![]() The first wave of titles included just two games: Super Mario 64 and Yoshi’s Island DS. Last week, Nintendo announced that it was bringing games from the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS consoles to the Wii U’s Virtual Console. Some recent events around Nintendo’s Virtual Console and digital storefront provide a lens with which to examine the company’s current strategy and execution. If Nintendo is currently sustained by a small subset of very dedicated users buying every major release, by golly it should be doing everything it can to keep those customers engaged and happy. ![]() Yet the company has yet to embrace this fact in a way that could mellow this generation’s dip in popularity. “You buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games” has been a mantra to the devout Mario enthusiasts for a long time, and it’s more accurate today than in previous generations of their hardware. is one of the series keeping core gamers interested in Nintendo’s consoles. Once you’ve gone through the titles that match your interests, it’s a waiting game for the next big exclusive, and in the meantime there are all the new titles coming out for PCs and other consoles. Play the heck out of it, then pick up the next Nintendo-made favorite. The typical usage cycle for the Wii U looks something like this: buy the console with your very favorite exclusive game. People don’t get a Wii U to play the mega-blockbusters like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto with their friends, they get them for Super Smash Brothers and Mario Kart and The Legend of Zelda (you’re killing me with that delay, Nintendo). ![]() It started with games from the likes of EA Sports, but now you’re unlikely to find more than a handful of third-party Wii U games lining the shelves of GameStop or even Nintendo’s eShop. In a market where tentpole games with huge marketing budgets need to sell millions of units to make a profit, developers have opted not to invest the time and money in making Wii U-compatible versions of their games only to have a total addressable market of ~10 million consoles. It’s a non-trivial task to port games to a less-powerful console - you have to peel away things like shaders and high-resolution textures and detailed character models until performance is acceptable, and in some cases you can’t do so without breaking the visual design of your game. Unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which transitioned to an x86 architecture that essentially uses PC parts, Nintendo’s console still relies on a custom PowerPC architecture that’s backwards compatible with the original Wii. Now that developers are starting to focus on Sony and Microsoft’s newer consoles, the Wii U is being left behind. ![]() For its first year or two, we saw a number of ports from previous-gen consoles, which brought familiar graphics and some gimmicky use of the Wii U’s touch screen for things like maps for aiming distant shots in games like Batman: Arkham City - Armored Edition. The Wii U, which dropped a year ahead of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, was more of a PlayStation 3.5 in terms of CPU and GPU horsepower. Nintendo’s home console has basically lost all support from third-party publishers, and it’s Nintendo’s own fault. If it weren’t for Nintendo’s high attach rate (it can get a lot of Nintendo fans to pick up every single new release for $59), the console would look like an absolute disaster. In the home, Nintendo’s now in a very far third place behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, just one generation after outselling Sony and Microsoft by 20 million units with the original Wii. Portable consoles like the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita offer plenty of fun experiences built from the ground up for their hardware and controls, but in the grand scheme of things, what was once the norm for the space is now the niche, just as point-and-shoot cameras were subsumed by the rise of the smartphone. With the rise of iOS and Android, hundreds of millions of people have come to see mobile gaming as an activity done on their phones rather than a dedicated device. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |