Nintendo isn't wrong. So why do people keep blaming them?

This first bit is an anecdote. Skip it if you just want to get to the point.

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I remember getting an NES when I was a kid. I had to have been about 5 or so. I distinctly remember, though, my whole family crowding around a tiny television set and playing Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers. My parents were no good at it, but they played. And every year after that, when we would get a new game that I thought my parents, mainly my dad, would like, I remember my brother and I running to grab him and show him what "video games" could do. When we got the Super Nes, I remember running and dragging him down to our basement to play Sim City with us. I remember dragging him to come play Super Nes NES Play Action Football. I remember dragging him to come play Wailai Golf. And then I distinctly remember the day I dragged him to come see a game on the Playstation and he responded with

"That looks too complicated. I don't know how to use all those buttons."

From that point on, he would come watch, but he would never play. Not Mario 64. Not Resident Evil. Not Gran Turismo. Not Fortza. Not Red Dead Redemption.

Right up until Wii Sports. Wii Sports he played again. He played a game for the first time in like 20 years. It wasn't too complicated. It wasn't too many buttons. It was just fun. And I had fun playing games with him again.

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So here's my problem:

Why do gamers keep blaming Nintendo for trying to lead the industry in a direction that at least SOME gamers clearly want to go? And with the number of people who bought Wii's I would say it's more than just SOME gamers.

"Well", you reply, "the system just didn't have any games beyond wii sports".

You're right. But Nintendo DID put out games. And what games they put out were good. THey should have put out MORE games, I agree, but the real problem, we both know, is 3rd parties. 3rd party manufacturers weren't making any good games for the console.

And they would have you believe that they tried, but those games just didn't sell. But did they really? I owned a Wii and I wanted to play games on it, but there were few, if any, 3rd party games that I wanted to buy. 3rd party games sucked. And it's not a mystery as to why, it's very clear why. And this is the crux of my rant:

PUBLISHERS AND DEVELOPERS HATE CHANGE.

Making videogames is about making money. Making money is about analyzing risk, and taking whatever course of action has the least risk involved to your making money. So how do you do that in the games industry? Sequels and copy-cat games. But how do you copy games onto a system that has NEW mechanics and a NEW controller? You don't. Or, you take what you've already done and make minuscule changes to get it to run on that new system.

3rd party games failed because developers were trying to figure out how to take what they were already making money on (Call of Duty and such) and port it onto the Wii, which wasn't suited for the games in any way. How many games implemented "Wii functionality" by having you shake the controller instead of press a button? Same game as on the other consoles, except now you are waggling instead of pressing a button. That is worse gameplay in every way, and the people HATED it.

THe Wii SHOULD have had MUCH better games. Heck, just combining the games from Wii Sports Resort (swordplay, canoeing, archery and disc) could make an AMAZING 3rd person adventure game.

My point is, I don't understand why Nintendo gets pooped on for the Wii (which is still an amazing console with amazing potential in my point of view) when it's the 3rd party developers who made crappy games for it. When they said "nobody makes money on Nintendo Systems but Nintendo", why didn't gamers shout back "STOP MAKING CRAPPY GAMES!" Many of their Wii titles never should have gotten past the first meeting, and making inferior ports of games that depend on their graphics to sell titles is not going to sell ANYTHING to ANYBODY.

I have owned all 3 consoles over the course of this generation and currently has a PS3 and Wii. I have preorders on X1 and PS4. Both those consoles are only going to play the exact same games I've been playing for years, and for the first year, they probably won't even look much better. The industry needs to start calling 3rd parties out for their "lowest risk, lowest effort, lowest common denominator" approach. Be it Kinect, Wii U or whatever Playstation has up it's sleeve, developers need to be forced to stop playing it safe and cranking out safe, boring, low risk titles.

