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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
- nrp 6y ago“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.
- Fr0styMatt88 6y agoFor me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.
- gambiting 6y agoSame can be said about the Switch - the Nvidia Tegra chipset used is absolutely ancient by modern standards, yet in the Switch it's used to much higher quality than in any other device with the same or similar chipset.
- nrp 6y agoA lot of that has to do with being able to run at high sustained clock frequencies by designing in an adequate thermal solution. Phones just don’t have the space to allow for that, so games have to be designed around throttled performance.
- Impossible 6y agoThis is a combination of costs and timeline. Oculus Quest development started in 2016 or 2015. Snap dragon 835 released in 2018 and Quest shipped in 2019. Now, Quest shipped 6 months after 865 so it would have been possible for Facebook to co-develop Quest with Qualcomm and potentially ship with an 865, but due to various factors (VR is a small market, Facebook doesn't have a close relationship with Qualcomm like console manufactures have with AMD, Quest needed to be "cheap")
- CookieMon 6y agoWhile it's beside your [good] point - you can do VR with fifty cent lenses and early headsets did, but the lenses in headsets like Oculus are specialised and still evolving.
- ascagnel_ 6y agoOculus also spent a ton of money to source and develop the best 50-cent lenses they could -- it's easier to spread the cost of R&D over many headsets than it is to spread the cost of expensive specialty parts.
- epigramx 6y agoFancy literature but in the end it says little. There is a simple way to put it. Sometimes an era has missed some of the innovations it could have done and spends too much time caring only about the core technology but it might be beneficial to stay a little more and innovate on the general design rather than just the core technology.
- taneq 6y ago"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts". In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/ That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.
- lubonay 6y agoFWIW I really didn't feel clickbaited - the article more or less aligned with my expectations based on the title.
- cannam 6y ago> It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait I think this (mis)translation was fairly widely recognised before this article was written, so it's probably just using the familiar version in the heading in preparation for clarifying it in the article. Reasonable enough I think.
- polm23 6y agoThe original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something. Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word: https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23sentences https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23se... There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example: https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424
- fenomas 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dlivingston 6y agoWhat strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990. Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.
- michaelbrave 6y agoIn some ways it's smart. They wait and see what the market wanted and then present the most polished version of that. They do this in game design and in console design. Other benefits would include: easier to develop for due to familiarity, better battery efficiency (as opposed to gamegear), and lower manufacturing costs as well. Likely the know that the experience matter more than the hardware. Which is something the original mac got right too, as it wasn't very powerful either.
- eythian 6y agoThat's the point of the article: If you're using "obsolete" or at least older stuff, all the potential unknowns have long been known so everything is much more predictable. That they succeed despite using older tech suggests that the level of the technology isn't the be-all-end-all for many people.
- pjmlp 6y agoAs GameGear owner, the set of batteries could hardly hold a couple of hours playing Sonic, meaning I used to play a portable device usually plugged in, while the GameBoy would last days.
- Kaiyou 6y agoGameBoy lasted weeks. I remember reading that it lasted about 40h.
- Operyl 6y agoWhile the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all these years, online play in their first party games is still just so .. atrocious. Ugh.
- nicolas_t 6y agoThat also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements... So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's getting better but it's still not great. Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development (IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who themselves then outsourced part of it) This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.
- umvi 6y agoIs this why software developers are paid peanuts in Japan?
- nicolas_t 6y agoWell, yes, it's not valued as a profession. When I moved to Japan as a recent grad, I was paid 50% of what I would have been paid back in France...
- earthboundkid 6y agoDo you think part of the issue is that computerization of records lagged due to the difficulty of encoding Japanese? When I lived there in the mid-00s, everything was still done on paper AFAICT. By then Unicode sort of existed but was still niche. On top of that, programming is done in English, which just adds cognitive burden. You could make a Japanese programming language, but those haven't gone anywhere, I think in part because you'd need to convert the characters to kanji as you type and that would take longer than just typing in Roman letters.
- growlist 6y agoOften the British engineering philosophy, tbh - frugality of necessity.
- huffmsa 6y agoYeah, but Nintendo's don't leave oil stains all over the garage.
- analyticascent 6y agoIn a weird way, I think Nintendo's approach is basically "Zero to One" to differentiate from competitors, but doing it with cheaper hardware to reduce costs. I'm not a gamer, but from a business perspective I'm intrigued with their approach.
- libertine 6y agoHmm I'm not sure if Zero to One fits into what Nintendo does - maybe the Wii was (arguably the N64). Nintendo main differentiation revolves around their IP, which they manage to refresh with every new console release by making some console feature into a game mechanic (and the gameplay revolves around it). You can see good examples of it in their hardware accessories for games, where they don't feel like gimmicks, yet on other consoles some accessories do feel like it.
- k__ 6y ago"the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses" I got a smartphone and a VR headset to put it in. Yes they are cheap, but the experience is completely different from the Rift. These may be the most fundamental parts, but they are not what makes the Rift a good VR set.
