I think it's important to also understand that, despite broad name recognition, Nintendo isn't a huge company in the way that Sony or Microsoft is. Their entire corporate revenue for 2019 was about $11b USD with about $2.3b USD in operating income. We regularly talk about startups here that are technically larger.
What Nintendo's philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft/Sony where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech.
While Microsoft and Sony's revenues per platform are around the same, their console businesses are small pieces of very large organizations -- with all the ossification that comes from being huge companies.
It's also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the "toy"). Nintendo's focus is on how to create this play experience, and what's the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.
There have also been interviews where they've talked about how they won't do something unless they can add something new to it. For example, they haven't created a new F-Zero game because no one has really come up with anything to add to F-Zero to make a compelling game, rather than just "It's another F-Zero game".
In I think the same interview, it was discussed that they won't make a game unless it's fun if it's just geometric shapes or basic sprites. The idea there being that a Mario game isn't fun just because it has Mario in it, but if the gameplay is solid then it will be fun despite not having Mario in it. Presumably this also lets them crank out prototypes without having to worry about spinning up art assets to give testers context.
"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts".
In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/
That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.
The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something.
Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word:
There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example:
> It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait
I think this (mis)translation was fairly widely recognised before this article was written, so it's probably just using the familiar version in the heading in preparation for clarifying it in the article. Reasonable enough I think.
The article is a case of rose-coloured glassed. It helps that FLOPS per core has essentially flatlined since 2006. I’m sure Nintendo realise that’s the main reason for the hardware choices.
“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”
Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.
For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.
While it's beside your [good] point - you can do VR with fifty cent lenses and early headsets did, but the lenses in headsets like Oculus are specialised and still evolving.
While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all these years, online play in their first party games is still just so .. atrocious. Ugh.
That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements...
So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's getting better but it's still not great.
Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development (IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who themselves then outsourced part of it)
This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.
Isn't it more a fork of android with some loose inheritance from 3DS?
But anyway, the problems of software and online-service in japan are old, very old. To some degree it originates in their late adaption of PCs with broader parts of society, to some other degree their early adaption of online-services in the age of featurephones including all the horrible patterns.
Japans society developed quite different in those areas, and you see it all the time with their software, culture and decisions. Nintendo is not really special there.
Even Sony's offering in that regard has been playing catch up to Xbox Live. PSN on PS4 has reached feature parity with Xbox Live on the 360, but it sure doesn't compete in important areas like actually working, download speeds, and navigating the menus in a reasonable time. Not sure what Live on Xbox One is like as I didn't get a Xbox this generation.
Meanwhile Nintendo still hasn't caught up with Xbox Live from the original Xbox.
It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.
If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.
Don't forget that, with the Switch, there was the opposite argument: "Smartphones are so common, nobody would buy a separate gaming device! If you want gaming on the go, you just download Candy Crush on your iPhone."
So the "lateral" thinking, here, was actually... quality. Smartphone games suck. The monetization strategies are downright predatory and touchscreens are a bad input device for a majority of game genres.
So what Nintendo did was make actually great games for a tablet device. Being able to put it on the TV and detaching the controllers is secondary, it's mostly about having great games!
This is why I'm a little pissed at marketing analysts turning this into some kind of stroke of business genius. The Switch is basically a Wii U with the GPU moved into the tablet part and the Wii U flopped hard. No market analysis could have predicted the Switch's success. It was a stubborn believe in quality, the worst thing they could do, what every "business advisor" would have warned them against. Market analysts were hilariously wrong and that's the history lesson to learn here, not "predulating quadrilateral core-market flibbugasting". The Switch is not a win they can claim, it's a win for quality and idealism.
I can't see Sony getting back into portables after seeing how they let the Vita wither on the vine and die. It was a very powerful system for its time and did decently faithful renditions of games running on consoles of the time. It is really too bad: the Vita is great. I just bought one a short while back now that it has been hacked wide open. With an affordable SDCard & adapter in place of Sony's proprietary and expensive memory cards, the Vita is an emulation powerhouse on top of all the original content made for it.