SHILL!

on a serious note, Nintendo is fine and dandy. They cater to a different audience for the most part. (yes there's obviously overlap) but they don't really cater to me, (mid20's straight male). That's fine. I dont have anything against them though.

lol

I have an entire shelf of games that says otherwise.

I think the problem with nintendo is that the group they are catering to is shrinking/being stolen and that they aren't really adapting to that. I may be totally wrong of course seeing as how the 3ds has sold very well.

There are people who say this? I'd argue that Nintendo is no longer a leader in the industry. And that the amount of people who have a Wii shouldn't all be considered core gamers. Remember how Nintendo successfully marketed the Wii to grandmas and other non-gamers?

You obviously feel very strongly about this but maybe Nintendo isn't making strides in the directions you're advocating against.

I would argue that a leader isn't necessarily the person with the most people behind him, but the person willing to be out front and go in a new direction.

Microsoft is experiencing the exact same problem as Nintendo right now. They tried to lead the industry with the X1 and the industry, in this case gamers, spat on them. Sony stood up and said "we're just not going to change anything" and people cheered a deafening cheer.

I was against the MS initiatives too, but in the end, I think the industry just hates change and doesn't want to be led anywhere.

I think they're wrong in constantly equating gimmicks like the Wii remote to "innovation".

I don't think you know what a gimmick is.

Being able to control games with motion, whether it's Wii or Kinect or whatever, isn't a gimmick. It's a new way of doing things. That's like saying the invention of the car was a gimmick.

The invention of the car allowed people to get from one place to another in a far more efficient fashion than any other invention before it, with the possible exception of the train. The train, however, had some of its own inconveniences, like leaving on a pre-planned schedule and not when a person wanted to.

The Wii-mote, on the other hand, is less efficient for most things than a traditional controller or a mouse and keyboard, as are motion controls of any kind. You're telling me that shaking/swinging/stabbing forward/pulling back/etc. is all more efficient than simply pressing a button? No, I'd say that the Wii mote is a device that almost works against the player doing well. It sounds good on paper, but in practice it's a very limited input tool. And that, in a nutshell, is what a gimmick is.

I'll concede that the touch screen on the DS has proven itself useful if only as a handy second screen where extra buttons, maps, and other information can be placed. Unfortunately, it's less easy to justify the Wii U's controller because a) you have to look down at the controller, something that most gamers haven't done in ages and just sucks to do anyway and b) it makes the controller larger, heavier, and somewhat expensive. EDIT: Though, to be fair, I've used a Wii U controller and don't have a real problem with it. At least it doesn't force developers into using its more gimmicky features.

I'm pretty sure people don't think that about Nintendo but sure...let assume that Nintendo knows where things are heading. Is it possible their execution sucks? Just asking.

@believer258:

Efficiency may not be its goal, at least not yet. The Wii-mote's original goal was more intuitiveness, which it generally succeeded at. Motions feel more natural and responsive (I can't quite grasp the word I want) than button inputs, at least for the audience Nintendo was aiming at.

Really, Nintendo didn't introduce anything new with the Wii. They've been aiming at a casual audience for most of their existence. It's just that with the Wii, they finally found the one missing piece of the equation, and it worked pretty damn well for them.

Just wanted to get that out there.

You are passing the blame onto third parties when the blame really does lie with Nintendo. Yes, it is true that third parties have not been putting out quality games on Nintendo consoles for quite some time, but Nintendo is the one to blame for this. The Wii U is the fourth straight Nintendo console that has one stupid decision that effectively killed any chance for third party developers to release multiplatform games on Nintendo consoles. Allow me to illustrate the point.

Nintendo 64: By opting to go with cartridges despite the fact that both their competitors had moved to CD, most of the multiplatform or de facto Playstation exclusives (after the Saturn became irrelevant) were technologically incapable of being released on the N64. Games that exceeded the small capacity of the N64 cartridge, games that used lots of prerendered video, and games that featured voice work were either not released on the system or were released in a diminished state (lack of FMV, highly compressed audio, etc.).