- joshjdr 6y ago“These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” The focus on decreasing latency is arguably what differentiated the Rift early on: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/ https://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/
- huffmsa 6y agoEven when they did ship with more cutting edge power and tech, they approached it as if they didn't have it. It partly comes from the video game things being a bit of a gamble and side project to keep the company alive. "Success under constraint." And not it's a bit of an intentional handicap, like setting a horsepower cap on a racecar. Anyone can go fast and make something spectacular with unlimited power, but when bleeding edge graphics aren't even available for you to waste time considering, you have to finds new ways to make your game "fun". You have to think of new control schemes, new mechanics, endearing art styles, etc. You can't just melt faces (and wallets) with the visuals.
- Kaiyou 6y agoDidn't Nintendo drop this philosophy the moment Gunpei left to work on a GameBoy competitor for Bandai and pushed out the GBC? Or was it after Gunpei died in a car accident shortly after? The NGC also didn't follow this philosophy and neither did the GBA. It wasn't until the Wii/NDS era, when they kind of brought it back.
- philistine 6y agoWe perceive Nintendo as working under the principles of Yokoi because he wrote his vision in a book. The reality is more complicated.
- pkilgore 6y agoReminds me of http://boringtechnology.club/ http://boringtechnology.club/
- saturdaysaint 6y agoIt's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables. If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.
- RookyNumbas 6y agoThat insight happened 30 years ago. Nintendo's best selling consoles and games have always been portable systems.
- Loulybob 6y agoI think you're forgetting the massive powerhouse that was the Wii.
- redisman 6y agoNintendos influence goes very deep into all gaming these days. Portable games started with Game-n-Watch and Gameboy, NES started off the popularity of game consoles, etc.
- RookyNumbas 6y agoWii was the third best seller, and the only non-portable in the top 5.
- danudey 6y agoIt's true, but compared to its seventh-gen contemporaries (the 360 and PS3), it sold about 15m more than either. (The Wii U, on the other hand, sold abysmally.)
- schnevets 6y agoLove it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory. It gives me hope for the future - if we can get more people from various walks of life to learn how to code and appreciate technology, there is so much more we can do. Of course, that "if" has always been a huge challenge.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoGot some examples?
- hirako2000 6y agoI can think of SalesForce, asana and others in the glorified crud category. Slack and similar chatting apps are just IRC for then common user, yet it worked seeing their valuations.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoMy experience with SalesForce is that it is way more complicated than a simple CRUD app.
- gkolli 6y agoserviceNow and workday are two ‘unsexy’ companies that are huge.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoWouldn't facebook fall under this category? It was originally just the universities head shots and a login.
- zyang 6y agoIronically Facebook uses PHP, which definitely falls into the "withered" tech category.
- dr-detroit 6y agoThis is an example of an article written by AI that just isn't quite believable. Sure all those words run together but what are they saying? That a man claims to have invented the D Pad and so what?
- SeanFerree 6y agoGreat read! Love Nintendo
- marmolito 6y agome parece una excelente idea
- marmolito 6y agoque sitio web tan increíble y con muy buena información
- marmolito 6y agoexcelente website encontré en este foro lo que estaba buscando https://forum.cs-cart.com/user/65825-www123moviestheater/ https://forum.cs-cart.com/user/65825-www123moviestheater/
- bane 6y agoI think it's important to also understand that, despite broad name recognition, Nintendo isn't a huge company in the way that Sony or Microsoft is. Their entire corporate revenue for 2019 was about $11b USD with about $2.3b USD in operating income. We regularly talk about startups here that are technically larger. What Nintendo's philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft/Sony where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech. While Microsoft and Sony's revenues per platform are around the same, their console businesses are small pieces of very large organizations -- with all the ossification that comes from being huge companies. It's also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the "toy"). Nintendo's focus is on how to create this play experience, and what's the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.
- danudey 6y agoThere have also been interviews where they've talked about how they won't do something unless they can add something new to it. For example, they haven't created a new F-Zero game because no one has really come up with anything to add to F-Zero to make a compelling game, rather than just "It's another F-Zero game". In I think the same interview, it was discussed that they won't make a game unless it's fun if it's just geometric shapes or basic sprites. The idea there being that a Mario game isn't fun just because it has Mario in it, but if the gameplay is solid then it will be fun despite not having Mario in it. Presumably this also lets them crank out prototypes without having to worry about spinning up art assets to give testers context.
- odessacubbage 6y agotbh that's probably just a polite way of saying they wont do a new one because ax was a highly expensive commercial failure. there have been 6 mario kart sequels since gx that all broadly fall into the category of 'just another mario kart'
- meeebooo 6y agoThis does backfire for them in certain cases though, especially in terms of networking. All of their games are still on a built-out peer2peer implementation they acquired in 2008 and it shows how much it holds them back - anyone that played a Nintendo online game on switch knows what I mean (no, 30 NES games I played on my Wii aren't a consolation). Let's not even talk about friend codes in 2020.