Topic: Is Nintendo making the games they want to make a bad idea these days?

they shouldnt just make the modern realistic, gritty, "mature" games. but they should definitely have a few. look at what the Wii U lacks, the kind of games you see on other consoles. its pretty much happy-go-lucky cartoon games all the way. now, those games arent bad by any means, but they need a more complete package. if Nintendo could nail a new crysis-esque Metroid prime, it would go so far in getting the mainstream onboard and show that Wii U was more than just a toy. or a new IP for that matter, if Nintendo could challenge these modern style games and beat them it could do wonders for them.

I'm not really sure. On one hand, they don't really appeal to the larger markets they need to to be profitable. But then again, AAA is becoming less and less sustainable every day and in mobile most gamers want to pay as little as possible. So it's hard to say, it doesn't seem like any sector of the market is very profitable.

Nintendo should never change its charm or what makes them uniquely them.

They should however broaden the genre selection for first party titles, both the Wii U and 3DS are very weak when it comes to racers and or shooters......

Wave Race, 1080 Snowboarding, Sin and Punishment, F-Zero, Metroid, another Kid Icarus.....

C'mon Nintendo, WTF? I guess we should just be happy about Star Fox U.

I think this whole thread is suffering a bad case of selective hearing. The truth is that Nintendo are making games that sell well despite the fact that they are not making the games that do well on other platforms. Of all the IP Nintendo has ever made it's the Marios and Zeldas that have done well and continue to sell well. Why fix what isn't broken?

Just putting stuff into perspective. The 3DS got one of the best and widely loved Resident Evils on any platform and it was outsold by an order of magnitude by Animal Crossing and New SMB. We love to talk about how great games like Bayonetta 2 and ZomBi U are on the Wii U but they were both outsold by just about every big first party Nintendo title. If the "hardcore sells" rule held any weight then surely Metroid would sell more than Zelda which would sell more than Mario. The reverse has been true for every single Nintendo platform ever released.

People complain that Nintendo isn't doing the thing that they reckon would sell. But when they do that thing it doesn't sell. So clearly Nintendo know their market better than the average internet user does. I mean they've been in the game and survived for how long? How many other gaming companies from the 80s are still as relevant as Nintendo are in any sense? They don't always get it right and hindsight is 20:20, but you'd have to concede that given how well they've done they surely know what they're doing.

Making games for a demographic area, specific, just brings incomplete games like the AC: Unity. Most AAA publishers develop crappy games, with pathetic storytelling like The Order. And why all the games has to be "Mature"? I'm 36, and I don't bolognese want more "serious life", the violence is fully covered in CNN or any news channel, so why in the world I would like more violence in my enterteiment? No, I want to relax and enjoy, to get fun. I demand challenge, no the easy games of this "day and age".

About realistic games, since they don't try with lame games like destiny, but I would play something like Ethernal Darkness

Nintendo's best selling games rarely crack 10 million sales, with the exception of Pokemon. Some of the more popular IPs on other consoles like CoD and Assassin's Creed easily pass that mark. As for why realistic games don't sell as well as Mario and Zelda? The hardcore market that would buy those games is turned off by Nintendo's weaker hardware and that most of its games are cartoony. If they had stronger hardware and a better mix of cartoony and realistic games, the sales would skew more towards realism. It goes beyond game library, Nintendo has an entire image problem with the hardcore market.

@Bolt_Strike
Yes, lets talk absolute numbers when Nintendo's platforms right now have smaller install bases. That's a great way to make a compelling argument about what sort of content Nintendo should make. Way to go, my argument is all null and void now. GG. This is sarcasm BTW.

For perspective, percentage of ___ owners who have ___:
Wii U: Mario Kart 8 -> 50%
XBOne: CoD: AW -> 37%
Wii U: Smash Bros -> 34%
PS4: CoD:AW -> 31%
3DS: Pokemon X/Y -> 24%
PS4: Assassin's Creed Unity -> 16%
XBOne: Halo MCE -> 16%
3DS: Animal Crossing -> 15%
Wii U: Wind Waker HD -> 14%
PS4: Shadow of Mordor 8%
Wii U: Bayonetta 2 -> 7%
XBOne: Sunset Overdrive -> 6%

"ZOMG! Nintendo should make more games like Assassin's Creed and CoD! Those games do so well on other platforms! Better than anything Nintendo does!". What a load, the numbers don't lie. Nintendo knows what does well on their platform and when their platform does well those games can and do crack 10mill+. Hell most of the best selling games ever have been Nintendo's IP.

We get it, the Wii U isn't the best selling platform. But you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Let's not forget that some of the best selling games in the last 10 years have been Nintendo games. As in, half of the Top 25.

This classic seems relevant.

And you think that if Nintendo attracts more gamers those percentages won't change? Statistics don't always work that way, buddy, it depends entirely on what kind of market they draw in. Let's take Smash Bros for example, it sold to 34% of the Wii U's install base, but Brawl only sold to 12% of the Wii's install base. The casual market that made up the difference between the Wii and Wii U's sales didn't care for Smash Bros, so a lower percentage of Nintendo's fans owned Brawl than Smash U. The only way those percentages would hold is if they draw in a demographic that has the same interests as Nintendo's current market, and that's highly unlikely if not impossible, especially if they're going after larger markets like the dudebros and casuals.

@Bolt_Strike
So let me get this straight, you're trying to say I'm wrong about Nintendo knowing what they're doing by pointing to the Wii? One of the most successful gaming platforms of all time? A platform that allowed Nintendo do produce some of the best selling games of all time? I don't even have to try, you're doing a better job of destroying your argument than I could.

