14 ms·

Miyamoto Admits Nintendo Underestimated The Switch To HD

114 points by scholia 13y ago

bitwize 13y ago
Feh. If they think HD is hard, just wait until everybody switches to 4K in a couple of years. (The true videophiles will have 8K or 16K.)
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  There tends to be quite a bit of lag between available video technologies and what people actually have at home, there's still plenty of Xbox 360s out there hooked up to SDTVs for example.
- smackfu 13y ago
  The general "meh" towards Blu-Ray makes me wonder.
- xuim21 13y ago
  I think uptake will be extremely slow. Most consumers won't be able to tell the difference when watching TV from a couch, my parents can barely tell the difference between SD and HD as it is.
- adam86306 13y ago
  I think 4k will be a hard sell for most consumers kind of like 3D because 1080p is pretty damn good quality. I wonder when we will get to a point where it is good enough.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- AndrewDucker 13y ago
  Unless you're sitting within 7 feet of a 70" screen 4k is completely pointless: http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/ http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    THANK YOU. We might see 4k screens take off for computers, but they don't make sense for TVs right now.
    - AndrewDucker 13y ago
      Yeah, my 22" monitor is 1680x1050 - which http://isthisretina.com/ http://isthisretina.com/ tells me is retina at 38". As it happens, I'm sitting about 26" from it - so I need about 50% more pixel depth. Even then, that only makes it 50% of 4K resolution. A 4k screen at 22" is a retina display at 17". That doesn't sound comfortable - although I haven't played with an Oculus Rift yet...
  - DanBC 13y ago
    And yet people still buy gold plated HDMI cables.
  - sixothree 13y ago
    10 feet away from a 90" screen is what many people with projectors currently enjoy.
  - sukuriant 13y ago
    Having gone in to see one of the screens, I believe it was less than that from a 60+" screen that I could tell the difference. Go to a store, e.g. Best Buy, and see. Obviously, the people with the standard 37-50" screens aren't going to see much of a change; but when you get large screens, it's pretty clear
- swang 13y ago
  HD is hard. Game companies are barely got to 1080p/60fps for their games with most of them cheating to get near that quality. This next generation they may be able to just throw process cycles at it for the PS4/XBone. I can't imagine how long it will take to get to the 4K/60fps quality rate.
  - warfangle 13y ago
    Which is funky, because I was playing games in 1600x1200@60fps in <2003.
    - KeyBoardG 13y ago
      And 3d games < 2003 were rubbish graphically compared to today. There was minimal AA and AF. There were almost no particle effects, shaders were just being thought about. Physics in games were a joke until HalfLife2.
      - TillE 13y ago
        Yes, and? Those were the limits of the hardware. Mobile phones have better GPUs now. Doesn't change the simple fact that you could run the most advanced games of the time at high resolutions. Everyone was saying the Wii was outdated at launch, and they were right.
        weego 13y ago
        Nintendo seem to have always aimed to not compete on graphics and hardware. It's been a smart move while they have managed to engage third party developers to make "decent" games around their headline titles but now they aren't being so successful (thanks to much easier cross-platform dev for console/pc freezing them out of the main console market and the rise of smartphones eating into the mobile market) getting good developers on board their strategy is starting to look hollow. Which is a real shame because historically they have been exceptional at competing on fun, but you can't justify a £200 console based on the possibility of 1 or 2 first party games a year.
      - 13y ago
- LandoCalrissian 13y ago
  I think that is a rater optimistic timeline since the next gen consoles will probably still struggle to do 1080.
jug6ernaut 13y ago
Of the big three i easily have the most faith in Nintendo. Why? Because they know how to make games i enjoy, and have been doing so for well over 2 decades. Nintendo put themselves in a tough spot, with dwindling Wii sales they were left with the choice of having no Console choice or having one with no games(very few). It can be argued which is the better option, obviously both suck. I do not consider Nintendo in trouble, there base(as has been proven time and time again) will always be there(mainly because they stick to there guns, for better or worse). Point & case of this is the 3DS, when this was release for a good 7-8 months it was considered a horrible console, with its best game being a remake of "The Legend of Zelda OOT"(arguably). Look at it now it is considered to be the best running console available. Granted it some good games in this 7-8 month period, but not much. My point is, when it comes down to it, games sell consoles, and the WiiU has no games, at all really. Once they come, and they will, the console will be in at least fine shape. I personally have not bought one, but it is on my list above both the xbox1 and the ps4. My 2 cents...
- rocky1138 13y ago
  I wish Wii U was as open as the Ouya. It's cool, though, that they put that JS library up for getting button-mapping in-browser from the control pad. I don't own a Wii U, either. It's way too expensive and I don't find any of the titles compelling. That, and when I played with one at Toys R Us I found the controller cheap to hold.
