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Originally Posted by The Strangler
I keep on having high hopes for Nintendo, and they continue to dash them all to Hell. The more I hear about the Revolution, the more I am reminded that Nintendo is just blind to the direction videogames are going, or even basic marketing sense.
1) After Nintendo screwed up their launch of the Gamecube, and before everyone starts flaming me please remember that even they admitted they did, Nintendo said they would not allow themselves to be caught in the rear of the gaming bus again. Yet as we see at E3, they are once again behind both MS and Sony. So little to show for the Revolution when MS and Sony are showing so much.
2) Dance Dance Revolution... with MARIO. Is there any franchise that Nintendo won't pimp out their most beloved characters to? Mario is quickly becoming irrelevant in the gaming world due to Nintendo's abuse of the property. It will only be a matter of time before we see Metroid Chess and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Shuffleboard.
3) The biggest stink over the Revolution that I've seen is the ability for it to download old Nintendo games from the history of the company, across all of its consoles: Ultimate Backwards Compatibility. Yeah, thats a great gimmick, but you don't go forward by looking to the past. I wish Nintendo would get over its gloried past, and realize that they are quickly on the way to becoming a distant third place gaming platform in the present. Oh yeah, and everyone loves how "sexy" the Revolution looks, like anyone ever bought a console because it matched their home decor.
I want Nintendo to succeed. I didn't buy a Gamecube so that it would sit in the back of my entertainment center gathering dust, yet there it remains. Nintendo's refusal to create new and exciting properties, and instead concentrate on gimmicky, perpheral driven enterprise (Donkey Konga and the DS Scribble Pad) has done more to alienate casual and even long time gamers than to recruit new ones. Initial sales of the first Konga game and DS were positive, but as is shown by the current sales figures, no one cares about a Konga game anymore and the DS is getting bitch slapped by the PSP. And the way that Nintendo is also alienating developers by creating such things as the need for a pair of Congos and a stylus is shown by the number of developers that are flocking to the PSP instead of the DS. Nintendo's hardware innovaltions are their biggest hindrance.
If Nintendo doesn't look at what others are doing right, and what they are doing wrong, then all they will be left with is their blindly loyal hardcore fan base.
Of course, this is merely my humble opinion.
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Edit: Woahhhhhhh when it double posted, it chopped off half of my post.
You're absolutely right and you're getting plus repped for this, but you missed what I believe to be the biggest point.
Nintendo is stubborn.
The simply will not give gamers what we want. They tell us what we want and then stuff it down our throats. See Zelda Wind Waker. Only the most fervent, mindless Nintendo sheep liked it at first. Even those who were opened minded didn't really "like" it when it was first announced. Now sure, a lot of people warmed to it and it turned out to be a great game, but does anyone remember what it was liked when that thing was first showed back in 02?
There was so much backlash at the time, I'll bet it cost N 1,000,000 cubes over the life of the system. Extrapolate that number out to games and accessories....
People that were going to buy a cube but didn't get one at launch bought other systems because of Celda. If the Zelda that we're going to get later this year had been released in march 03 Nintendo would have probably sold an extra million or two systems to play that game. This Zelda could have been the gamecube's Halo, but now it's going to come out in the last year of the systems life, and even though everybody that already has a cube is going to buy it, almost no one will be buying a Cube FOR it, and even if they do, they're probably not going to be buying dozens of other games like they might have in the past 18 months if they'd have picked up a realistic Zelda in 03.
Another huge problem is the stuffing the franchises down our throats. Yeah, I want a Zelda, Mario and Metroid game to come out for my Nintendo system, and yeah SSBM, and Mario Golf are great games, and cool franchises, but for the love of god, Mario is whored out to everything now. Look at RE4, that is such an amazing game graphics and gameplay wise. Why hasn't the power of this system been put to use like that more often? I'm not a graphics whore but guess what, 90% of the people who play games ARE, and it is flat out ignorant to suggest that it's OK for Nintendo games to look substandard when the system is capable of so much more. FZero and RE4 prove that the cube can hold its own vs the Xbox in the visuals department but it's rarely tried.
It's a cyclical process. If the games look better, then more people will buy the system and the games, which will allow the developers to be more adventurous because sales are easier to come by, which will lead to more niche games being developed, which will allow more systems to be sold, which will allow more money to be spent on development, which will produce better looking games, which will sell even more systems.
Then there's the DVD, or lack there of. Nobody really gives a **** anymore in 2005 about the DVD player because everyone has a DVD player, but back in 2001 it wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is today. I remember the fanboy scream from back then too. IF YOU WANT SOMETHING THAT PLAYS DVDs BUY A DVD PLAYER. Thank you very much, Watson, now sit down and shut up. It didn't matter to people that the DVD player in the ps2 was ****, and it didn't matter much that to make xbox play dvds you had to hand over an extra 30 beans. What mattered was that they were getting the newest and best gaming system AND A DVD PLAYER! HOLY **** COOL! Not with the cube though. It did keep the cost down, but that didn't factor into as many decisions as "you get a dvd player with it!"
Then there's online play.
Does anyone still want to argue this one?