Day 23: Nintendo Taking a Break from the Console War

So...I'm taking a little break from regular posts to talk about this ongoing story with Nintendo.

Wii sales have consistently been dropping for about two years now. The Nintendo DS has been doing fairly well but it's been seven years and hundreds of millions of sales by now so it's forgivable that sales aren't astounding every month. The lineup of upcoming, high-profile Wii titles has been dwindling to nothing. This year takes the cake with only a new Zelda and Kirby title to occupy the holiday season and attempt to offset the other 10 months of...nothing.

Adding insult to injury was the ongoing story of Pandora's Tower, Xenoblade, and The Last Story, a trio of new, high-profile JRPGs published exclusively by Nintendo for the Wii in Japan. They have rough UK localization and releases set but no North American release scheduled despite the apparent hunger and anticipation for those titles over here.

It's been almost a slap in the face to us who are getting practically no new Nintendo games this year unless we're willing to buy remakes of N64 games for 3DS. Speaking of which, the 3DS hasn't been selling particularly well either. It's price, $250, is rough and counter-intuitive to Nintendo's practice of launching low priced hardware. However, what sets the 3DS apart from other launches is there's practically no competition for it and the Wii is practically dead already. The PSP is six years old too so it's truly not much competition from a technological standpoint. Plus, the PSP hardly gets any attention over here but in Japan it's consistently selling well due to an abundance of new, high-profile releases.

At E3 Nintendo gave the world the first roundup of details of their new console, the Wii U, which again demonstrated Nintendo's willingness to confuse shoppers by launching new consoles with practically the same names as their predecessors. In addition, Nintendo has shown they've mastered the art of talking about a console at length and leaving everyone in the room completely bewildered. Hell, half the people in the room probably didn't even know Wii U was a console until someone else told them. As a bonus, Nintendo didn't show off any games nor did they actually show off the console itself or what it can do.

Combine all this together and what do you get? The lowest Nintendo stock values since before they unveiled the Wii for the first time. Sales are down across the board. Consumers are hungry, unhappy and skeptical. Anxious investors are more anxious and skeptical than ever. The 3DS and 3DTVs are failures at this point and across the industry everyone is losing faith in 3D's market viability or even if it ever had any...except Sony but they have the most to lose by dropping it. What is Nintendo supposed to do to come back from this hole they've dug themselves into?

Let's start by cutting 3DS prices from $250 to $170 (in North America) and from 25K yen to 15K yen (in Japan). Then, as a sign that we're taking things very seriously, let's cut our executives' salaries by upwards of 30% with Iwata-san taking a 50% cut. Are these executives going to go hungry? Hell no. They're still going to make more every year than we can dream of making. In an ideal world the evils of capitalism wouldn't exist and we wouldn't produce jobs that award absurd amounts of money. But hey, if this actually means that millions more will go towards producing games and software features then I'm all for it. Now if only we can get some of those Sony guys to shed some money...

Is this the beginning of the end for Nintendo? Who knows, but I doubt it. Like Sega before I believe that if worse comes to worst then Nintendo will find a way to stick around in some capacity. Maybe they'll drop out of the home console market and focus on handhelds where they consistently dominate. I'm sure the investors would be ecstatic if Nintendo were able to challenge Apple, even if it's just in the capacity that PSP challenges NDS. Maybe Nintendo will have to regress to a 3rd party publisher. How awesome would a Sony built console with Valve's software and Nintendo's games be? We can only dream...

Small companies can be killed by small mistakes. Big companies can only be killed by big mistakes. Nintendo, however, has the kind of resiliency to withstand many mistakes and still come back and become the most prominent video game company in the world years later. Nintendo, lately, has made a lot of big mistakes consecutively. If Sony or Microsoft had made these kinds of mistakes they'd probably be gone by now. Hell, Sony doesn't need to make games, they make pretty much every other consumer electronic device already as well as publishing music and movies, this video game thing is just a hobby by comparison. Microsoft is, or was, the world's biggest software company and even today they have software on practically every computer in the world, Windows or not. Seeing as Microsoft bullied and marketed their way into PC gaming exclusivity the step into console gaming wasn't a far-fetched one. Hell, even today Xbox games are little more than PC games retrofitted for a more lucrative market.

Is Nintendo gonna come back from this? Most definitely. Maybe it won't be five years, maybe in ten, maybe more or less Nintendo can and will be the biggest video game company in the world because it's all they can do and no one does it better. They're bound to make mistakes and in a capitalist world one mistake can bankrupt you. They'll always be back though.

I think it's going to be rough for Nintendo going forward and they may have to pull out of the console market altogether. Microsoft and Sony's consoles have a lot more potential than they've come to realize. We saw the Kinect and Move appear to challenge Wii's unique capabilities. Imagine what the responses will be for the Wii U or even what the responses would have been if Wii wasn't so disappointing in the first place? If the Wii were capable of games like GTA4, Bioshock and Assassin's Creed then just imagine what the PS3 and 360 would have had to bring to top it and demonstrate their strengths?

Mostly though, I want to see Nintendo humble themselves like Sega did and share their unique catalogs with the rest of the world. Everyone loves their games even if other consoles have more fulfilling lineups. We're not made of money here, Nintendo! Example: LittleBigPlanet lets you create your own levels and content, ya know what levels are usually the most popular? Hint: it involves a guy in a red cap. Anyone else own that Sonic Ultimate Genesis Collection, even if just to have all the Sonic games? How great would an NES or even SNES collection be, even if it were just Nintendo games? Oh right...one does exist but the selection is pretty bad and it costs $100's...it's called the Virtual Console. Honestly, most of us buy their consoles just to play their games right? I sure as hell didn't buy a PS3 just to play Sony's games...I'm just saying...

Come on, Nintendo, make it happen!