- lauraura 13y ago
  Nintendo's been mainly working off their portables for years, really. The N64 didn't sell that great either, and the Gamecube did pretty awfully, ending up selling what few units it did almost entirely on the merit of its first-party games and a couple rare gems, like Tales of Symphonia. The Wii was unusual -- the Wii U is more "normal", by Nintendo sales standards! Fortunately for them the 3DS is doing great, gathering dozens and dozens of great games, and probably makes a tidy profit margin too. They did a wonderful job pivoting the console; people pretty quickly lost interest in the 3D aspect, but there was no reason they had to market the console on those merits to begin with, so as far as I can tell they've mostly de-emphasized that aspect of the device (and nobody I know even uses it!) It's also cheap enough that even as the Vita does finally pick up sales and actual games (and it's happening, finally), it probably won't hurt the 3DS' sales -- their game lists seem more mutually exclusive than not and if someone can afford a Vita, they probably already have a 3DS if they ever wanted one. The Vita is really its own interesting story of a console with (initially) almost no games -- a lot of more minor and independent developers have found that they can get great sales on the Vita since the market is much less saturated. Amazingly, a few months ago, the top selling Vita game was actually a rather niche title that was released with no prior announcement on the e-shop and no marketing whatsoever. I kind of wonder if the Wii U will have a year or two (or ten??) of the same kind of thing -- it definitely could be an interesting platform for indie devs.
afreak 13y ago
> It remains to be seen if Nintendo?s laundry list of beloved exclusives can carry them for another console generation. I recently asked Xbox loyalists if Microsoft?s continued employment of Master Chief and Halo was enough to keep them excited about the console. Most said no, and I wonder if the numbers will finally start to turn for Nintendo as well. I think that this part misses the point about the differences between Halo and Mario. Halo is and always has been aimed towards the types that have been long term gamers and has only been recently usurped by the likes of Call of Duty et al. Mario and its entire universe has brand value with parents and is geared towards practically anyone who can figure out a d-pad. While I think that most of the Mario franchise is just a rehash of a rehash (Mario Bros. Wii being the last rehash I liked), for as long as parents see the games that way, Nintendo can keep pumping them out.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  True, but how long can Nintendo stay afloat with only the strength of the Mario franchise to lean upon. 3rd party developers are giving the WiiU no love, and the WiiU doesn't have the hook to attract casual gamers the way the original Wii did. I think parents will still choose Mario, but that number is going to get smaller and smaller as time goes on. Why spend $300 for a console that only has Mario games? That's not a good way forward for Nintendo.
  - aclevernickname 13y ago
    > True, but how long can Nintendo stay afloat with only the strength of the Mario franchise to lean upon. Perhaps we can ask Disney the same question about Mickey Mouse.
smackfu 13y ago
Seems pretty inexcusable to me. Nintendo was able to coast through the entire last-gen not doing HD games at all. Now they have to do HD on their new console, and it was perfectly clear they were going to have to do HD, and it's too much work for them to get games out on time??
- atourgates 13y ago
  Also, the fact that Wii games emulated on Dolphin in 1080p look pretty fantastic makes this seem a bit hard to believe.
- roc 13y ago
  That's just Nintendo being Nintendo. They (seemingly) don't ever watch their competitors or consider the lessons their competitors are learning. It's not so different than their being dragged kicking-and-screaming into connected services and then introducing initial offerings that look and function as if none of them had ever even seen the Internet before, let alone used any connected services that had been on offer from the industry. Also: their games are always slow to materialize. Despite SD resolutions, the Wii was a similar-scale software-wasteland for at least its first year. (or longer - depending on how generous you're feeling) The only real difference is that its launch titles retained novelty and popularity as more and more people were being first-introduced to waggle-gaming. Now that it's old hat, and every visitor isn't demanding to try it out, no-one's logging a hundred hours on a launch title and the lack of software is more glaring.
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    Nintendo being Nintendo has served them well for decades. It's not reasonable to expect them to throw their entire corporate identity out just because they have a huge Wii-shaped bump in their stock chart. What makes Nintendo unique among console makers--and what carries them through each generation--is focusing on making fun games, not abiding the latest trends. Nintendo does roughly what Apple does: let the competitors make all the big mistakes and take the PR hits, then come behind and release something that gets it right on the first try.
chaostheory 13y ago
