Topic: Nintendo seeks Alliance with other companies....

[BlackNMild2k1]

for advertising and maybe other stuff?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/26/nintendo-idUSL3E7FQ06Z20110426

(Reuters) - Nintendo said on Tuesday that alliances with other companies may be necessary, a day after the game maker reported its second straight fall in annual profit and said it would launch a successor to its ageing Wii console.[ID:nL3E7FP0W4]

"I now regret that we didn't tie up with someone outside the company to market the Wii. If we had done that, the fate of the Wii might have been different," Chief Executive Satoru Iwata said at a conference for investors and analysts.

"Now I am aware that we should not rely too much on ourselves. You will see what I mean by this when we market the 3DS and the Wii in the future."    (Reporting by Junko Fujita; Editing by Michael Watson)

What does that mean? It's a little late to market the Wii isn't it? there is no software coming out for the poor thing. But who could they be teaming up with for "marketing"?

Google? Valve? Apple(lol)?


none of those are serious answers BTW

[Louieturkey]

I have no idea what it means but if it results in more good games, I'm all for it.

[coffeewithgames]

for advertising and maybe other stuff?

What does that mean? It's a little late to market the Wii isn't it? there is no software coming out for the poor thing. But who could they be teaming up with for "marketing"?

Google? Valve? Apple(lol)?


none of those are serious answers BTW

They need to get a better PR firm also...while they're at it.
As for future advertising of the Wii, I'm guessing they mean the rest of the year?  Perhaps that's why the price drop down to $150 is happening next month, and they'll roll out the new campaigns then?

[Chozo Ghost]

At this point the Wii can't really be helped much. It desperately needs games, but convincing 3rd parties to support it when a successor is on the way is pointless. That should have been done back in 2006-2007, but its too late now.

The consoles need to be marketed to two very different groups: developers and consumers. The Wii was obviously successful with the latter, but not so much with the former. Right now is the time when Nintendo needs to get developers on board with the Wii Stream Cafe. Not 5 years from now when its too late. The alliances must be formed NOW!

[UncleBob]

Philips.

[rad.i.kal]

can't wait for this, this is getting good

[coffeewithgames]

At this point the Wii can't really be helped much. It desperately needs games, but convincing 3rd parties to support it when a successor is on the way is pointless. That should have been done back in 2006-2007, but its too late now.

The consoles need to be marketed to two very different groups: developers and consumers. The Wii was obviously successful with the latter, but not so much with the former. Right now is the time when Nintendo needs to get developers on board with the Wii Stream Cafe. Not 5 years from now when its too late. The alliances must be formed NOW!

Even if they have a strong initial showing, that doesn't mean much based off of the past three Nintendo consoles: N64, GameCube, Wii.
I think the GameCube and Wii mainly show me why we should take third party support of Nintendo's next console, with a grain of salt.

GameCube, it was a big surprise when Nintendo(or Capcom?) announced Resident Evil 4 as an "exclusive" for the system.  The system even started out with a great exclusive, with Rogue Squadron...

The Wii had Red Steel, Rayman Raving Rabbids, and some others early on.  It just seems that Nintendo wasn't willing to approach third parties, or seemingly just lost third parties, and couldn't do anything to get them back, but three console generations don't bode well as a track record of what we can expect moving forward...even if they are formed NOW, Nintendo seems to have had the magic touch of losing them quickly.

I really do hope they prove me wrong with their next system, we will see soon enough I guess.
The games aren't even what really concern me though, as much as Nintendo's other business aspects, such as online aspects and being extremely slow to update things.

[Ian Sane]

It's rather interesting that Iwata mentions marketing the Wii when at the time the "Wii would like to play" campaign was considered a tremendous success.

One thing I like about this is that if Nintendo was content with being the casual game company the Wii would be considered a massive success.  Yet they seem disappointed with how things turned out.  I guess when Nintendo talks about being an "everyone" company they aren't kidding.  The Wii was not successful with everyone, just freakishly successful with a huge market segment.