Nintendo's portable efforts have been honed since the Gameboy. The content really helps sell those handhelds and keeps people glued to them. Games like Animal Crossing ("Gotta play every day or I get weeds in my town!") or Pokemon ("Gotta get 'em all.") are like crack. And a lot of their other content is simply top notch.
I don't care for portable gaming, but Nintendo's portables since the Gameboy Advance have had libraries in many respects better than any contemporary console. Some portion of their success is surely because of the library, and despite their portability (though, yes, many value the portability, I'm sure). I don't know how the controls would work but I'd love something like the Playstation TV (a stripped-down Vita that plugs into a TV and uses Playstation 3 or 4 controllers) for the GBA-3DS libraries (yeah I know about the add-on for the gamecube but that's just the GBA, plugging in non-HDMI devices is getting increasingly inconvenient, and Gamecube-era hardware's starting to get pretty janky)
>releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor
The reason the Switch doesn't hit PS4/XBox One levels of power is because it's hard to hit that mark while staying within weight considerations, having decent battery life, and also coming in at the price points console gamers intend to pay (<$400).
It seems like they're trying to back into it by turning the consoles into in-home gaming servers and have you use your smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. as a display that the console streams to.
> I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.
My school took us on a tour of companies with west coast offices that were looking for data talent. Nintendo was one of them. We met with their data science team. It was... one guy. For all of Nintendo of America. He was trying to get it to two guys.
I think very highly of nintendo's management because they're very willing to try zany things and fail (ring fit, wii, wii u, switch, nintendo labo, two screen ds, 3ds, etc. etc.). I find their games to be excellent and their hardware to be way more interesting than competitors. They're not really a video game company so much as a toy company at heart. And they are definitely not data driven.
Sony made several portable gaming devices (PSP, PS vita, PSN compatible phone).
The market didn’t really care for them.
Which makes sense. People already have a phone, they don’t want an additional thing to carry around. People want a flagship phone, not a worse phone that’s more expensive because it can play some exclusive games.
The Nintendo switch was the right form factor, but only Nintendo has the IP to pull it off. If MS or Sony were to make a Switch-like, it’d fail much like the nvidia shield has.
I think one of the biggest not-talked-about factors that has contributed to Nintendo's and Switch's success has been the amount of exclusives, especially in modern times.
Looking at the PS4 and XBOX debate, going forward the architectures of these two consoles will be increasingly similar, which is translating to a very low amount of exclusives for each platform. This is harsh as exclusives used to be one of the best signals for console performance.
With Switch focusing on portability infra + Nintendo's strong portfolio of exclusive IPs, its a winning combo for sure.
>It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king
Amen to that. I pretty much only have time to play on the go, so the fact that Xbox and Sony (don't even get me started on how they treated the Vita...) have completely given up on portability means I'll never purchase another Sony or MS console again. Simple as that. I want to play portably, and Nintendo has consistently been the best at it.
Currently I've been really into the PSP scene that I missed (because I was too busy on my DS at the time), and I've caught up on a few years of Vita releases already. They really are some great systems, and I cannot believe in this age of "entertainment everywhere" that two of the three titans in video game consoles couldn't care less about portable gameplay.
If your gaming PC is gathering dust but you play the switch, you probably are falling for the marketing.
PC has nearly every game switch has, and more.
Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products.
My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Which people have been saying about Zelda since TP)
I don't really see how the Switch is a good case of this lateral thinking, nor withered technology. They just got nVidia to make them a powerful gaming tablet, something nVidia was push hard to sell at the time. In this way they were able to continue to dominate the mobile market and hedge their console strategy.
Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory.
It gives me hope for the future - if we can get more people from various walks of life to learn how to code and appreciate technology, there is so much more we can do. Of course, that "if" has always been a huge challenge.