I think the only console manufacturer, in this generation, that focused on ease of programming from the hardware side was Sony; to make up for the mistakes they've made in the past with resulted in PS3's Cell. That said, I didn't hear anything about Wii U having a weird architecture like PS3's Cell. The only thing I keep reading is that the Wii U's specs are actually even weaker than the Xbox 360's hardware.
- talmand 13y ago
  But the PS4 and the Xbox One have weaker specs than my one-year-old PC so I guess whatever point you're making about the Wii U applies to those consoles as well.
  - chaostheory 13y ago
    Not really. Both PS4 and XBox One pretty much sport near off the shelf PC CPUs and GPUs. They're a lot closer to a PC architecture wise than a Wii U is. Well the Xbox One is a little harder to program for since it doesn't have unified memory.
    - talmand 13y ago
      Sure, off the shelf parts, but not the latest and greatest. I'm just expanding on the thought that if a console has weaker specs than other consoles then it couldn't possibly have good games. Consoles are always behind gaming PCs so therefore the logic dictates that you can't have good games on any consoles. Which, I'm hoping it comes across that I don't agree with said logic.
Millennium 13y ago
There are three things Nintendo understimated: how much HD would add to the cost to create a game, how little HD would add to the value of a game, and how badly third parties would insist on it anyway.
Nursie 13y ago
That's OK, been playing my Wii games in HD for ages on Dolphin... No seriously, my only complaint about the Wii graphics was that they weren't very smooth on a 50 inch screen. They didn't need to be photo-realistic, but a bit less blocky would have been nice. Hence Dolphin.
m_st 13y ago
I think Nintendo, but also Sony and Microsoft will have a hard time convincing people to buy a console or portable once Apple releases iOS 7 with the rumored game controller support. You can be sure controllers will be made available for other popular phones too and in about a year there'll be plenty of good games on the market, for much less than classic console and portable games. If you can get such a controller for less than 50$ and already have a smartphone or iPod touch like device, then I just don't see why you'd want to buy yet another gaming device. Now give me a good and comfortable controller for my iPad and I won't buy any console anymore.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Look at the top selling games on consoles. Grand Theft Auto, Mario games, Halo, Call of Duty, Madden. How many of those games can be done on a tablet or phone? Zero. Home console gaming currently offers gaming experiences that cannot be done on mobile devices. Mobile devices are only a threat to mobile consoles.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - chaostheory 13y ago
    It's a given that the hardcore gamers will either stick with the consoles or go PC. However it's good to note that GTA, Call of Duty, and Madden are all on the tablets and phones now. The publishers can't ignore the large casual gaming market.
  - ameen 13y ago
    GTA / Madden | Fifa / CoD | Battlefield / Mario-like platformers are on iOS right now. Most of them quite decent. They'll get better if an official Controller (or) an API is launched. I think there's an opportunity for a proper platformer IP exclusively made for mobile seeing as how its exploding onto traditional consoles (Ouya/etc) Remember Nintendo's investors threatened the board and wanted them to release Nintendo IP on Mobile appstores [1]. [1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/09/15/nintendo-no-games-app-store/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/09/15/nintendo-no-games-ap...
parfe 13y ago
Lot of doom and gloom about the only gaming company that doesn't dump their product on the market at a loss. Sony and Microsoft piss away literally billions of dollars for years waiting for their consoles to become profitable. And here's a redditor putting the Wii U game library in context: http://www.reddit.com/r/wiiu/comments/1gurfs/is_nintendo_preparing_for_a_n64_style_generation/cao1kvm http://www.reddit.com/r/wiiu/comments/1gurfs/is_nintendo_pre... The Wii U receives slightly better than average third party support vs other Nintendo consoles.
rschmitty 13y ago
Really good book for those wanting more on Nintendo history: http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America/dp/1591845637 http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America... I just finished the audio version during workouts, while it was not _thrilling_ it was definitely interesting
programminggeek 13y ago
Here's something people easily forget... The gamecube wasn't that successful either and the Wii was derided in the press for having a dumb name initially. Even the hardcore didn't quite "get it" at launch. It wasn't until Wii Sports created this group gaming that was accessible to everybody in the family that it really took off. The place where Nintendo is not going to lose to Sony or Microsoft is the family friendly entertainment that you just can't get on the PS3 or 360 (or PS4 or XBOne). I've got young children and I can't play Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, Halo, etc. in front of them if I don't want to expose them to graphic violence, blood, etc. Nintendo games biggest challenge is going to be on the dealing with "app" type consoles filled with tons of casual games that are cheap or free to play. Think Ouya or Apple TV or some other console with F2P or $1 games like Sonic, vs mario for $50+ and I think Nintendo's ability to create experiences people will pay a premium for is going to be harder, but not impossible.