I just want Nintendo to not be so self-focused.  I'm not so much interested in forming alliances with other companies but rather not jerking everyone around and treating everyone like competition.  Sony and MS are the competition but Nintendo acts like jerks to third parties and retailers and the media and, oh yeah, their CUSTOMERS.  I just want them to ditch that attitude that they must exploit everyone.

[Ceric]

I almost forgot about the "Wii Would like to play" commercials.  They should have done those the whole Wii Life.

[Chozo Ghost]

I agree about the Wii Would Like To Play campaign. The problem was they dropped it too soon. When you find something that is successful you should stick with it. Sony found a successful campaign in the form of Kevin Butler, who they've been using for several years now. They didn't drop him after 2 or 3 commercials like Nintendo did with their respective stuff.

With sagging sales, the Wii could really use another ad campaign right about now. Nintendo depends on the Wii to carry the company forward for at least a whole year, so they should be making more of an effort to promote it. They can't do much about the lack of games, but the price drop was a good move. Now let's see an ad campaign to go with it.

[Mop it up]

I think the quote may be more about how the Wii hasn't been selling so well lately. I know it's worded a bit strangely to mean that, but it sold in record numbers in the first couple of years so I don't see how they could be disappointed in that. It's where they are now that they are disappointed, where sales have slowed considerably, they probably wanted to keep some momentum. The quote also may be referring to Japan, where the Wii is currently selling the least by quite a bit.

[NeoStar9X]

I almost forgot about the "Wii Would like to play" commercials.  They should have done those the whole Wii Life.

Those were pretty good. They were unique to Nintendo, had distinct music, and grabbed you. I never understood why they stopped those.

More importantly they should have took those concerns core gamers had to heart early on. Yes they put out games that were aimed at that but they put the spot light on them the way they could have. Battalion Wars 2 or Excitebots for example. They did not push those when they really should. Then they let them go out of print it seems.

I still hold, and this is conspiratorial, that many 3rd party companies crapped on the Wii the way the way they did on purpose. They wanted to poison the waters because they wanted the damn system to go away. They wanted it to be a fad in the strongest possible way. So they acted stupid. Acted like they had no more engines that they used on the PS2, Cube, and Xbox. They acted as if there was no core audience on the Wii, that those GameCube owners didn't exist. That they needed to find out what the mythical "Wii audience" wanted. So really even in the end if Nintendo did everything we wanted them to do I think the end result would have been the same. 3rd parties hated the system and wanted it to go away. Many I still hold have a straight up anti-Nintendo bias. Some more then others. When it didn't die it was to late. Either people picked up PS3s or 360s which is what they wanted or they simply ignored 3rd party efforts and focused on Nintendo games. Which hurt efforts from those that had a change of heart.

The Wii in the end did well in spite of the 3rd party efforts to kill it. For as powerful as the new system is going to be I will bet money that 3rd party developers/publishers will come up with yet another excuse for why they aren't putting their games on a Nintendo system. I'm just waiting for it. It's going to happen. That I'm 100% sure of. They never fail to hit that note.

Am I jaded? Yes. Perhaps I'm playing the Nintendo fan victim card. However I've seen nothing that makes me think 3rd parties will care this time around. They'll be the rare company here and there. That's always the case but the majority will try to screw the platform and it's owners once again.

I think Nintendo should do more themselves. More internal and secondary IPs. More studios. More output with their names on it. IF they rely to much on 3rd parties or try to make them the most important when they pull the rug out from them again, if it gets that far, they'll be stuck.

[Lithium]

on an emotional standpoint i agree, the mainstream gaming "media" and developers always find a reason to take a dump on nintendo's consoles. Logically though at the end of the day its just business, they do what helps the bottom line and if they don't see the nintendo platforms as a profitable system to develop for they will stay clear, this generation they saw the casual market and produced tons of half assed mini game collections because thats what made money. It was like the modern day Atari: a popular system but a large chunk of the games were shovelware and crowded out the quality 3rd party stuff which in turn told developers that only shovelware sold it was kind of like an endless cycle

[Ian Sane]

I still hold, and this is conspiratorial, that many 3rd party companies crapped on the Wii the way the way they did on purpose. They wanted to poison the waters because they wanted the damn system to go away. They wanted it to be a fad in the strongest possible way.