Even when they did ship with more cutting edge power and tech, they approached it as if they didn't have it.
It partly comes from the video game things being a bit of a gamble and side project to keep the company alive. "Success under constraint."
And not it's a bit of an intentional handicap, like setting a horsepower cap on a racecar. Anyone can go fast and make something spectacular with unlimited power, but when bleeding edge graphics aren't even available for you to waste time considering, you have to finds new ways to make your game "fun".
You have to think of new control schemes, new mechanics, endearing art styles, etc. You can't just melt faces (and wallets) with the visuals.
Fancy literature but in the end it says little. There is a simple way to put it. Sometimes an era has missed some of the innovations it could have done and spends too much time caring only about the core technology but it might be beneficial to stay a little more and innovate on the general design rather than just the core technology.
What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990.
Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.
> What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
The Switch is neat and tidy rather than premium exactly, but I do remember the first time I picked up a DS Lite. I was really impressed. The DS Lite (unlike the original DS, DSi, or 3DS) had a double-skinned cover with a thin transparent plastic shell over the coloured one, which gave it a lovely sheeny appearance, and everything just fit together beautifully. The audio design was a delight as well. I loved that this quality was lavished on something "for kids", and that it was so unlike the sort of sterile metallic slabs that companies like Apple would spend the next decade and more designing.
What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
I'm not sure quality is the issue, all of my old Nintendo consoles still work years later (SNES, GBA SP, Gamecube), they simply seem to eschew cutting-edge (and often less reliable) technology.
I've owned four Xbox 360s, three PS1s, two PS2s and two PS3s...there's often a price to pay for packing too much new technology into a game console.
That's the point of the article: If you're using "obsolete" or at least older stuff, all the potential unknowns have long been known so everything is much more predictable. That they succeed despite using older tech suggests that the level of the technology isn't the be-all-end-all for many people.
The Switch isn't supposed to feel premium. It's a toy for children. I think there's a quote from someone at the company to the effect of "our audience is children (even if their age indicates otherwise), we want to give them something that feels fun enough, but it shouldn't get in the way of the games"
Also overlooked is that this strategy backfires on Nintendo nearly as often as it succeeds.
The Wii may have sold a lot of units, but it didn’t get _played_ as much as its contemporaries in large part due to the fact that Nintendo refused to release a high-def version, right when the world dumped all their old TVs en masse.
The Wii U nearly sunk the damn company. If the 3DS hadn't been popular, Nintendo would be where Sega is by now.
It's fine, excellent in fact, to go with tried-and-true tech, but you also need the foresight to see what's inadequate.
A premium feel device like Apple feels like a mistake for a device who's audience is largely children. How many people have you seen with iphones with cracked screens? While it's very solid feeling, and yes, better protected against getting scratched by keys, I would wager while the switch is more likely to sustain cosmetic damage (scratches, chips, flaked paint) than an iphone, an iphone is more likely to suffer catastrophic screen failure when dropped. Plastic just doesn't shatter the same way glass does.
I fully agree. For me, it's not the performance of the switch that is the problem. It's the build quality and the software quality.
For example, my joy cons have problem with losing their connection or having input lag when reception is lacking. I've seen this on other switches too, so it's not only mine. Compare this to my Xbox 360 controllers, I can walk to a different room and still play without this issue. This is just bad/cheap design.
Games are forced to use vsync, even when it ruins the game. Rocket League has much more input lag, compared to other hardware due to this. Actually lots of Switch games have more input lag than for other systems. Nintendo could care about what quality other developers are allowed to publish, but they don't.
The build quality of the switch itself is also so-so. The screen has low contrast, the wifi doesn't have great reception. Let's not even get started on the usb design.
All this would be okay, if the hardware and software was really cheap, but it isn't.
As GameGear owner, the set of batteries could hardly hold a couple of hours playing Sonic, meaning I used to play a portable device usually plugged in, while the GameBoy would last days.
