How Nintendo Blew it

[Note: This article is brought to you by The Game Dish, definitely give it a visit.]
The Wii is a triumph of marketing and philosophy. Bring the games out of the niche and into the family room and the retirement home. But for all its success, it’s a technical failure.

I know, I know, it’s heresy to say anything negative about the big N. And the current console “war” (not much of a war any more, is it?) is all the evidence we need that Nintendo is doing just fine, thank you.

But Nintendo blew it. They blew it with the Wii, and they’re blowing it with the DSi.

Duct Tape

I remember the E3 where the Wii was revealed to be a Big Deal. Some of my coworkers had been there, and they raved about the controls in the Wii Sports demo they tried. It was a totally new experience, they said. It does what you do, they said. Soon after E3 our publisher targeted our team to make a Wii game. We exitedly started researching the platform. We made our best guesses about what the hardware would be able to do, and what we could do with the hardware. We were giddy.

Imagine our surprise when we found out that it was just two Gamecubes duct-taped together – and that’s a generous characterization, by the way. It’s really just a Gamecube, sped up and made smaller. Hardware bugs from the Gamecube still exist. Put side by side, the Xbox 1 is arguably a more powerful machine, and that’s a whole generation ago. What were we going to do with this? Less than we had hoped for, that’s for sure.

Even though Nintendo doesn’t put forward that they’re competing with the Xbox 360 and the PS3, they’ve benefitted from being in the same generation as the other two. Consumers see it as a choice between three game consoles, and along with that, they assume they deliver fairly similar experiences – especially if they’re not gamers and buying for their kids or their family. When it turns out Wii games don’t really look or feel much like a next-gen game, who gets the blame? I’ll give you a hint: not Nintendo.

Waggle

On top of the limited hardware, the Wii controller turned out to be a disappointment too. Nintendo markets the Wii like the controller is some magic device that knows exactly where in space it is and how the player is manipulating it. When games fail to deliver on that implicit promise, control feels artificial, tacked-on, not fun. Well, guess what: the controller is a simple, noisy three-axis accelerometer. Detecting motion along its axes isn’t hard, but tracking it through space is a tough, tough problem. When we started working on motion controls for our game, we had a choice: either spend lots of time and research trying to detect lifelike motion, or throw together something Grandma can do from the couch. I wanted the former; we shipped the latter.

Nintendo offered little help to developers for this problem. I can recall Nintendo documents that basically suggested we keep it simple with control complexity, in contrast to the image their marketing department put forward. Years after launch, still very few games have good, natural motion controls. Nintendo has announced the MotionPlus peripheral that is what the controller should’ve been in the first place. The MotionPlus is Nintendo’s owning up to that particular mistake while still making money doing it.

Same Difference

The DSi is getting the Wii treatment, but with cameras instead of motion control. It’s 1.09 DSes duct taped together. Sure, it has double the CPU speed, but it’s internal architecture is so slow that the speed increase will be nearly imperceptible. Sure, it had four times the RAM, but you’d have to make a DSi-exclusive game to really take advantage of that, and who’s going to do that? And the kicker: Nintendo left the graphics hardware alone, so games will still suffer with abysmally low polygon counts.

I have no doubt the DSi will sell like hot cakes. I also expect people to complain about lousy camera controls and disappointing software, except that the DS’s audience is less likely to get on a forum and rant about it.

Wii and DSi: Paycheck Loans

Nintendo’s mortgaging their future. They’ll come out ahead this generation, but if they remain on their current tech ramp, no one is going to want to develop for or play on a Nintendo platform because they’ll fall so far behind. Processing power is enabling for the developer. It allows them to create new ways to play and try things that couldn’t be considered on lower-class hardware. That leads to better games in the eyes of the consumer, which slowly builds the platform’s reputation and brand. Eventually Nintendo will have to change their ways or this trend will catch up to them.

It’s a shame, really – the company that innovated the most with the controller allows the least amount of technical innovation on their platform.