– Will be a Nintendo system.
– Will have Nintendo games.
– Third parties will pledge support and then take it away after six months.
– Promised Nintendo exclusive from western third party will go exclusive before launch and be delayed by six months.
– Complaints about no games.
– Complaints about no mature games that can’t be had for free.
– Game reviews for NX will judge games based on if they can save the system.
– Late adopters will go “wait these games were good?!”.
– Potential buyers will go “I will not buy one game for NX” and then go on to buy multiple disappoints for the other guys.
– YouTube Let’s Players will continue to bitch about not getting money for Nintendo.
Can I be a paid gaming journalist now?
Pietriots 
You forgot the part where journalists pen weekly articles that the NX and Nintendo are “doomed”.
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“– Will be a Nintendo system.”
Welcome to why, no matter how well it sells, it will still be considered a failure. The 100 million unit selling Wii is looked back on today as a failure, even though Nintendo made more money from it than Sony and MS combined have ever made from gaming. And it only took years of bashing the platform and 3rd parties flooding it with trash to kill it. If developers had treated it with the respect that it had earned we might have actually seen the first 200 million selling platform. But no, it had to die, because it wasn’t formulaic, by-the-numbers, and didn’t allow developers to crap out soulless copycats focused on pretty.
Why do you think the Wii U was being attacked before it had even been officially announced? I remember a good solid TWO YEARS of outright platform bashing from the collective gaming “press” before the Wii U actually hit store shelves. OF COURSE it was going to sell badly when everyone’s first impression of it was failure even when there was nothing to be known about it in the first place.
As for the NX, I’ve read more than once that people are already expecting it to do better than the Wii U. And it will. Not because it will be a better platform, but because there hasn’t been a concerted smear campaign against it. Most are looking at it as little more than a curiosity, the same way the Wii was looked at before it conquered all of gaming and sent Sony, MS, and the hardly core racing to deal with the fall out over the revelation that they weren’t the true masters of gaming.
With the rate the console market is collapsing, and it’s collapsing alarmingly fast, the question isn’t what will the NX be, it’s what is everyone else going to do? Sony and MS have built their respective markets around selling huge platform numbers in order to mitigate their staggering losses and entice 3rd party developers, oh, and money-hats. Three years into this generation (and yes i count the Wii U as the beginning of this generation) hardware sales are at, what, around 40+ million? That is not a healthy looking number. Even if we remove the year the Wii U was on the market by its self we’re sill looking at only 30+ million over two years.
Nintendo is looking at around 1/5th of their previous platforms sales. MS is looking at around 1/4. Sony might actually hit their last generation numbers. It depends on if they can keep sales up and how long they try to drag this generation out for. The PS3’s 10 year plan didn’t actually include it being their only platform for that entire 10 years after all. Even still, the attach-ratio of the PS4 isn’t looking good so it’s seeing “better” (comparably) hardware numbers but software is lagging. What good is selling a billion consoles if no one is buying games for it?
The only thing I’m willing to predict about the NX is that it will be interesting, original, and most of all, fun. And unless Nintendo does something staggeringly stupid, like caves into pressure and starts to mimic Sony and MS, I’m going to own one. Well, as long as I have the money for one anyway. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
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And unless Nintendo does something staggeringly stupid, like caves into pressure and starts to mimic Sony and MS, I’m going to own one. Sadly Nintendo sort of did this with the WiiU… the Wiimote was fantastic as a control method, it was innovative and the Wii Motion Plus made things better.
But nope, have to bend over for those publishers. Oh well, at least 3DS was innovative.
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I can understand where you’re coming from. It does seem odd that they completely dropped the Wii-mote. I wasn’t happy that there wasn’t one packed in with the Wii U. I know they said that everyone already had some so they could just use their existing ones but packing a Wii-mote in would have sent a strong signal. The same signal they sent when they only packed a Wii-mote in with the Wii.
I look at it more along the lines of what happened with the GC. It was an incremental step not an evolution. Sadly an incremental step isn’t enough to differentiate them from the buckets of money Sony and MS throw around.
One thing I will say though is that I’m not sure if they’re bending over backwards for publishers simple to garner their support. It may seem that way what with Sony and MS doing just that for generations but Nintendo is the only one of the three that actually understands how gaming works. Which is also the reason they’re the only ones that can actually make money off of it.