I think the simpler explanation is that third parties wanted to move towards multiplatform development this gen and Nintendo's goofy ass Gamecube 1.5 screwed those plans up.  So they cranked out shovelware and ported PS2 and PSP games to it to get some sort of product out there.  Third party exclusives were rare this gen.  Everyone wanted to get their games on as many platforms as possible so most games are for the X360 PS3 and PC.  The Wii's hardware was way too different to allow for it to be included in multiplatform plans so it was excluded.  Nintendo made a system to attract exclusives in a market where no one wanted to make exclusives.
 
These are businesses that care about the bottom line.  Very few businesses would risk losing money just to spite another company for petty reasons.  And even if some did it couldn't possibly be ALL of them and with the Wii it was ALL of them that ignored it.  It is just completely irrational to think that they all decided to screw Nintendo over.  The Wii was too different to fit with their plans and they didn't want to completely overhaul those plans to fit the Wii in.  So they set their B-team to work to get some content out, it wasn't very good so it didn't sell and they said "**** it".  It's no different then how most companies don't put much effort in handheld games because they're busy enough with their console efforts and aren't willing to put in a full effort to two different formats.
 
For all the talk Nintendo made about lowering development costs they essentially raised them because they made it so that any third party that supported all three consoles would have to make TWICE the product.  The cheaper development cost would only apply to Wii exclusive developers, like Nintendo themselves.

[NWR_insanolord]

For once, Ian's right on the money with this one.

[Chozo Ghost]

No More Heroes 1&2 and Red Steel 2 were decent 3rd party Wii exclusives. So I'd have to say at least Ubisoft was an exception.

[SixthAngel]

I think the simpler explanation is that third parties wanted to move towards multiplatform development this gen and Nintendo's goofy ass Gamecube 1.5 screwed those plans up.  So they cranked out shovelware and ported PS2 and PSP games to it to get some sort of product out there.  Third party exclusives were rare this gen.  Everyone wanted to get their games on as many platforms as possible so most games are for the X360 PS3 and PC.  The Wii's hardware was way too different to allow for it to be included in multiplatform plans so it was excluded.  Nintendo made a system to attract exclusives in a market where no one wanted to make exclusives.

More games being multiplatform is a good point but I think its more of a symptom than an actual cause.  Plenty of games (Final Fantasy) were made with exclusivity in mind but changed when they realized that making games had become so much more expensive and that the system they bet on was not dominating.

Nintendo's third party situation was decided before the Wii even launched.  Games can take years to make and the big games were in the pipeline before anything was even released.  These companies invested a lot of money in the technology, talent and training for the hd systems because they assumed they would be the biggest.  In order to focus development on the Wii the companies would have had to say that these investments were a bad decision.  This makes it logical that some companies would want the Wii to fail.  The leaders and decision makers bet millions of dollars against the Wii and changing their direction would have pointed out to everyone how wrong they were, required restructuring, and possibly put their jobs on the line.  They want their investment to pay for itself even if it would actually be better to scrap it and go back to last gen tech.  The Wii failing is necessary for the strategy they've been using  and planning for years to actually be correct.
Big companies like EA and Activision have an interest in the the hd systems winning as well.  When it costs hd money to make games it gets rid of almost all their competition because only big players like them can actually exist.

Then you have companies like Epic that had an active interest in Wii failing.  They make most of their money off engines so they need people to keep adopting new technology and anything that slows the pace of that is bad for them  It's not a coincidence that they offered nothing for the Wii but got crap running on the iphone.

[ThePerm]

When Gamecube came out I made a short rpg game where you were traveler and you introduced other people to Nintendo....and that was exactly the Wii would like to play campaign. I just thought it was always funny.