They fully compensate hardware with portability and the most polished titles you can find. Also, their first-party games look better on 720p switch display then like 98% of all games on 4k displays.
You can make the best hardware possible, but practically no companies can achieve Nintendo level quality.
>Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
The Switch also has an MSRP of $300. The iPod Touch is about $200, but for a much less complicated piece of hardware that gets to draft on the volume discounts from producing the iPhone.
i have a lot of complaints about nintendo, but nintendo's only console to be well ahead of their competitors' offerings in terms of hardware was one of their worst competing consoles, in terms of sales. and that's the gamecube. so it hasn't made and doesn't make commercial sense for them to heavily invest in the underlying hardware.
ever since the gamecube, and maybe before then, nintendo has been on a divergent path from the likes of other console makers. they do not seek to compete in hardware power.
nintendo's true problems lie in online and cloud services, like account management and online multiplayer, and just pure laziness in game development and implementation. they get away with it somehow.
It could be perceived quality, since Nintendo is notable for their build quality. There are many stories of their devices having survived years of abuse (I’m talking Gameboys that still work after falling out of a bus).
In some ways it's smart. They wait and see what the market wanted and then present the most polished version of that. They do this in game design and in console design.
Other benefits would include: easier to develop for due to familiarity, better battery efficiency (as opposed to gamegear), and lower manufacturing costs as well.
Likely the know that the experience matter more than the hardware. Which is something the original mac got right too, as it wasn't very powerful either.
What do you consider as premium? The switch is a toy for children. So it should be robust, reliable and cheap enough. The switch does serve this very well IMHO.
Additionally, Apple is bigger, selling significant more units of their devices, which are also more expensive, while having a better standing in the industry. Nintendo on the other side was taking a gamble on whether the switch would even sell good enough to survive. So price-calculation for both companies is quite different, with apple having more money to invest in premium than nintendo.
Maybe the rumored switch pro some day will up nintendos premium-game?
> Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.
Does everyone still feel this way about Apple?
I still can remember the first iPhone I had. The 3G just felt really great in my hand. I probably played with that more than a 13yo will play with his balls. Then the first retina and machined metal feel. It all felt like this was the top of the phone world. But ever since then the iPhone just feels like another phone. I don't feel anything special about the X as its just another in long line of iPhones. I stick with apple because I like iOS compared to how android behaves. Apple could make a plastic phone and I wouldn't care or think less of it.
The switch on the other hand I am enthralled with. My wife, at 40, has gotten into gaming because of it. I'm sure if Nintendo partnered with Apple it would be a highly machined and precisely designed piece of hardware, but I would find it hard to believe it would matter.
I guess what I'm saying is I no longer associate quality of a product with the materials as long as they don't break on me. My switch has lasted 3 years which is about a year longer than any iPhone I've had where I've wanted to upgrade because the phone feels slower than it used to.
In a weird way, I think Nintendo's approach is basically "Zero to One" to differentiate from competitors, but doing it with cheaper hardware to reduce costs.
I'm not a gamer, but from a business perspective I'm intrigued with their approach.
Hmm I'm not sure if Zero to One fits into what Nintendo does - maybe the Wii was (arguably the N64).
Nintendo main differentiation revolves around their IP, which they manage to refresh with every new console release by making some console feature into a game mechanic (and the gameplay revolves around it).
You can see good examples of it in their hardware accessories for games, where they don't feel like gimmicks, yet on other consoles some accessories do feel like it.
This does backfire for them in certain cases though, especially in terms of networking.
All of their games are still on a built-out peer2peer implementation they acquired in 2008 and it shows how much it holds them back - anyone that played a Nintendo online game on switch knows what I mean (no, 30 NES games I played on my Wii aren't a consolation).
Didn't Nintendo drop this philosophy the moment Gunpei left to work on a GameBoy competitor for Bandai and pushed out the GBC? Or was it after Gunpei died in a car accident shortly after? The NGC also didn't follow this philosophy and neither did the GBA. It wasn't until the Wii/NDS era, when they kind of brought it back.
