16th December 2022, 10:51 PM
(This post was last modified: 16th December 2022, 10:54 PM by A Black Falcon.)
What do you all think about Nintendo's direction in these post-Iwata years?
Yamauchi's Nintendo succeeded through a combination of focus on tech, developer relationships, and the best first party software in the industry. Some elements of that foundered at times, but he had a great eye for talent and for understanding what people wanted, even if people didn't realize that that is what they wanted. He apparently did not play videogames and was an imposing traditional Japanese boss, but it worked. This era of the company built up a strong and independent American branch, which was critical to Nintendo's continuing success when they totally collapsed in support in Japan with the N64 but did much better in the US market. Yamauchii retired in the '00s, but apparently his last suggestion was the project that became the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's best-selling console.
After Yamauchi retired, Iwata became head of the company. His era, from the Gamecube to the Wii U, saw some major changes. Essentially, Iwata dropped the tech part of Yamauchi's three main pillars, relying instead on innovation to sell systems. This sometimes worked and sometimes did not; Nintendo was both very successful during these years as the Wii and DS sold spectacularly, and struggled as the Gamecube and Wii U very much did not. He centralized corporate control in Japan and took away almost all of Nintendo of America's independence. He broke off relations with most of the close Western studios who had been supporting Nintendo, as well, only keeping a very few such as Retro and NST. Nintendo lost most "AAA" software after about '02 because of the above reasons, but did eventually get slowly growing support from smaller developers which helped to make up for it.
However, Iwata sadly died young, and now Nintendo has new leadership. The new leadership has dialed back his focus on innovation, but has not brought back a focus on tech; instead, they seem more focused on focus-tested ideas that will sell, while also re-releasing a lot of Wii U games that didn't sell well the first time because of how sadly poorly that console sold. Now, I don't want ot be too hard on modern Nintendo since the Switch has an absolutely amazing game library, with thousands and thousands of indie games available digitally and a top-tier first party library, but... I've always been a bit critical of the platform on a design front, and that has not changed. The eshop is absolutely horrible with one of the most broken, slowest shops this side of the PS3; the system drops most of the Iwata era's interesting, good innovations such as pointer motion and a second screen; the portable nature of the machine has left it as both an oversized portable and an underpowered home console; and more. Of course that it has one of my favorite games ever, Super Mario Maker 2, is a plus, though. Mario Maker is a better game for creators on Wii U, showing that system's advantages over the Switch in terms of hardware design, but the many added parts in SMM2 make up for that for me.
But still, yeah, I don't know, I have some major issues with Iwata, most notably with how he lost Nintendo's Western developers, but the new era is in a lot of ways worse. Sure, the Switch is both a portable and a handheld, which is an interesting idea which kind of works, and its controller does have built in gyro motion, which is great, but... I'm not sure how much of this is just because we are getting older and how much is real, but it does feel like some of the innovation and genius of old Nintendo has been lost in favor of more sequels and such. And the new leaders are not the kind of public-focused leaders Nintendo had before, they seem to me like more generic corporate board types.
Now, of course Nintendo is still doing interesting things. Labo was a pretty cool experiment, for instance. It didn't entirely work out, both in sales and in function -- my opinion on Labo is that they are a lot of fun to build but not that great to play with and are hard to keep around with how huge the resulting models are -- but it was an interesting idea worth trying. And making more sequels and the like isn't a bad thing, I like Splatoon 3 for instance; it's no Splatoon 1, but I definitely like it more than the second game and I'm glad the series continues. But in a lot of ways it is an entirely iterative sequel which does not change the series formula at all. And the Switch's insanely overwhelming volume of digital-only releases is something ... maybe in its favor, depending on ones opinion about how many of the games are actually worth playing. But even so, I do think something has been lost. How important what has been lost is I'm not sure, but I probably do think that Nintendo is slightly less interesting as a company than they used to be. Nintendo still releases amazing, innovative games and does more than enough to keep me buying their stuff as a fan, but the company as a whole is not what it used to be. That is both good and bad -- obviously as a company they are doing fantastically well right now, the Switch is extremely successful -- but for me it's as much bad as good. But things change over time, that's how it goes...