114 points by scholia 13y ago

Feh. If they think HD is hard, just wait until everybody switches to 4K in a couple of years. (The true videophiles will have 8K or 16K.)

jiggy2011 13y ago
There tends to be quite a bit of lag between available video technologies and what people actually have at home, there's still plenty of Xbox 360s out there hooked up to SDTVs for example.
smackfu 13y ago
The general "meh" towards Blu-Ray makes me wonder.
xuim21 13y ago
I think uptake will be extremely slow. Most consumers won't be able to tell the difference when watching TV from a couch, my parents can barely tell the difference between SD and HD as it is.
adam86306 13y ago
I think 4k will be a hard sell for most consumers kind of like 3D because 1080p is pretty damn good quality. I wonder when we will get to a point where it is good enough.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
AndrewDucker 13y ago
Unless you're sitting within 7 feet of a 70" screen 4k is completely pointless: http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/ http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  THANK YOU. We might see 4k screens take off for computers, but they don't make sense for TVs right now.
  - AndrewDucker 13y ago
    Yeah, my 22" monitor is 1680x1050 - which http://isthisretina.com/ http://isthisretina.com/ tells me is retina at 38". As it happens, I'm sitting about 26" from it - so I need about 50% more pixel depth. Even then, that only makes it 50% of 4K resolution. A 4k screen at 22" is a retina display at 17". That doesn't sound comfortable - although I haven't played with an Oculus Rift yet...
- DanBC 13y ago
  And yet people still buy gold plated HDMI cables.
- sixothree 13y ago
  10 feet away from a 90" screen is what many people with projectors currently enjoy.
- sukuriant 13y ago
  Having gone in to see one of the screens, I believe it was less than that from a 60+" screen that I could tell the difference. Go to a store, e.g. Best Buy, and see. Obviously, the people with the standard 37-50" screens aren't going to see much of a change; but when you get large screens, it's pretty clear
swang 13y ago
HD is hard. Game companies are barely got to 1080p/60fps for their games with most of them cheating to get near that quality. This next generation they may be able to just throw process cycles at it for the PS4/XBone. I can't imagine how long it will take to get to the 4K/60fps quality rate.
- warfangle 13y ago
  Which is funky, because I was playing games in 1600x1200@60fps in <2003.
  - KeyBoardG 13y ago
    And 3d games < 2003 were rubbish graphically compared to today. There was minimal AA and AF. There were almost no particle effects, shaders were just being thought about. Physics in games were a joke until HalfLife2.
    - TillE 13y ago
      Yes, and? Those were the limits of the hardware. Mobile phones have better GPUs now. Doesn't change the simple fact that you could run the most advanced games of the time at high resolutions. Everyone was saying the Wii was outdated at launch, and they were right.
      - weego 13y ago
        Nintendo seem to have always aimed to not compete on graphics and hardware. It's been a smart move while they have managed to engage third party developers to make "decent" games around their headline titles but now they aren't being so successful (thanks to much easier cross-platform dev for console/pc freezing them out of the main console market and the rise of smartphones eating into the mobile market) getting good developers on board their strategy is starting to look hollow. Which is a real shame because historically they have been exceptional at competing on fun, but you can't justify a £200 console based on the possibility of 1 or 2 first party games a year.
    - 13y ago
LandoCalrissian 13y ago
I think that is a rater optimistic timeline since the next gen consoles will probably still struggle to do 1080.

