Nintendo a 3rd Party?
“We’re reaching the limits of how far we can appeal to consumers by boosting the machine’s performance or providing more compelling graphics and sound,” he said. “I feel like a chef cooking for a king who’s full.”
Much controversy has surrounded this statement made by Satoru Itawa, Nintendo’s recently appointed president. Could the Gamecube very well be Nintendo’s last foray into the hardware side of the video game business? And more importantly, how does this affect us Gamecuber’s and video game players in general?
Nintendo has always believed in the Ying-Yang philosophy of hardware and software – they are as one abd work hand in hand. Hardware is useless unless it has good software, and software is useless unless it has good hardware. Perhaps my ramblings can best be summed up into a quote made by Nintendo’s Executive VP of Sales and Marketing Peter Main, as quoted from the now defunct Next Generation magazine.
“What’s different about us is that while we honestly believe the quality of the software is a function of how the software is designed, a large part of the success comes from Miyamotyo and his teams telling the hardware guys what kind of platform they need. That’s why we don’t believe Luigi’s Mansion and other titles ported over to a PC or another console would be the same game. The whole [gaming experience] is an interlocked equation.”
By Nintendo developing the system with input from the software developers such as Shigeru Miyamotyo and the rest of EAD, the hardware caters to the specific needs of the software being developed for it, which boosts the software’s gameplay. This is why Nintendo is able to develop their games that maximize their own system’s potential (at least most of the time), and why other companies are able to develop for the Gamecube system with ease (at least to my understanding).
This is why I can’t see Nintendo going third party anytime soon. If Nintendo decides to go third party, their games would be severely reduced in quality; even on a system such as the Xbox, which has the best specifications on the market. They would be reduced in quality because a whole new system and architecture would have to be learned, and without a hardware company’s input from Nintendo’s top developers, games would be reduced to a hit or miss category. Peter Main also had more to say about new hardware products…
"…They [Sony] had a solid global success with the PlayStation, and they got all these hardware guys who said they could double their values in this and that, and they can improve its adaptability as a set-top box. So all this stuff is thrown together and all of a sudden all the poor software guys say, ‘This is a nightmare! How do I program for it?’ It’ll be a frosty day [in July] when that kind of thing takes place with us by virtue of how we go about the development process."
Satoru Itawa, in his press release to analysts, had more to say about the state of the hardware business.
“Price cuts in software could destroy the game industry,” he said. “The effort to produce machines with better technology has reached its limit. If things continue, they may lead to the decline of the entire games industry.”
Has the video game hardware business reached its apex? Itawa seems to think so, but I’m more skeptical. Video games underwent a tremendous revolution from 2-D to 3-D, and it will be some time before we see a change of that magnitude happen again; we’ll have to wait and see whether the Internet can offer gamers new gaming experiences. In the meantime, all what hardware companies, such as Sony, can do is increase the hardware performance and hope that the games somehow become better. Nintendo should continue to develop their own systems with their software philosophy’s applied to that system instead of focusing more on software. Nintendo has enough credibility, history, success, and fanboys to take it well into the future with a new console. Any money invested into a console (which can take years to get a profit on) can easily be recuperated through software sales, where the profits a company can make are astronomical.
As for us Nintendo fans, Nintendo staying where it is would be for the best. The “Nintendo Experience” has always been about playing a Nintendo game on a Nintendo console. Besides the strangeness of playing a Nintendo title on a competing console, the quality of the software would be greatly reduced; and it would be some time before we see good games reach the market.
As for mainstream gamers who think Miyamotyo is a used car salesman from Kansas and the crowds of PS2 and Xbox fans, Nintendo putting a Mario on their systems would be an added bonus. SEGA is currently experiencing tremendous success by broadening their userbase with games previously accessible to Dreamcast only console gamers, and maybe Nintendo can experience that same sort of success by releasing franchise characters onto other systems. Whichever path Nintendo will decide to take, it can only benefit gamers in the long run.