Nintendo the lifestyle company
Are Nintendo about to abandon traditional gamers?
There is a growing number of video game fans expressing dissatisfaction with Nintendo. The games are not challenging; the games are not engaging. There is a grain of truth in this - Nintendo do seem to have changed their emphasis to the detriment of traditionalists.
In truth, the grumblings of the traditional gamer started as soon as the Wii was released - the machine was regarded as a novelty, derided as a Fisher Price approach to video games. However, as the Wii became a phenomenon, the derision turned to something more serious, and the howls of the Hardcore Gamers became shrill and panicky. Their argument goes like this: Developers will stop producing multi-million dollar epics, and start making simple, pick-up-and-play titles for the Wii, a less risky and potentially more profitable approach. In time, the hardcore gamer might not be catered for any more.
Even Nintendo appears to have stopped producing epic titles - at this year’s E3 Nintendo’s line-up of games was not terribly inspiring. Indeed, the word is that Nintendo are on the brink of becoming a broader ‘leisure and lifestyle’ company, and abandoning their video game heritage. Not that this is the first time Nintendo has reinvented itself - before Mario, it was, amongst other things, a playing cards manufacturer.
So have Nintendo really turned their back on hardcore gamers? Yes, to an extent - largely because Nintendo have struggled to appeal to hardcore gamers since the days of the N64. The Gamecube failed partly because Nintendo took too long to produce these in-depth ‘hardcore’ titles. And, as third-party titles dried up, the Gamecube ended up looking like a dead machine.
The truth is that in order for Nintendo not go the way of Sega, they had to come up with a new approach that would appeal to both the traditional gamer, and someone who would normally avoid video games like the plague. Have Nintendo succeeded? The balance certainly has shifted to the casual gamer but the financial rewards have been enormous.
The lucrative nature of Nintendo’s current strategy probably explains why they are still reluctant to make Wii versions of some of their classic intellectual properties - there is simply no need. Couple this with the lip service paid to online gaming, and it seems that Nintendo are happy with the way things are going.
There are striking parallels between the fortunes of Apple and Nintendo. Apple, like Nintendo, was a company that was practically on its knees at the start of this decade. It could no longer compete on Microsoft’s terms, so transformed itself from a technology manufacturer to a design company. Nintendo are doing the same kind of thing; they know that the old battle is lost, so they have entered a new market altogether - lifestyle and leisure. Does this mean that hardcore gamers are going to be marginalised? On the Wii, possibly. But there are enough of them out there to mean that there will always be a market for them. They just have to accept that they are no longer the only ones playing video games.