jug6ernaut 13y ago

Of the big three i easily have the most faith in Nintendo. Why? Because they know how to make games i enjoy, and have been doing so for well over 2 decades. Nintendo put themselves in a tough spot, with dwindling Wii sales they were left with the choice of having no Console choice or having one with no games(very few). It can be argued which is the better option, obviously both suck. I do not consider Nintendo in trouble, there base(as has been proven time and time again) will always be there(mainly because they stick to there guns, for better or worse). Point & case of this is the 3DS, when this was release for a good 7-8 months it was considered a horrible console, with its best game being a remake of "The Legend of Zelda OOT"(arguably). Look at it now it is considered to be the best running console available. Granted it some good games in this 7-8 month period, but not much. My point is, when it comes down to it, games sell consoles, and the WiiU has no games, at all really. Once they come, and they will, the console will be in at least fine shape. I personally have not bought one, but it is on my list above both the xbox1 and the ps4. My 2 cents...

rocky1138 13y ago
I wish Wii U was as open as the Ouya. It's cool, though, that they put that JS library up for getting button-mapping in-browser from the control pad. I don't own a Wii U, either. It's way too expensive and I don't find any of the titles compelling. That, and when I played with one at Toys R Us I found the controller cheap to hold.
lauraura 13y ago
Nintendo's been mainly working off their portables for years, really. The N64 didn't sell that great either, and the Gamecube did pretty awfully, ending up selling what few units it did almost entirely on the merit of its first-party games and a couple rare gems, like Tales of Symphonia. The Wii was unusual -- the Wii U is more "normal", by Nintendo sales standards! Fortunately for them the 3DS is doing great, gathering dozens and dozens of great games, and probably makes a tidy profit margin too. They did a wonderful job pivoting the console; people pretty quickly lost interest in the 3D aspect, but there was no reason they had to market the console on those merits to begin with, so as far as I can tell they've mostly de-emphasized that aspect of the device (and nobody I know even uses it!) It's also cheap enough that even as the Vita does finally pick up sales and actual games (and it's happening, finally), it probably won't hurt the 3DS' sales -- their game lists seem more mutually exclusive than not and if someone can afford a Vita, they probably already have a 3DS if they ever wanted one. The Vita is really its own interesting story of a console with (initially) almost no games -- a lot of more minor and independent developers have found that they can get great sales on the Vita since the market is much less saturated. Amazingly, a few months ago, the top selling Vita game was actually a rather niche title that was released with no prior announcement on the e-shop and no marketing whatsoever. I kind of wonder if the Wii U will have a year or two (or ten??) of the same kind of thing -- it definitely could be an interesting platform for indie devs.