“These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”
bane|5 years ago
What Nintendo's philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft/Sony where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech.
While Microsoft and Sony's revenues per platform are around the same, their console businesses are small pieces of very large organizations -- with all the ossification that comes from being huge companies.
It's also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the "toy"). Nintendo's focus is on how to create this play experience, and what's the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.
danudey|5 years ago
In I think the same interview, it was discussed that they won't make a game unless it's fun if it's just geometric shapes or basic sprites. The idea there being that a Mario game isn't fun just because it has Mario in it, but if the gameplay is solid then it will be fun despite not having Mario in it. Presumably this also lets them crank out prototypes without having to worry about spinning up art assets to give testers context.
taneq|5 years ago
In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/
That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.
polm23|5 years ago
Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word:
https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23se...
There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example:
https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424
lubonay|5 years ago
cannam|5 years ago
I think this (mis)translation was fairly widely recognised before this article was written, so it's probably just using the familiar version in the heading in preparation for clarifying it in the article. Reasonable enough I think.
bottled_poe|5 years ago
https://www.quora.com/What-makes-CPU-models-increasingly-fas...
nrp|5 years ago
Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.
Fr0styMatt88|5 years ago
CookieMon|5 years ago
Operyl|5 years ago
nicolas_t|5 years ago
So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's getting better but it's still not great.
Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development (IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who themselves then outsourced part of it)
This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.
slightwinder|5 years ago
But anyway, the problems of software and online-service in japan are old, very old. To some degree it originates in their late adaption of PCs with broader parts of society, to some other degree their early adaption of online-services in the age of featurephones including all the horrible patterns.
Japans society developed quite different in those areas, and you see it all the time with their software, culture and decisions. Nintendo is not really special there.
Macha|5 years ago
Meanwhile Nintendo still hasn't caught up with Xbox Live from the original Xbox.
saturdaysaint|5 years ago
If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.
nothis|5 years ago
So the "lateral" thinking, here, was actually... quality. Smartphone games suck. The monetization strategies are downright predatory and touchscreens are a bad input device for a majority of game genres.
So what Nintendo did was make actually great games for a tablet device. Being able to put it on the TV and detaching the controllers is secondary, it's mostly about having great games!
This is why I'm a little pissed at marketing analysts turning this into some kind of stroke of business genius. The Switch is basically a Wii U with the GPU moved into the tablet part and the Wii U flopped hard. No market analysis could have predicted the Switch's success. It was a stubborn believe in quality, the worst thing they could do, what every "business advisor" would have warned them against. Market analysts were hilariously wrong and that's the history lesson to learn here, not "predulating quadrilateral core-market flibbugasting". The Switch is not a win they can claim, it's a win for quality and idealism.
MegaDeKay|5 years ago
Nintendo's portable efforts have been honed since the Gameboy. The content really helps sell those handhelds and keeps people glued to them. Games like Animal Crossing ("Gotta play every day or I get weeds in my town!") or Pokemon ("Gotta get 'em all.") are like crack. And a lot of their other content is simply top notch.
karatestomp|5 years ago
naravara|5 years ago
The reason the Switch doesn't hit PS4/XBox One levels of power is because it's hard to hit that mark while staying within weight considerations, having decent battery life, and also coming in at the price points console gamers intend to pay (<$400).
It seems like they're trying to back into it by turning the consoles into in-home gaming servers and have you use your smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. as a display that the console streams to.
klmadfejno|5 years ago
My school took us on a tour of companies with west coast offices that were looking for data talent. Nintendo was one of them. We met with their data science team. It was... one guy. For all of Nintendo of America. He was trying to get it to two guys.
I think very highly of nintendo's management because they're very willing to try zany things and fail (ring fit, wii, wii u, switch, nintendo labo, two screen ds, 3ds, etc. etc.). I find their games to be excellent and their hardware to be way more interesting than competitors. They're not really a video game company so much as a toy company at heart. And they are definitely not data driven.
