Reactions to Iwata
I enjoyed all the great coverage of GDC this past week from sites like Gamasutra and Ars Technica as well as the blogs and Twitter feeds of several game writers I follow. Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata’s speech was interesting not just for what he said (loved the Miyamoto insights) but for what happened afterward: another round of eye-rolling from the core crowd. Over at SVGL, a follow-up question came up yesterday: What else could Iwata-san possibly have said that would have pleased these folks?
I posted a short answer, and I’m posting it here, too. I thought about it for a while and really, I just don’t think there is anything Nintendo can so or say at this point that will please this group, which I count myself a member of. That might be a fairly obvious observation given the direction the company has been moving since it introduced the Wii in 2006. People have bitched and moaned about underpowered hardware and watered-down games during the last two years.
What’s so remarkable about how Ninty has “changed” recently is how little change has actually taken place. In 1985, Nintendo rolled out a somewhat underpowered box in the U.S. market that appealed to a wide demographic: kids, families, both boys and girls, and plenty of people who had never spent time hanging out in an arcade in ’80s. Every time I think about the idea that Nintendo used to be hard core but isn’t anymore, I think about my best friend’s dad, who beat the original Legend of Zelda — the godfather of all ‘hardcore’ games — and never touched a videogame again, ever. There’s your “new” Wii market.
One part of that original demographic grew up and became today’s core gamers. They expected more. More detailed graphics. More complex play systems. More buttons. More hours of game time. Like everyone else, Nintendo went along with the tide and catered to that crowd — after all, this was an audience it had basically created. Nintendo’s consoles each steadily sold less than the one that preceded it as the niche grew smaller, but louder. So they simply went back to the well, and here we are. We’re at a place where even the announcement of a new Zelda title doesn’t move the needle much with the core crowd. But I’ll bet more than a few dads out there will be playing it.
(Image: Infendo.com)