Gamecube: Nintendo once again made a format decision that would cost them many multiplatform games, this time deciding to go with 1.4 GB mini discs that were less than 1/3 the capacity of standard DVDs. This was the generation where their decision probably hurt them the least, since the cheap production cost of these proprietary mini discs meant that games could easily fit on multiple discs (look at RE4), but there were still many instances of games that came out on both the PS2 and Xbox but did not release on the Gamecube.

Wii: This one is pretty obvious. By making a system so vastly under-powered compared to the competition, Nintendo basically made the decision for third parties. Even though the Wii had a higher install base than it's two competitors, the install base of the 360 and PS3 combined dwarfed that of the Wii, making multiplatform development much more lucrative than Wii exclusive development. If the Wii were capable of running multiplatform games without much effort in the port job, developers may have actually spent the time to add some Wii exclusive features to make use of the system's unique aspects, but because games couldn't be ported to the Wii, the only instances of multiplatform games released on the system were inferior versions farmed out to second tier development studios. You say developers only put out crappy games on the Wii, but think of it from a business perspective. The publisher is spending tens of millions of dollars on a game, are they going to have their top tier studio make a game for ridiculously outdated hardware with a lackluster online infrastructure and no HD capability that has a potential install base of 100 million or have them work on more modern hardware with a potential install base of 150 million (plus PC in some cases)?

Wii U: Nintendo simply didn't learn. They made the exact same mistake as the Wii generation. They opted to go with input "innovation" and simply did not make a machine capable of matching the competition on a technical level. Third parties will be left with the exact same scenario as last generation and they will make the same decision. They will always choose the option with the larger install base and the more advanced hardware. While 360 and PS3 versions of games are still being made, the Wii U may get some ports of convenience, but once the industry shifts completely to the next generation systems, Nintendo will once again be completely abandoned by third parties, and once again they have no one to blame but themselves.

It was hardly intuitive. It's worth mentioning that I have never used a Wii Motion Plus add-on, mostly because I just stopped attempting to care about the Wii before it came out, but I can hardly imagine that it really made the shaking and moving an equivalent to more tried-and-true control schemes.

Hey, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade here. If you have fun with the Wii, then continue having fun with the Wii. But stop calling it things like "innovative" and "original" simply because it used and popularized motion controls, or pretending like this generation didn't bring anything innovative or original. I'd rather reserve those terms for the things that actually do something innovative and new - Mirror's Edge or Portal come to mind. Something that takes an idea and proves that there is a lot of depth to it. An honest question - What took the Wii's controls, made new mechanics with it, and thoroughly explored those mechanics in the same way that the first person parkour of Mirror's Edge or the mind-bending puzzles of Portal did?

I didn't say that. In fact, I said the exact opposite.

I didn't mean you, I meant people that say those things in general, the OP included. Sorry, I should have made that a bit clearer.

@jazgalaxy: those 3rd party games were bad in large part due to Nintendo being hard to work with.

If they don't share dev kits in a timely manner or make it easy to code for their systems or make the financial structure dev friendly, guess what? 3rd party games will stink on their system.

I love Nintendo, but their trubs are entirely self inflicted

This was pretty much what I was going to say. I mean, for an example of how underpowered the Wii was, look at The Last Story. I love that game, but the main city hub, at times, didn't load in its entirety, the gameplay stuttered near water, and at times, at one boss that existed in a water-filled area, my Wii nearly shat a brick trying to deal with it. Nintendo shoot themselves in the foot by thinking small, and it's shrinking the audience. It's the sense of self-imposed alienation that really gets me though. They seemingly have very little business smarts when it comes to their consoles, it's quite sad.

Yeah. While it's no secret that the lineup on the Wii was severely lacking compared to the others, it's not entirely impossible to build up a half-decent collection, provided you're willing to look.