"In fact Insomniac's Overstrike, was changed to the much more serious looking FUSE because the focus group they tested with though Overstrike was too cartoony. Hell, even 12 year olds thought it was a game for their little brother. I'm seeing similar complaints with Splatoon, people who claimed to want a new Nintendo IP wanted something realistic and mature as opposed to Splatoon and to a lesser extent, Codename S.T.E.A.M."

It's weird, because I see people all the time complaining that they want something fresh. Looking at Splatoon, how many times do we get shooters like that? However. these same people want a more "mature" Call of Duty or Battlefield experience which we've seen an upteen amount of times?! I dunno, gamers can be a real finicky bunch sometimes...

I really like Nintendo's approach lately. Some different takes on old IP like Hyrule Warriors. Some new IPs like S.T.E.A.M. and Splatoon, and of course sequels and remakes. It seems to be going well for them despite low sales of the Wii U. Hyrule Warriors came out of the blue but it sold really well.

Focus groups only tell you what people say they want they don't tell you what people actually want. I'd argue that trying to chase "key demographics" brings down content often to the detriment of the whole industry. It's a "safer" strategy and and easier one but it's not necessarily the most profitable. It's easy to use hindsight and claim that successful things were always obviously going to be successful. Often the reverse is true.

Just look at the times when Nintendo has done the unexpected. Before Wind Waker people were asking for a "mature" Zelda, something not-unlike what we got with Twilight Princess I suspect. But Wind Waker actually did pretty well. The Wii and Wii Sports launched at a time when everyone assumed the only way to do well was with a brown FPS on a powerful machine. It ended up being more than just a success, they had those things in retirement homes. Even Pokemon, if you told someone in the mid 90s that a kid-friendly JRPG that featured a small yellow rat named Pikachu would be one of the best selling series in the US ever?

Just look at this: http://kotaku.com/5260140/pokemon-could-have-been-muscular-mo...

When cutesy monster series Pokémon was being prepped for the Western market, localizers told Nintendo this: No way will adorable monsters be accepted by Americans.

In a recent interview, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata reveals, "We were sent a proposal of muscle-bound characters to use if we wanted to do well in the U.S." Nintendo didn't sign off on the beefed-up Pocket Monsters. The-then-Nintendo-honcho Hiroshi Yamauchi viewed releasing the cute monsters in the States as a worthy challenge. The fact that these characters were different could be appealing to Western gamers.

So yeah, sometimes the focus groups don't know what they want. Nintendo are one of the few companies who have the guts to do the unexpected and unusual. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it pays off spectacularly. The last thing the industry needs is for Nintendo and developers like them to stop taking those risks.

If Nintendo actually did go for 'roided up Pokemon for the American release, I wonder if the series today would be a) entirely forgotten or b) openly mocked, with several spin-off memes and its own page on tvtropes.

Besides, we're living in an era where the only popular AAA JRPG series left is Tetsuya Nomura's band of impeccably groomed bishounen. I hardly think that "make it beefier and browner" is the only recipe for success in NA.

Wow, hypocrisy much? First you call me out for using absolute sales over attach rate and then when I show you a game with low attach rate and you claim it's still successful? Way to move the goal posts.

At any rate, the Wii's success is a fluke in the grand scheme of things, the casual audience they drew in with the Wii abandoned them for mobile and they're not coming back. So Nintendo can't rely on them anymore. In general, the whole blue ocean strategy isn't going to work for them, the more they branch out into new markets, the more they have to change their philosophy to keep those markets. What they have now is roughly the limit of Nintendo's inherent appeal.

@Bolt_Strike
Where's the hypocrisy? I was just saying that the better way to measure what games "got it right" for the platform is the attach rate not absolute numbers. Because naturally a game that's multi-platform, on a platform with a bigger install base or both will sell better. You pointing to Smash Bros on Wii doesn't blow my argument apart. Infact I would argue that Smash Bros Brawl didn't "get it right" for the Wii's demographic as much as some other games did. It's just that with the Wii Nintendo did so damn well that games could do well but not be a smash hit and still pull 5-10mill units.

I was just laughing at the fact that while trying to argue that Nintendo is "doing it wrong" you'd bring up the Wii.

If you're going by attach rate though, 5-10 million is not a success for the Wii. The Wii sold 101 million units, so 5-10 million would be a 5-10% attach rate. 5-10 million is only a success in terms of absolute sales, so you're declaring Wii games a success in absolute sales and Wii U games a success in attach rate. It's a double standard.

@Bolt_Strike
An attach rate of 10% is pretty good, when they get upto 30% they've nailed it. It's just that on the Wii the numbers were so crazy that a game could "fail" and still sell a couple of million copies. This isn't a double standard, this is precisely the point I was trying to make.

You can't point to sales of CoD or Assassin's Creed and say that Activision and Ubisoft are reading the market better than Nintendo. Because Nintendo's games require a specific investment in specific hardware that not everyone will make. CoD and Assassin's Creed can be played on just about any platform. Just like you can't point to Wii Music and say that Nintendo read the market better with Wii Music than it did with Super Mario 3D World.

That's exactly a double standard, you're measuring success differently on a higher selling console.

Yes you can. That's an absolute numbers game. You can't use attach rates to claim that Nintendo is better at reading the market because as I said earlier, attach rates do not automatically hold at different sales levels. You can't just extrapolate and assume that if you have a 30% attach rate on a 20 million console that if you can sell 50 million units of a console that 30% of the 30 million people who entered the market will buy that particular series. Attach rates don't tell you anything about how well they can read the entire market. Only about how well they can read their market.