@masterpaperlink said:
Nintendo games rank among the best in the industry but 5-6 per console generation isn't enough to warrant an early system purchase. Nintendo jumped the shark with the wii and burned a lot of their fanbase, they should have leaned into the mainstream instead of confusing everyone.
The problem with leaning into the mainstream (or rather casual, since the Oprah crowd isn't necessarily the mainstream for big-budget entertainment products), is that Nintendo got killed by dirt cheap (and eventually free) iOS and Android apps that people could dink about with. The problem with going after fads is that you're going to be eventually supplanted the the next one. You can see it in the abrupt end of the Wii's roller coaster success (2010 was when it stopped being the must-have status symbol of choice for the shallow suburbanite, around the same time we started seeing smartphones enter the mainstream). Once the Wii stopped being the choice of soccer moms, Nintendo needed to return to the same core gamers who were burned by the king of shovel-ware, and I don't know if you've noticed, but gamers tend to hold grudges, for better or worse. While the true believers who only need more Mario and Zelda re-hashes to be sated will always be there, the rest of the gamer community are tired of them, of buying hardware for only the five or six games we get from them that rekindle our nostalgia. The fact that Wii owners had to fucking beg for three of the most critically acclaimed games the system had during a huge software drought in the year-long lead-up to the Wii U says something about the outright contempt Nintendo had for the gamer demographic during this generation.
The other issue with the Wii is that it burned third parties. The few great third party games, your Madworlds and Zach and Wikis, that couldn't be ported to the more gamer-oriented platforms and thus constituted enormous risks, sat on the shelves as hilarious, money-draining failures. It's often been said that people buy Nintendo systems for Nintendo software, and that got re-affirmed this generation. Between the failures of third parties who dared to try and Nintendo's limited software output, the system was relegated to dumping ground for every fly-by-night "publisher" putting out shovel-ware like Ninjabread Man. The biggest problem with software on the system, of course, was that most people only bought it for the pack-in, Wii Sports. It was truly an industry first - a system that sold like gangbusters but was impossible to sell games for. Fanboys can argue all they want, but the pathetic 3rd party support for Wii U is the closest thing we have ever seen in this industry to a vote of no confidence. Seriously, even Dreamcast had better software support from 3rd parties, at a time when Sega was floundering and everyone was still pissed at Bernie Stolar. That says something about Nintendo's position.
Can Nintendo reverse the trend? With regard to third party support, I don't think so. Third parties are increasingly tired of investing in games (both exclusive and non) for the platform and not seeing desired returns. Combined with long-seated bitterness over Nintendo's tyrannical rule of the industry during the NES and SNES era, and the ship with third parties has sailed, at least for the forseeable future.
With gamers? I'm not entirely sure it's impossible. The big thing Nintendo needs to do is stop with the gimmicks. If GamePad and motion control add something substantive to a game, fine, but don't throw it in just to throw it in. I can't speak for anyone else, but I found myself fighting the controls in Super Mario Galaxy, because there was so much that was assigned to waggle that would have been better off on buttons and there was no Classic Controller support, and ended up giving up on it. Gimmicks don't sell games, and they don't make games enjoyable. Gameplay does.
Secondly, they need to realize that they will never get third party support on par with the PS4 and Xbone, and fill in the gaps in their software library accordingly. Understandably, they don't want to jeapordize their dominant position in the 6-12 demographic by putting shooters and other more mature games out, but that's easily solved by taking the Disney route. For those of you who don't know, Disney releases darker, more mature films and shows under the dummy label Touchstone Pictures, and uses their recently acquired ABC to put more mature content on TV, such as Victoria's Secret pagent. Nintendo could stand to invest in a few dummy labels as well to fill the void left by the departure of 3rd parties. Whether by this, getting indie games out on retail, or other means, however, Nintendo has to fill in the cavernous gaps between their Mario and Zelda titles that have come to define their hardware as much as those games themselves. That is mission critical; there can be no way to understate it. They need to give up on third parties, at least in the short-to-medium term, and invest heavily in expanding their first party development, especially for games not traditionally associated with Nintendo.
Nintendo will never truly die off, of course. As bleak and pathetic as the Wii U looks, it's more than made up for by the 3DS' continued worldwide domination of the handheld space and the Japanese studio support that brings. However, if Nintendo doesn't reverse its home console fortunes, they'll forever be pigeonholed outside Japan in the role they are now - the console you buy for kids until they're old enough to graduate to the other boxes.
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