The problem with the Wii was that its "audience" was, by and large, unwilling to look, really only caring about the novelty and joining the public Zeitgeist. This is the natural problem with a system that is mainly bought by the masses as a fad - the appeal is fleeting, and so is the attention paid. The system didn't have anywhere near the attach rate of other systems because so many people, especially when the fad was at its peak, only bought it as a Wii Sports machine.

This was, BTW, a crying shame. Some really nice games failed for being on the Wii.

As to third parties, I think Nintendo KNOWS at this point that the ship has sailed on ever getting more than token 3rd party support. Nintendo needs to VASTLY grow its internal development stable to keep the prolonged droughts between big releases from happening.

Because they are living in some ivory Tower far away from reality and the whole market. They still do not understand modern game development like switching from SD to HD and they don't listen to anyone. Iwata really needs to go or this can become the last generation for Nintendo in terms of consoles.

Has anyone else ever had to explain to someone where the B button is on the Wii Remote? It's harder than it should be.

people dont blame them for leading them the way SOME people want to go.. some people have terrible taste and dont understand when theyre being screwed. thats ok. but i think the people who are able to see the problem should speak with their wallets and not support such things . . ill never support nintendo for what theyve done post gamecube like ill never support microsoft for what theyre doing with xbox one. unless they learn their lesson and take a complete turn and get new leadership and all of that . .. it would take a lot to convince me

I like Nintendo's stuff for the most part. I'm not sure the WiiU was a great move but I'm not really sure what else they were in a position to offer. Maybe it's the best they can do right now. Games are in a weird place this year. Maybe it will work out for this this holiday season but I don't think so. The lineup they announced just doesn't look all that interesting or fresh.

This is so dumb it's ridiculous.

Why are you comparing a single console to multiple consoles? You could ask the question "why not have an install base of 150 million when you can have an install base of 250 million?!" Answer that question, and that's the answer to the question of why 3rd parties didn't take up the Wii... not because they could develop for the 2 others and make money.

The fact that developers spent time porting to Cell, but not to Wii, say something too.

This is everything I could have possibly wanted to say, only longer, with more detail, and all around much clearer than I ever could.

Just to add my own two cents to this insight, Nintendo also makes all these decisions in such a way that it seems they are either truly ignorant of the future of this industry or that they are simply so arrogant that they don't think they have to care. Gimmicky control schemes are not the future of gaming; the future is creative, beautiful, huge virtual worlds. If you don't believe this, look at how excited developers are for the next generation of Xbox and PlayStation gaming, then compare this to the level of excitement developers have for making games for the Wii U. Nintendo needs to stop making these awful creative decisions and passing them off as innovation or the future of gaming.

Yes. The Wii Remote CAN be much more efficient than a controller. Hence why so many people use the wii as a netflix box rather than the other consoles.

Did you ever play Resident Evil 4 on the Wii? That was the single most underrated game I have ever played, and I don't even like resident evil. Using the wii remote as a light gun and running around shooting bad guys was the most unique and fun experience I had in this entire console generation. I don't know why more games didn't try to copy it's design.

And did you ever try to play Myst, Diablo, Xcom, Broken Sword or other such games on the Playstation? They were proven blockbuster titles that were completely unplayable on the console due to the controller. The wii remote being used simply as a mouse is just one example of hundreds of different games that could suddenly be played on console that were completely unplayable before.

As a longtime Nintendo fan, here are my thoughts on the company: Nintendo does innovate with hardware ideas, though not every single one ends up being a banger (DD, Virtual Boy, GameBoy Camera etc.). However, it seems like more and more they keep relying on old franchises to appeal to the nostalgic core, and then having things like Wii sports/fit for the more casual audience. Those are both fine, but where the fuck is the new ip?