But what do you think?
Yamauchi's Nintendo succeeded through a combination of focus on tech, developer relationships, and the best first party software in the industry. Some elements of that foundered at times, but he had a great eye for talent and for understanding what people wanted, even if people didn't realize that that is what they wanted. He apparently did not play videogames and was an imposing traditional Japanese boss, but it worked. This era of the company built up a strong and independent American branch, which was critical to Nintendo's continuing success when they totally collapsed in support in Japan with the N64 but did much better in the US market. Yamauchii retired in the '00s, but apparently his last suggestion was the project that became the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's best-selling console.
After Yamauchi retired, Iwata became head of the company. His era, from the Gamecube to the Wii U, saw some major changes. Essentially, Iwata dropped the tech part of Yamauchi's three main pillars, relying instead on innovation to sell systems. This sometimes worked and sometimes did not; Nintendo was both very successful during these years as the Wii and DS sold spectacularly, and struggled as the Gamecube and Wii U very much did not. He centralized corporate control in Japan and took away almost all of Nintendo of America's independence. He broke off relations with most of the close Western studios who had been supporting Nintendo, as well, only keeping a very few such as Retro and NST. Nintendo lost most "AAA" software after about '02 because of the above reasons, but did eventually get slowly growing support from smaller developers which helped to make up for it.
However, Iwata sadly died young, and now Nintendo has new leadership. The new leadership has dialed back his focus on innovation, but has not brought back a focus on tech; instead, they seem more focused on focus-tested ideas that will sell, while also re-releasing a lot of Wii U games that didn't sell well the first time because of how sadly poorly that console sold. Now, I don't want ot be too hard on modern Nintendo since the Switch has an absolutely amazing game library, with thousands and thousands of indie games available digitally and a top-tier first party library, but... I've always been a bit critical of the platform on a design front, and that has not changed. The eshop is absolutely horrible with one of the most broken, slowest shops this side of the PS3; the system drops most of the Iwata era's interesting, good innovations such as pointer motion and a second screen; the portable nature of the machine has left it as both an oversized portable and an underpowered home console; and more. Of course that it has one of my favorite games ever, Super Mario Maker 2, is a plus, though. Mario Maker is a better game for creators on Wii U, showing that system's advantages over the Switch in terms of hardware design, but the many added parts in SMM2 make up for that for me.
But still, yeah, I don't know, I have some major issues with Iwata, most notably with how he lost Nintendo's Western developers, but the new era is in a lot of ways worse. Sure, the Switch is both a portable and a handheld, which is an interesting idea which kind of works, and its controller does have built in gyro motion, which is great, but... I'm not sure how much of this is just because we are getting older and how much is real, but it does feel like some of the innovation and genius of old Nintendo has been lost in favor of more sequels and such. And the new leaders are not the kind of public-focused leaders Nintendo had before, they seem to me like more generic corporate board types.
Now, of course Nintendo is still doing interesting things. Labo was a pretty cool experiment, for instance. It didn't entirely work out, both in sales and in function -- my opinion on Labo is that they are a lot of fun to build but not that great to play with and are hard to keep around with how huge the resulting models are -- but it was an interesting idea worth trying. And making more sequels and the like isn't a bad thing, I like Splatoon 3 for instance; it's no Splatoon 1, but I definitely like it more than the second game and I'm glad the series continues. But in a lot of ways it is an entirely iterative sequel which does not change the series formula at all. And the Switch's insanely overwhelming volume of digital-only releases is something ... maybe in its favor, depending on ones opinion about how many of the games are actually worth playing. But even so, I do think something has been lost. How important what has been lost is I'm not sure, but I probably do think that Nintendo is slightly less interesting as a company than they used to be. Nintendo still releases amazing, innovative games and does more than enough to keep me buying their stuff as a fan, but the company as a whole is not what it used to be. That is both good and bad -- obviously as a company they are doing fantastically well right now, the Switch is extremely successful -- but for me it's as much bad as good. But things change over time, that's how it goes...
But what do you think?