Funding indies; if it doesn't work then losses will be even higher than they were these part 3 years. To have a chance with making indies into AA they've have to spends hundreds of millions every year(bigger risk of losses if it doesn't work). Better to spend that money on expanding proven first party development than unproven indies.
All they're doing is doubling down on the same tired franchises that nobody is buying their systems for anymore. People do not care. If they don't realize that sooner rather than later, you'll quickly begin to see the implications of what being slow to change means.
It's too late to salvage Wii U. I'm talking about a complete change in character for both Nintendo as a company and for their next system. It's time for them to stop pretending they're separate from the rest of the market, because that only works if they come up with a gimmick that is both actually new and that anyone gives a shit about. They need to stop thinking they're above making a certain type of game, when ignoring that market isolates entire parts of the industry. And as the person who leads the way for your platform, it's your job to show the market AND developers/publishers that this is a system that not only will have those games, but will give equal pride and place to them alongside their traditional fun-for-all-ages fare.
If they really do think they're above making those games, it's a necessity they partner with major third parties to come up with ideas that they will allow them to do. And these ideas must be pushed with the same energy and market budgets as the largest Mario title. Everyone can tell the difference between the way they push their primary stable of all-ages games and the less 'normalized Nintendo' stuff. It's hardly ever front and center. If Nintendo wants to bring on board consumers who are going to allow third parties to thrive just like they do, they need to balance out the way they show their system between games aimed at younger folks, games aimed at all ages, and games aimed at adults. They can't show twenty five games with colorful mascots in a row and then show a clip of Bayonetta and Xenoblade and say we're all cool. They have got to tip the balance for a while, to redraw consumers attention to the fact that Nintendo is the place to be for
all types of games.
Right now the impression most consumers get is that they'd have to be half mad to get a Wii U when PS4 and XBO offer basically everything they need, in every type of genre, in every type of visual style, in every type of gimmick, in every type of theme and age group and top off with massively superior technological edge and online functionality.
So unless Nintendo is ready to get serious and compete, they're going to just become more and more isolated. And that'd be sad to me, because they're one of the last companies who still do what they do.
Coming up with their own bold new ideas? They had Wii Sports and Wii Fit, it worked for console sales and hence was the right approach, but third parties didn't play ball and didn't even try to directly cater to and cultivate the new audience.
If Nintendo did all of this third parties would give them a few scraps and carry on focusing on MS/Sony. Nintendo console sales won't go up and they'd lose money they invested to do the above.
Of course they did. In fact they did it so often that the majority of third party games that were million+ sellers were in that precise mini-game compilation mode. I don't really care to discuss the quality of them, because consumers purchased them in droves, and they were the same milquetoast party games and mini-game compilations that Nintendo demonstrated to the average consumer the Wii would be about.
That is exactly the type of game that dominated the coverage of the system. You can say as a more informed gamer that other stuff was there, but first and second and third impressions matter, and it was completely dominated by a Nintendo that was single-minded in their casual focus.
And then, surprise, it was casuals that purchased the games third party devs made.
Again, Nintendo did their job perfectly on the Wii. Third parties dropped the ball and that audience was lost.
But third parties did not. Nintendo purposefully marketed the Wii as a platform that catered to certain very specific needs. Every commercial emphasized the family play aspect. Every talk show demonstrated the easy access and its ability to bring friends and family together. The vast majority of games from Nintendo illustrated the desire for consumption of simplistic/shallow party experiences that are easy to develop and even easier to access without fear of there being a barrier of entry. Nintendo themselves continued to have the vast majority of all the games they develop be either the same stable of traditional IPs they've been making since the NES, or the new casual-lite affairs like Wii Fit, Wii Party, Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, Brain Age, Wario Ware, Mario Party, etc. That literally dominated their agenda. It consumed their advertising.
After this focus, ever after the few games that bucked the trend of selling within these categories were those with big names attached that sell no matter where they go, like Call of Duty and Resident Evil.
Nintendo has a responsibility to cultivate an environment that is conducive not only to their own games if they want the royalties that come with software to start rolling in. Other developers have expertise that Nintendo does not have, or approaches that they simply refuse to dabble in. And that's fine, but none of these devs/publishers have the ability to set a console's agenda the way the marker of that console does. And Nintendo made it a neverending point to make it seem like the fun-for-all-ages gimmick machine dream.
Therefore, devs did listen. They went on to create a million games that were just within the very categories that Nintendo emphasized around the clock. And guess what? With few exceptions, they were where all the third party million+ sellers came from (unless they were from very well established franchises like Resident Evil or Call of Duty), and there were a bunch. It didn't matter that a dev made Zack & Wiki, because Nintendo didn't cultivate that audience. It didn't matter that Dead Space Extraction was actually quite fun, because it wasn't a great fit for the console thematically, which had consumers conditioned to expect lighter fare. And finally toward the end of the systems life when Nintendo finally started dishing a bit outside that circle, they either failed to release them in the US or Europe altogether, or they released them so late in the cycle and after so much teeth pulling from gamers that it was too-little-too-late to change any perceptions about the console.
Nintendo set the agenda. The market kept demonstrating they listened and brought the system for those types of games. Devs therefore began to make more of those types of games, as they began to show they were the only types of third party products that had the type of success that made single console development viable (thanks to Nintendo's horrendous hardware power decision).
Nintendo takes the blame. They have to. And the longer they are allowed to pretend they are not to blame, the longer they will take to actually change. And the longer that takes, the harder it is to become relevant again.
I love Nintendo. So I hope they begin to leave their comfort zone sooner rather than later. They're stifling their own growth and creativity, because there's so much they can contribute beyond the bounds of the genres and themes they're comfortable with. You can still predominately make those other types of games while affording a decent increase in percentage in more radically experimental titles unassociated with any of their classic IPs and, in some cases, more adult thematically. But the point would be to break the idea of what it means to be a Nintendo game. Nintendo games should be quality and polish, it shouldn't carry any implications about theme or light heartedness or direction.