The most recent console series I can even think of is Pikmin, and that was back during the Game Cube. I'm not saying they just need to make up some new character for the sake of doing so, but they need to expand beyond Mario/Zelda/Metroid. They also aren't even utilizing all of their franchises that they currently have. Miyamoto keeps saying he can't think of a way for them to make F-Zero fun and new again, yet they're gearing up to release Mario Kart 8 next year b/c that franchise sells gangbustsers. While I'm pissed Bayonetta 2 is Wii U exclusive, it's good to see them trying to publish some more mature titles. I know they'll never make them in house, but it'd be great if there were more partnerships with other developers to make and publish more mature and diverse titles. Look at Sony, they have first party games for every age range (LBP, Gran Turismo, Ratchet + Clank, Killzone, inFamous Resistance, Uncharted, God of War, Last of Us, Wipeout) and they keep investing in new ip; and it looks like Microsoft is going to do so as well.

As @ll_exile_ll pointed out, Nintendo has also repeatedly failed to adopt industry standards that literally everyone else is using, and that consumers expect from products costing hundreds of dollars. I'm willing to bet that by holiday 2015 the only games coming out on current gen platforms will be sports titles, and licensed games for kids cartoons/movies, or games like Rayman that, while gorgeous, are more about art/animation than raw visual fidelity. Just like with the Wii, publishers aren't going to invest resources on a platform that's basically as powerful as consoles released 7-8 years ago. Nintendo has always said gameplay is more important than graphics, and I agree, but Sony/Microsoft and third parties have proven countless times that the two aren't mutually exclusive. Nintendo really only has themselves to blame for lack of third party support.

Nintendo's reluctance to embrace the Internet, and indies is another example of mistakes they've been making. Iwata making disparaging comments about mobile developers in the past just comes off as butthurt to me. I know they've been trying to make up ground on that in the past year or so but still. The Wii barely had any online capabilities, and the only worthwhile feature was Virtual Console. They still haven't added Nintendo Network to the 3DS, or Miiverse for that matter...or added Miiverse to smartphones/tablets. As for the Wii U, the fact that accounts are locked to one console and purchases aren't tied to an account is bullshit. Literally every other gaming service has worked this way for years. Nintendo is practically a decade behind everyone when it comes to HD and online, and while the Wii could have been their opportunity to learn about those things, they decided to kick the can down to 2012 and now they're stuck playing catch-up.

I'll own a Wii U eventually, probably when they drop the price b/c $350 is way too much for a box that basically exists to play Nintendo games. Just pulling a number out of my ass here, but I could see this thing selling around 30 million units in its lifetime or so. The casuals that flocked to the Wii that still enjoy gaming have smartphones and tablets, and if they want a console they'll probably go PS4 or XOne since they have greater value. It's also quite possible the Wii takes care of all their gaming needs and they see no reason to upgrade. Or they have no idea the Wii U even exists since Nintendo's marketing for the system seems to be non-existent. Everyone in my family knew about the Wii, but I've had to be the one to tell all of them that the Wii U is a thing, and it's not just an add-on.

Apologies if this is tl;dr for you guys, I guess I just needed to get this Nintendo rant off my chest.

You're missing the point. The Cell may have been a pain in the ass to program for, making ports more hassle than they could have been, but the PS3 and 360 were very similar power wise. Any multiplatform game that could be done on one could be done on the other, even if it took a bit of effort to get it running well. I don't even get what you're trying to say, that publishers didn't port their games to Wii out of spite?

The fact is there is no possible way any multiplatform 360/PS3 could be ported to the Wii. In order to get those games on the Wii, they would have to alter content, not just fuck around with optimization like porting to the Cell required. Altering content is a lot more difficult, time consuming, and expensive than simply optimizing for different yet comparable hardware.

And the proof is there that even if the if effort was put in to get some of these games on Wii, the system was simply not capable of recreating the experiences players on the 360 and PS3 were having. Look at games like Skate It and Dead Rising Chop Till You Drop. They had to make up some bullshit about an apocalypses in a skateboarding game to explain why they couldn't render any NPCs and Dead Rising had about 1/10 the number of zombies on screen at a time. You can't really blame the developers for these issues, they were simply trying to bring games with a scope and scale designed for better systems to one that was simply incapable of recreating that experience.

The reason having an install of 250 million was not an option was because of Nintendo's poor design decisions with the Wii. The console was simply not powerful enough to handle games designed for the other two systems, and in the instances where developers attempted to bring their games to the Wii as well, that versions always wound up being significantly inferior to the other two.

Maybe because they have been doing the exact same thing for over a decade now and people are getting tired of it?

They can only make so many Mario, Zelda, and Animal Crossing games before people just clock out. It's the same thing (with a few minor differences) OVER and OVER and OVER again.

Until they get some meaningful 3rd party support, they are going to keep losing people and their hardware is going to keep selling less and less as time goes on (as we've seen recently in the last few years).

Nintendo needs to get with the program soon or they'll be another SEGA.

Using it for Netflix is hardly comparable to using it for a video game. Also, do you have any hard numbers for that "so many people use the Wii as a Netflix box" thing? Also, the on screen keyboard for the Wii is pretty bad. Not that console on screen keyboards are good, but you don't have to slowly pinpoint the damn cursor on a letter and lightly press A to get that letter to come up.

Yes, I have played RE4 on the Wii and no, it was not a pleasant experience. It was clunky and unintuitive, from what I remember (though the console version are also clunky and unintuitive until you get used to their clunkiness and unintuitiveness, at which point they become good enough). But I'm not really getting at specifics here; I'm saying that the Wii remote was overall restrictive. There are only so many motions you can do, and it's possible for a game to mistake one motion for another. For instance, in Metroid Prime 3, getting those energy cells in and out is occasionally a pain in the ass. A perfectly functioning controller is never going to mistake the A button for the B button or flicking the analog stick right for clicking it in.

I'll agree that none of those games are as good on controllers as they are on mice and keyboard, but both inputs are far better than the Wii remote. Don't forget that the Wii has to have these big buttons, whereas a mouse can be used with more pinpoint accuracy. You could never play Crusader Kings 2 with a Wii mote, for instance, because all of its buttons are pretty small. You could also never play it with a controller. While we're at it, X-Com is perfectly playable on a 360 controller and Torchlight, a game similar to Diablo 2, also plays fairly well with a 360 controller.

For the record, I own a Wii and have attempted, many times, to enjoy Wii games. I can't. I managed to power through Metroid Prime 1 on it and the controller made it a markedly worse experience, quite a feat for what I consider my favorite game of all time behind Super Metroid. The fucking controller continually gets in the way of any experiences I've had with it. This is not coming from some kind of crazy fanboyism or hate for Nintendo, I just think that the Wii-mote and motion controls in general are terrible, terrible ideas, all of them. Any time that they have been implemented, it has been done badly, and with less intuitiveness than most other inputs out there. The only potential exceptions are light gun games, a genre I've had little experience in.

Torchlight and Xcom were games that were re-made to have console joypad controls. I would arugue that the new xcom, because of that, doesn't control as well as the old xcom, which used pure mouse controls. (The new diablo game for PS4, though, controls better than all other versions, is my understanding.)

Regardless, my opinion is that I feel that there are dozens of new (and old, abandoned) gameplay styles that could make use of the Wii remote.

Wii games played poorly because developers tried to shoehorn their joypad games onto a controller that wasn't built for that.

I got sick of hearing about Mario and Zelda 6 years back. Mario this, Mario that. Super Mario MCXIII, Mario Kart 9001, Super Smash Bros. Bazillion. They've been flogging the same damn franchises for decades and they don't even get a fraction of the hate that Call of Duty and Assassins Creed get.

I'm sure kids like those sort of games and the old people who had their childhood in the 80s probably only remember Mario but zero innovation will invite hate and which is why I will not get Nintendo devices until they start diversifying.

@claude