RookyNumbas|5 years ago
GuiA|5 years ago
The market didn’t really care for them.
Which makes sense. People already have a phone, they don’t want an additional thing to carry around. People want a flagship phone, not a worse phone that’s more expensive because it can play some exclusive games.
The Nintendo switch was the right form factor, but only Nintendo has the IP to pull it off. If MS or Sony were to make a Switch-like, it’d fail much like the nvidia shield has.
Jommi|5 years ago
Looking at the PS4 and XBOX debate, going forward the architectures of these two consoles will be increasingly similar, which is translating to a very low amount of exclusives for each platform. This is harsh as exclusives used to be one of the best signals for console performance.
With Switch focusing on portability infra + Nintendo's strong portfolio of exclusive IPs, its a winning combo for sure.
unknown|5 years ago
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geddy|5 years ago
Amen to that. I pretty much only have time to play on the go, so the fact that Xbox and Sony (don't even get me started on how they treated the Vita...) have completely given up on portability means I'll never purchase another Sony or MS console again. Simple as that. I want to play portably, and Nintendo has consistently been the best at it.
Currently I've been really into the PSP scene that I missed (because I was too busy on my DS at the time), and I've caught up on a few years of Vita releases already. They really are some great systems, and I cannot believe in this age of "entertainment everywhere" that two of the three titans in video game consoles couldn't care less about portable gameplay.
oneVoiceOnHN|5 years ago
PC has nearly every game switch has, and more.
Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products.
My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Which people have been saying about Zelda since TP)
jayd16|5 years ago
schnevets|5 years ago
It gives me hope for the future - if we can get more people from various walks of life to learn how to code and appreciate technology, there is so much more we can do. Of course, that "if" has always been a huge challenge.
zyang|5 years ago
X6S1x6Okd1st|5 years ago
X6S1x6Okd1st|5 years ago
huffmsa|5 years ago
It partly comes from the video game things being a bit of a gamble and side project to keep the company alive. "Success under constraint."
And not it's a bit of an intentional handicap, like setting a horsepower cap on a racecar. Anyone can go fast and make something spectacular with unlimited power, but when bleeding edge graphics aren't even available for you to waste time considering, you have to finds new ways to make your game "fun".
You have to think of new control schemes, new mechanics, endearing art styles, etc. You can't just melt faces (and wallets) with the visuals.
epigramx|5 years ago
dlivingston|5 years ago
More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990.
Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.
cannam|5 years ago
The Switch is neat and tidy rather than premium exactly, but I do remember the first time I picked up a DS Lite. I was really impressed. The DS Lite (unlike the original DS, DSi, or 3DS) had a double-skinned cover with a thin transparent plastic shell over the coloured one, which gave it a lovely sheeny appearance, and everything just fit together beautifully. The audio design was a delight as well. I loved that this quality was lavished on something "for kids", and that it was so unlike the sort of sterile metallic slabs that companies like Apple would spend the next decade and more designing.
Chazprime|5 years ago
I'm not sure quality is the issue, all of my old Nintendo consoles still work years later (SNES, GBA SP, Gamecube), they simply seem to eschew cutting-edge (and often less reliable) technology.
I've owned four Xbox 360s, three PS1s, two PS2s and two PS3s...there's often a price to pay for packing too much new technology into a game console.
eythian|5 years ago
huffmsa|5 years ago
Eric_WVGG|5 years ago
The Wii may have sold a lot of units, but it didn’t get _played_ as much as its contemporaries in large part due to the fact that Nintendo refused to release a high-def version, right when the world dumped all their old TVs en masse.
The Wii U nearly sunk the damn company. If the 3DS hadn't been popular, Nintendo would be where Sega is by now.
It's fine, excellent in fact, to go with tried-and-true tech, but you also need the foresight to see what's inadequate.
