Yeah, and the situation isn't ENTIRELY dissimilar to Disney though... because for a very short period of time, they were floundering after traditional animation was floundering in this country and they were relying strictly on their Pixar partnership (before they made the hard deal with Pixar). It was an old dinosaur having trouble adapting to modern times, but they finally did the hard thing and made the deal work. And now Disney is on a lot better footing, reaching out and grabbing LucasArts and shit like that.
Nintendo might be in for another down period where they have to re-evaluate their priorities. As much as many of their hardest core supporters don't mind eighty three Mario games every week, and as much as they say it doesn't matter as long as they're good, the truth is that is not enough to draw in the new customers Nintendo needs to stay relevant.
Without the mass market appeal of wiimote, they have to rely on games that provide potential customers with a wide range of big potentials, and without third party support (which is most certainly partially Nintendo's fault as well), they have to do it themselves. You can release a game like Xenoblade and not even try to market it (to say nothing of its disastrous territorial release state). Are they going to let X die the same way?
They have to be willing to take those risks. They have to be willing to put SOME Mario (and Zelda and Donkey Kong and whatever) games in a freezer and tell themselves 'you know what, this is painting us into a corner, and we can't always be this company. We can be that company at times, but the modern market demands we become something else as well.'
And that doesn't mean abandoning core Nintendo philosophies like being fun for the entire family. It means challenging themselves to come up with new ideas that are unrelated to what they've done before, sometimes that tells customers that this is a system they MUST own because they can't get anything like this experience anywhere else. If a customer wanted to play some Mario games once in a while, the current status is they can just buy a 3DS and pay $160 and be done with it. They have to make Wii U special, and the pad - like I've been saying for a while - is really a traditional controller with DS functionality. It's good for some things, but it's not going to change the game. And so they should have turned their attention to changing the game with their software and partnerships...
Yeah I really liked it. It's no perfect game, but it's the first really true traditional jRPG I loved in ages (I liked Tales of Vesperia, which is probably the last time I really liked one close to this way). Glad it was made.
I mean they made SOME investments, but I have to say the ones I've seen have been pretty poor... at least from a global perspective. They have to think bigger then they have been thinking. Hardware gimmicks have always had the same problems: to the people with the type of low attention span that NEW GIMMICKS are the only thing that draws them in, eventually those gimmicks will run out of steam for them and eventually you'll run out of gimmicks to sell them. And in the absence of that, software is where you must turn. And that's where Nintendo has failed to adapt.
Oh, I'm sure. But, so far, the announcements they've made have pretty much been exactly what I've been saying: I'm excited for some of them, but they're not going to sell your system to new customers. They're going to sell your systems to established hardcore Nintendo fans, and that has always been a diminished group of individuals. I count myself among them, as harsh a critic as I can be sometimes (I hate because I love), but most people don't.