Nintendo cannot survive alone. Sure, we all like to talk about how they don’t need 3rd party support and how they could carry a platform all on their own but the truth is that without other developers the industry would still crash. It’s the reason why they’ve gone out of their way to make their platforms as simple to develop for as possible for generations now. The only real effort you need to put into making a game on a Nintendo platform is in regards to game play. The technical details were worked out a long time ago. But the industry moved in the other direction. Away from game play and much more into the unnecessary technical features. That’s dangerous and unsustainable.
So here we have Nintendo making platforms that are easy to develop for but require actual effort to be put into coming up with gaming ideas. It seems to me that they’ve been trying their best to help mitigate the damage that is happening to the industry and keep as many developers, and by association themselves, around for as long as possible. They’re trying to stabilize the industry. They even put effort into getting 3rd parties on board the Wii, a platform that everyone was absolutely certain that only Nintendo’s own games would sell on, and sell they did. Why would they do that?
I know the Wii U felt like a bit of a step back and that’s because it really was. And yes it was to cater to 3rd parties but not for the reasons you may think. At least I hope it wasn’t. With indies becoming more prominent and them being more willing to actually come up with new gaming ideas I wonder if the NX will be designed more in order to attract them. Most of the big 3rd parties are already gone and the last few standing Japanese developers outside of Nintendo are on their last legs. As for the big western developers, if you’re not willing to basically fund their games entire development you can forget about their support. The current incarnation of the games industry is dead. It’s time to move on.
So I’m still not worried about Nintendo’s direction just yet. The NES may have reignited the games industry the world over but without the support of numerous other developers it would have been a short flare before fizzling out again. It’s why Nintendo came up with the 3rd party publishing agreement in the first place. They knew they needed as many developers working on the platform as possible in order to keep things running successfully. And when I see things today like Nintendo throwing Unity in as part of the Wii U development kit at no extra charge (the most used engine by indie developers) I see them continuing to make moves to try to draw developers to them who can and will support their strengths, and do their best to ensure that this industry continues to survive for generations to come.
I’m not worried.
I’ll worry when I actually see something worth worrying about.
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No game journalist job for you until you learn how to write a proper clickbait headline and inset SJW agendas into all of your articles.
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Too early to be pulling the victim card for NX, this is just as bad as the predictable game journalists. NX has got to rise above all of this.
I just want a good positive environment for videogames, and faster load times for Woolly World. As for predictions I believe the entire Wii U Virtual Console will carry over.
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You could call it pulling the victim card if it weren’t for the fact that this is the exact same way things have turned out for every Nintendo home console since Sony entered the market. It’s not being pessimistic when the last FOUR generations have all followed the same trends:
1. Developers talk about how much they love Nintendo.
2. Developers pledge support.
3. Developers pull said support when Nintendo refuses to knuckle under to them and pander to them as Sony and MS do.
4. Everyone starts talking about how Nintendo needs to go 3rd party or make phone games while Nintendo continues to turn a profit and the rest of the industry burns all around them.
5. GOTO 1.
Nintendo tried to drag the gaming industry out of the dark ages with the Wii. The industry’s response was to kick and scream and throw tantrums until they got their way.
It’s simply not possible for the NX to “rise above all this”: when quite literally “all this” is exactly what the vast majority of the developers and publishers in the games industry want. It’s simply not possible. Which is why the above will, once again, happen with the NX. Either Nintendo is going to join the rest of the industry proper, or the rest of the industry is going to do everything in their power to marginalize and destroy them.
There is no middle ground.
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I gotta side with quixoticsomnia on this one. It’s been “Nintendo vs the world” For two whole decades now. Nintendo’s business model is radically different from anything else in the industry (focus on the experience of PLAYING the game, deliver information directly to consumers), and both 3rd party devs and the gaming press have a financial interest in seeing them put out of business, or at least fail as much as possible.
Even if quix’s post was just paranoia (and its not), what could 3rd parties do succeed on a Nintendo system if they legitimately wanted to make a real effort? They don’t even make games like Castlevania or Mega Man anymore. I’m sure I’m not the only Nintendo customer who has no interest in modern multiplats like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed. If I wanted those games, I’d have an Xbox or Playstation, but I don’t. Is Konami going to give me a new DDR? Is Square going to give me a worthy successor to Secret of Mana? Of course not. The industry, and by extension the bulk of its developers, has changed so radically that I can’t imagine them actually being able to play in Nintendo’s league anymore.