afreak 13y ago

> It remains to be seen if Nintendo?s laundry list of beloved exclusives can carry them for another console generation. I recently asked Xbox loyalists if Microsoft?s continued employment of Master Chief and Halo was enough to keep them excited about the console. Most said no, and I wonder if the numbers will finally start to turn for Nintendo as well. I think that this part misses the point about the differences between Halo and Mario. Halo is and always has been aimed towards the types that have been long term gamers and has only been recently usurped by the likes of Call of Duty et al. Mario and its entire universe has brand value with parents and is geared towards practically anyone who can figure out a d-pad. While I think that most of the Mario franchise is just a rehash of a rehash (Mario Bros. Wii being the last rehash I liked), for as long as parents see the games that way, Nintendo can keep pumping them out.

GVIrish 13y ago
True, but how long can Nintendo stay afloat with only the strength of the Mario franchise to lean upon. 3rd party developers are giving the WiiU no love, and the WiiU doesn't have the hook to attract casual gamers the way the original Wii did. I think parents will still choose Mario, but that number is going to get smaller and smaller as time goes on. Why spend $300 for a console that only has Mario games? That's not a good way forward for Nintendo.
- aclevernickname 13y ago
  > True, but how long can Nintendo stay afloat with only the strength of the Mario franchise to lean upon. Perhaps we can ask Disney the same question about Mickey Mouse.

smackfu 13y ago

Seems pretty inexcusable to me. Nintendo was able to coast through the entire last-gen not doing HD games at all. Now they have to do HD on their new console, and it was perfectly clear they were going to have to do HD, and it's too much work for them to get games out on time??

atourgates 13y ago
Also, the fact that Wii games emulated on Dolphin in 1080p look pretty fantastic makes this seem a bit hard to believe.
roc 13y ago
That's just Nintendo being Nintendo. They (seemingly) don't ever watch their competitors or consider the lessons their competitors are learning. It's not so different than their being dragged kicking-and-screaming into connected services and then introducing initial offerings that look and function as if none of them had ever even seen the Internet before, let alone used any connected services that had been on offer from the industry. Also: their games are always slow to materialize. Despite SD resolutions, the Wii was a similar-scale software-wasteland for at least its first year. (or longer - depending on how generous you're feeling) The only real difference is that its launch titles retained novelty and popularity as more and more people were being first-introduced to waggle-gaming. Now that it's old hat, and every visitor isn't demanding to try it out, no-one's logging a hundred hours on a launch title and the lack of software is more glaring.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  Nintendo being Nintendo has served them well for decades. It's not reasonable to expect them to throw their entire corporate identity out just because they have a huge Wii-shaped bump in their stock chart. What makes Nintendo unique among console makers--and what carries them through each generation--is focusing on making fun games, not abiding the latest trends. Nintendo does roughly what Apple does: let the competitors make all the big mistakes and take the PR hits, then come behind and release something that gets it right on the first try.

chaostheory 13y ago

I think the only console manufacturer, in this generation, that focused on ease of programming from the hardware side was Sony; to make up for the mistakes they've made in the past with resulted in PS3's Cell. That said, I didn't hear anything about Wii U having a weird architecture like PS3's Cell. The only thing I keep reading is that the Wii U's specs are actually even weaker than the Xbox 360's hardware.

talmand 13y ago
But the PS4 and the Xbox One have weaker specs than my one-year-old PC so I guess whatever point you're making about the Wii U applies to those consoles as well.
- chaostheory 13y ago
  Not really. Both PS4 and XBox One pretty much sport near off the shelf PC CPUs and GPUs. They're a lot closer to a PC architecture wise than a Wii U is. Well the Xbox One is a little harder to program for since it doesn't have unified memory.
  - talmand 13y ago
    Sure, off the shelf parts, but not the latest and greatest. I'm just expanding on the thought that if a console has weaker specs than other consoles then it couldn't possibly have good games. Consoles are always behind gaming PCs so therefore the logic dictates that you can't have good games on any consoles. Which, I'm hoping it comes across that I don't agree with said logic.

