kent on Google and came upon this old gem. Let us laugh at Kent and his foolish claims! Seriously, this is interesting because Kent is telling us how to fix Nintendo, and Nintendo has arguably fixed itself, but in a different way than Kent (or almost anybody else) envisioned.
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1. Abandon the ‘belle of the ball’ mentality.
I think Kent had the right basic idea here. It was time for Nintendo to admit it had made a lot of mistakes. Interestingly, Nintendo came to that conclusion even harder anybody else: not only did Nintendo conclude that it made a lot of mistakes, it concluded that even trying to beat Sony and Microsoft was a mistake.
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2. Forget the bottom line.
...
That is a nearly steady drop of 50 percent from one generation to the
next.
The typical Nintendo response to this is something along the line of
their console business always remaining profitable. It’s a good and
persuasive response. Even as Sony strangled Nintendo in all three world
markets in the last year of the original PlayStation, Nintendo managed
to make money with N64 while Sony leaked like a sieve.
The problem is that if Nintendo’s share of the market keeps getting
smaller, the next generation will not be profitable.
The sentiment is correct, and I have to admit I strongly agreed with Kent on this point when I first read the article - Nintendo needed to do something about its shrinking marketshare. What Kent, myself, and most other people failed to predict was that Nintendo would find a way to improve it's marketshare without sacrificing the bottom line. Nice work.
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3. Know your market and stick to it.
Kent is totally wrong and right on this point. Not sticking to old markets has turned out to be a boon for Nintendo, however, Kent is right in the "know your market" sense. I think Nintendo has put a lot of thought into reaching out to the new markets and is reaping the benefits. One could also argue that Nintendo's "market" is the all-ages/family "market" and Wii attacks that market head-on.
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4. Americanize, Americanize, Americanize
The bottom has dropped out of the Japanese video game market. It
shrank by one-third in 2001 alone.
Ooopsie. This turned out to be Kent's most incorrect suggestion, and it also demonstrates just how much Nintendo DS surprised everyone and turned the industry around. Non-gaming is the new gaming in Japan, and it's spreading to other territories. Reading this quote and looking at the initial sales figures, it's clear that Wii is going to own Japan.
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5. Keep doing what you do right
As angry and pessimistic as some gamers have become about Nintendo,
other insiders believe that Nintendo is doing many things exactly
right. “Nintendo is listening to a good mixture of customers and game
developers,” says Richard Doherty, research director of
Envisioneering.
This section is a bit of a mixed bag. Doherty's comment above seems to be right on the money, and Kent goes on to point out how staying the course with Pokemon in spite of critics that said it was a fad paid off. Sounds like exactly what Nintendo is doing with DS and Wii.
Then he goes on to say that Wind Waker's style was a great idea and creates two different Zelda series: a lighthearted one and a more adult one...starts to seem like a bit of rambling to me. I guess his point is that when Nintendo gets it right, it gets it really right, and that's true.
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6. Stop with the mid-course corrections and hold to the basics
What did Sony and Microsoft do that was so brilliant with the launches
of their first console systems? Nothing. But even when things went
wrong, they kept to their game and that made a difference.
I think GameCube had problems straight from the start, and that's what Kent is noticing here. Nintendo was still a bit stunned from Sony handing N64's arse to Nintendo on a platter, and GameCube was Nintendo's mixed-up reaction to that: It's a purple lunchbox with the best survival horror games. Nintendo refocused itself since then.
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...The same thing has happened with GBA. First GBA SP’s clamshell
design was to make it more adult-friendly. Then DS materialized, and
GBA SP turns out to have been a kids system all along.
Nintendo needs to pick a strategy and stick to it; and in no area is
that more important than in handhelds...
This is Nintendo's early "three pillars" rhetoric getting mixed up with Nintendo's actual strategy. The strategy was to come up with ways to sell DS to all kinds of new audiences by taking advantage of its new interface, and it worked. GBA was kept on the market to supply Nintendo with money while it tried to get DS off the ground, and to give Nintendo a fallback point if the experiment failed. In the end, Nintendo's strategy worked brilliantly.
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7. Either do Revolution right or don’t do Revolution at all
...
First, it’s time for Nintendo to discover the Internet...
Done. Some people aren't satisfied, but let's be honest: if anything, online gaming is going to be secondary to the Wii interface in terms of success.
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...Next, it’s time for Nintendo executives to listen to what their
customers tell them. People like pretty graphics. People want the same
games with better graphics. Nintendo executives say they want
Revolution to be as revolutionary as DS. Fine, but make sure the
graphics are hugely improved...
LOL. I know there are still graphics advocates out there, but DS sales have proven once again that they're totally irrelevant to a handheld, and so far Wii sales prove that they're not relevant to home consoles either.
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...Not everyone agrees with this. Richard Doherty compliments Nintendo
for not trying to “create a super computer in a $300 game box.”
This, he says, is what will separate Nintendo from Microsoft and Sony...
That Richard Doherty is a smart guy. Anybody know who he is?
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...The truth is that if good old “Madden NFL” looks better and plays
better on PlayStation 3 and NextBox, Maddeneers are going to buy those
systems. And, for the record, “Madden NFL 2004” was the best
selling game of 2003...
Okay, so he couldn't have known that it was going to play completely different on Wii.
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...Since that is not going to happen, Nintendo needs to launch on time
with good software and a strong proprietary library. If Microsoft
launches in 2005, Nintendo should launch in 2005 as well...
I kept advocating the earliest possible launch and I still think it would have helped a little, but due to Wii's totally different take on video games, the launch timing was not that important.
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...Finally Nintendo needs to have enough hardware at launch. Avoid
shortages—real or trumped up—and fill the channel...
Kent's right from the "you need as much supply as possible" perspective - that was a big problem for PS3, and it may have cost Sony some Christmas sales. However, shortages are typical for system launches, and given that Wii seems to have a relatively good supply, the shortages can't be that bad of a sign.
Topic: Steven Kent "Pulls an IGN" (Read 46546 times)