I’ve been saying for years that Nintendo’s solution to all this is to start snapping up mobile/indie developers and training them to become new second parties which will provide a constant stream of high quality Nintendo-esque games. Maybe we’ll never get a sequel to The World Ends With You, but perhaps with the right support, a small studio can give us something just like it. Tell EA, Ubi, Square, Capcom, etc to all take a hike and replace them with a new generation of developers who are in it for the sake of making fun and creative games.
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“I’ve been saying for years that Nintendo’s solution to all this is to start snapping up mobile/indie developers and training them to become new second parties which will provide a constant stream of high quality Nintendo-esque games.”
The 2nd party era is dead as well if you ask me. After the huge publicity surrounding Rare and Silicon Knights breaking their 2nd party status, I just don’t see it happening anymore. Nintendo ended up dumping a ton of cash and time into both developers and in the end lost it all. Same with Factor 5 and even Square and Enix back in the day.
They’re going to continue working with outside developers of course, but it’s going to be far more reserved. Much more at-arms-length if you will. They’ll be able to work with more developers at the same time while not having to worry about loosing one of them being seen as this massive issue, as people still today like to pretend that Rare was when they left. If SFA and their output under MS is any indication Nintendo dropped them at the right moment.
Purchases, on the other hand, have never been a Nintendo mainstay. They almost NEVER purchase developers because they know that a developers strength is in it’s people, not it’s name. The last company they purchased was Monolith, and they managed to keep all of their talent while doing so. Who was the last one before that? I don’t even know. It wasn’t Retro, though lots of people seem to think it was. Retro was actually co-founded by Nintendo and was always seen as an internal developer. They simply ended up buying out the other founder at a later date. Before that though?
What they have done is snapped up TONS of old school employees. Most of the developer talent behind Square’s great SNES games now work for Nintendo. The Secret of Mana team basically became Brownie Brown (now known as 1-up). They’re a support developer today but it’s still them. I wouldn’t be surprised to find many of the real developers behind the amazing Japanese games of yesterday now work for them in all sorts of fashions. Maybe not in direct development anymore but they’re still around.
Besides, Nintendo isn’t interested in creating their own little bubble gaming industry. They’re trying to keep all of gaming relevant. They can’t do that by hiding behind a walled garden of a handful of companies. The only way they can is by reaching out to as many developers who are willing to listen as possible. 2nd party agreements and purchases are contradictory to that idea.
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“I’m sure I’m not the only Nintendo customer who has no interest in modern multiplats like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed.”
No you are not.
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“The 2nd party era is dead as well if you ask me.”
What about Retro Studios? Couldn’t something like that happen?
I still think it’s worth a shot. It’s like Jesus fishing for men, and training others to be fishermen of men.
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“Besides, Nintendo isn’t interested in creating their own little bubble gaming industry.”
That would kind of be an asshole move. These motherfuckers need help and they don’t know it!
So let’s tweak that idea and help these indies become new third party developers. They’ll probably turn around and bite Nintendo’s hand later, but hey, some good could come out of it in the meantime. And still… JESUS… fish ’em out, wherever they are. I like that idea.
Nintendo itself will need successing members. It could sort of kill two birds with one stone, in a way. I think it’ll be very interesting to see what happens. I don’t think the industry is going anywhere at this time, or in the forseeable future. They’ve already made the transition from being frowned-upon into being plastered all over screens. God, how did this happen? It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and Nintendo’s being bullied. They do need to rise above this. What they make happen is produce another “mature” game (ala Twilight Princess, which at least won back some respect to be sure)… any IP of their choosing… and make it kick more ass than any Call of Duty ever thought it was doing.
It’s all they can do though is appeal to developers…somehow… Let the developers come to them. If it never happens, then it’ll be sad. But that’s better than doing what the competition is doing. For shame.
This industry is still young, folks. It has grown enormously. It might implode, actually…it’s like what happened to great civilizations throughout history: decentralization and lack of unity = implosion. Nintendo, might survive something like that..? And I’m sure they’d lend a hand, despite everything. I know that’s not ideal.. I’m just thinking off the top of my head, here…
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Not enough storage space, no kart skins, no online, not enough buttons, too many friend codes, no trophies, no voice chat, no voice acting… soo many possibilities I can’t wait to see what comes next.
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I still want to see the “Dolphin” come out… :p
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