Millennium 13y ago

There are three things Nintendo understimated: how much HD would add to the cost to create a game, how little HD would add to the value of a game, and how badly third parties would insist on it anyway.

Nursie 13y ago

That's OK, been playing my Wii games in HD for ages on Dolphin... No seriously, my only complaint about the Wii graphics was that they weren't very smooth on a 50 inch screen. They didn't need to be photo-realistic, but a bit less blocky would have been nice. Hence Dolphin.

m_st 13y ago

I think Nintendo, but also Sony and Microsoft will have a hard time convincing people to buy a console or portable once Apple releases iOS 7 with the rumored game controller support. You can be sure controllers will be made available for other popular phones too and in about a year there'll be plenty of good games on the market, for much less than classic console and portable games. If you can get such a controller for less than 50$ and already have a smartphone or iPod touch like device, then I just don't see why you'd want to buy yet another gaming device. Now give me a good and comfortable controller for my iPad and I won't buy any console anymore.

GVIrish 13y ago
Look at the top selling games on consoles. Grand Theft Auto, Mario games, Halo, Call of Duty, Madden. How many of those games can be done on a tablet or phone? Zero. Home console gaming currently offers gaming experiences that cannot be done on mobile devices. Mobile devices are only a threat to mobile consoles.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- chaostheory 13y ago
  It's a given that the hardcore gamers will either stick with the consoles or go PC. However it's good to note that GTA, Call of Duty, and Madden are all on the tablets and phones now. The publishers can't ignore the large casual gaming market.
- ameen 13y ago
  GTA / Madden | Fifa / CoD | Battlefield / Mario-like platformers are on iOS right now. Most of them quite decent. They'll get better if an official Controller (or) an API is launched. I think there's an opportunity for a proper platformer IP exclusively made for mobile seeing as how its exploding onto traditional consoles (Ouya/etc) Remember Nintendo's investors threatened the board and wanted them to release Nintendo IP on Mobile appstores [1]. [1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/09/15/nintendo-no-games-app-store/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2011/09/15/nintendo-no-games-ap...

parfe 13y ago

Lot of doom and gloom about the only gaming company that doesn't dump their product on the market at a loss. Sony and Microsoft piss away literally billions of dollars for years waiting for their consoles to become profitable. And here's a redditor putting the Wii U game library in context: http://www.reddit.com/r/wiiu/comments/1gurfs/is_nintendo_preparing_for_a_n64_style_generation/cao1kvm http://www.reddit.com/r/wiiu/comments/1gurfs/is_nintendo_pre... The Wii U receives slightly better than average third party support vs other Nintendo consoles.

rschmitty 13y ago

Really good book for those wanting more on Nintendo history: http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America/dp/1591845637 http://www.amazon.com/Super-Mario-Nintendo-Conquered-America... I just finished the audio version during workouts, while it was not _thrilling_ it was definitely interesting

programminggeek 13y ago

Here's something people easily forget... The gamecube wasn't that successful either and the Wii was derided in the press for having a dumb name initially. Even the hardcore didn't quite "get it" at launch. It wasn't until Wii Sports created this group gaming that was accessible to everybody in the family that it really took off. The place where Nintendo is not going to lose to Sony or Microsoft is the family friendly entertainment that you just can't get on the PS3 or 360 (or PS4 or XBOne). I've got young children and I can't play Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, Halo, etc. in front of them if I don't want to expose them to graphic violence, blood, etc. Nintendo games biggest challenge is going to be on the dealing with "app" type consoles filled with tons of casual games that are cheap or free to play. Think Ouya or Apple TV or some other console with F2P or $1 games like Sonic, vs mario for $50+ and I think Nintendo's ability to create experiences people will pay a premium for is going to be harder, but not impossible.