Macha|5 years ago
sniglom|5 years ago
For example, my joy cons have problem with losing their connection or having input lag when reception is lacking. I've seen this on other switches too, so it's not only mine. Compare this to my Xbox 360 controllers, I can walk to a different room and still play without this issue. This is just bad/cheap design.
Games are forced to use vsync, even when it ruins the game. Rocket League has much more input lag, compared to other hardware due to this. Actually lots of Switch games have more input lag than for other systems. Nintendo could care about what quality other developers are allowed to publish, but they don't.
The build quality of the switch itself is also so-so. The screen has low contrast, the wifi doesn't have great reception. Let's not even get started on the usb design.
All this would be okay, if the hardware and software was really cheap, but it isn't.
pjmlp|5 years ago
risyachka|5 years ago
You can make the best hardware possible, but practically no companies can achieve Nintendo level quality.
naravara|5 years ago
The Switch also has an MSRP of $300. The iPod Touch is about $200, but for a much less complicated piece of hardware that gets to draft on the volume discounts from producing the iPhone.
nikofeyn|5 years ago
ever since the gamecube, and maybe before then, nintendo has been on a divergent path from the likes of other console makers. they do not seek to compete in hardware power.
nintendo's true problems lie in online and cloud services, like account management and online multiplayer, and just pure laziness in game development and implementation. they get away with it somehow.
runawaybottle|5 years ago
michaelbrave|5 years ago
Other benefits would include: easier to develop for due to familiarity, better battery efficiency (as opposed to gamegear), and lower manufacturing costs as well.
Likely the know that the experience matter more than the hardware. Which is something the original mac got right too, as it wasn't very powerful either.
swiley|5 years ago
Compared to the 7 which feels like a flimsy piece of trash? Meh they both feel about the same.
slightwinder|5 years ago
Additionally, Apple is bigger, selling significant more units of their devices, which are also more expensive, while having a better standing in the industry. Nintendo on the other side was taking a gamble on whether the switch would even sell good enough to survive. So price-calculation for both companies is quite different, with apple having more money to invest in premium than nintendo.
Maybe the rumored switch pro some day will up nintendos premium-game?
oneVoiceOnHN|5 years ago
chrisan|5 years ago
Does everyone still feel this way about Apple?
I still can remember the first iPhone I had. The 3G just felt really great in my hand. I probably played with that more than a 13yo will play with his balls. Then the first retina and machined metal feel. It all felt like this was the top of the phone world. But ever since then the iPhone just feels like another phone. I don't feel anything special about the X as its just another in long line of iPhones. I stick with apple because I like iOS compared to how android behaves. Apple could make a plastic phone and I wouldn't care or think less of it.
The switch on the other hand I am enthralled with. My wife, at 40, has gotten into gaming because of it. I'm sure if Nintendo partnered with Apple it would be a highly machined and precisely designed piece of hardware, but I would find it hard to believe it would matter.
I guess what I'm saying is I no longer associate quality of a product with the materials as long as they don't break on me. My switch has lasted 3 years which is about a year longer than any iPhone I've had where I've wanted to upgrade because the phone feels slower than it used to.
analyticascent|5 years ago
I'm not a gamer, but from a business perspective I'm intrigued with their approach.
libertine|5 years ago
Nintendo main differentiation revolves around their IP, which they manage to refresh with every new console release by making some console feature into a game mechanic (and the gameplay revolves around it).
You can see good examples of it in their hardware accessories for games, where they don't feel like gimmicks, yet on other consoles some accessories do feel like it.
pkilgore|5 years ago
meeebooo|5 years ago
Let's not even talk about friend codes in 2020.
Kaiyou|5 years ago
philistine|5 years ago
k__|5 years ago
I got a smartphone and a VR headset to put it in. Yes they are cheap, but the experience is completely different from the Rift.
These may be the most fundamental parts, but they are not what makes the Rift a good VR set.
joshjdr|5 years ago
The focus on decreasing latency is arguably what differentiated the Rift early on: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/
growlist|5 years ago
huffmsa|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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