@Anti-Matter A mobile broadband connection would have to have been included in the FCC filing, both for the hardware and the leasing of spectrum bandwidth. They can't just say surprise!
@DanteSolablood With a $70 collector's edition, I would place the standard release at around $40 probably. So far as I know, it's digital only for everyone. All of the collector's editions have metal cards engraved with redemption codes.
@Ed_Fairway It's an absolutely legitimate criticism that they as much as admitted to last year. I think, for the most part, that SEGA stayed out of the devs way whilst they were working. They own the IP, they're handling the publishing and I believe that had yea or nay on new level design. Other than that, so far as I've been told, it's Taxman, Headcannon and PagodaWest.
If WaterMelon can do it (they claim that all of the materials in their carts are new) and make it cost effective then I'm sure that SEGA, Taxman and Headcannon between them could get the job done.
@samuelvictor I don't know about you, but I would have paid an extra $60 for an edition that came with an actual working Mega Drive cartridge, not just a cosmetic one. Pier Solar had a Mega Drive release so it wouldn't have been an impossibility.
If someone had told me, aged ten, that one day I would be more excited for a Sonic game than a Mario game, I would have glared at them intensely, but it's true. A strong 2D Sonic interests me far more than another 3D hub-world Sunshine derivative.
I've been looking forward to Mania since that atrocious anniversary celebration and it certainly doesn't look to disappoint. Of course, with Yuji Naka 2.0 (Whitehead) at the helm, the quality should be right up there with the original titles.
@Ralizah 'If the first 12 months are what set a console's reputation in stone, then the 3DS, PS3, and Xbone wouldn't have done nearly as well as they ended up doing. Continued software support and marketing are much more important.'
It's my fault for not using the more concrete 'consumer conception' rather than 'reputation' but you're misunderstanding me. I don't meant that the opinion of a console is set in stone, in the sense of being a net positive or negative, but that the consumer conception of its value proposition tends to remain static after that point. An example is the GCN, whose diminutive physical appearance and relatively innocuous early lineup labelled it a kiddie console and it was never able to alter that conception. The problem at that the Switch faces is that its category conception is in turmoil. Ostensibly it fills the role of being both a home console and a handheld, but the consensus I've seen from gamers is that it's generally viewed as a handheld that is dockable. The problem with is that that conception goes contrary to Nintendo's vested commercial interest. It HAS a portable, a strong one with with at least 12 months more life left in it, while it rather brutally and unceremoniously killed its failed home console, which needs a successor to keep that product category relevant for Nintendo's brand; that's why Nintendo, and especially RFA, is pushing the 'home console first' narrative so hard in during the pre-launch window. The very last thing that Nintendo wants or needs is for the consumer to view the Switch as primarily a handheld because that puts it into direct competition with its current primary handheld, and against the value proposition of the 3DS which, with better battery life, more robust physical construction (clamshell protecting screen and controls), smaller size, lower price, and thousand-game library, the Switch has only novelty and the draw of the triple-A experience (you can look to the Vita for how great a draw that is).
With mobile taking up so much slack in portable gaming, Nintendo cannot afford for 12 - 18 months of lacklustre Switch sales (ex the launch which should be reasonably strong) with the 3DS continuing to bat cleanup because they can't kill it outright. If they have a performance miss during that window, then the Switch remains a 1st party machine only, and we saw what the meant for the Wii U.
@Jessica286 It won't, 'dude', because you don't understand the portable market. Is non-home console gaming an increasing trend in Japan? Yes. Know what else is increasing? The defection rate of Japanese gamers away from dedicated gaming hardware to other mobile devices.
@Jessica286 Which it won't, at least not during the most important time which is the first 12 months of retail availability. That's when a console's reputation is set in stone, and where an enormous chunk of its total unit sales and profit lifetime comes from.
All of the Kool-Aid drinkers should be well-apprised: this is the same 'analyst' firm that confidently proclaimed that the Wii U would hit 25m units sales lifetime.
'Game' is rubbish, and it's no more a Mario game that Smash was a FF game just because Cloud was in it. The only convention that remains of Mario is that the player agent jumps. On-rails pseudo-platformer. I would much rather have had a Mario Kart game.
@Azooooz It's nothing to do with the cost, it's to do with increasing frustration with them wanting to look over our shoulders at every moment, because obviously we're all criminals that want nothing more than to rob poor Nintendo (you know, the company from which you've purchased nine versions of eShop SMB because a unified account would mean they miss out on SO MANY multi-dips) by sharing with the world the glory of an INFINITE BLOODY RUNNER.
@TearTheRoofOff Pokemon GO is free-to--play and is a multiplayer, AR game. Mario Run has no functionality to support this necessity and this move by Nintendo is entirely about foisting the cost of securing their IP onto the end-user. If they aren't able to secure their products without having a bar-coded leash being rammed up the posterior of the player, then they need remain on their mediocre hardware where they can continue the well-practiced condescension in a more traditional manner.
The Moto just lost a $10 sale and a trial download. They may own Mario, but they don't own my mobile. Microsoft had to be educated on why persistent internet connections aren't okay. I hope Nintendo gets the same message.
'The Switch is a smart move by Nintendo imo,their home console sales have been declining generation to generation,and even their handheld market is under fire from tablets and smartphones.
The switch has the ability to reach a much larger audience,you should pretty much guarantee most Wii U owners will be on board,as will a large percentage of 3DS owners,and you also have to consider that the 3DS's glasses free 3D feature has hurt sales a little in the west,the safety warning for 6 year olds and under can be a little off putting for parents,and even though you can turn the 3D feature off you can't always rely on children to do what is good for them.'
You MIGHT (and I mean best case) make the argument for 70 - 80% conversion from Wii U to the Switch (and if you look at Nintendo's console history without the outlier of the Wii, which garnered huge casual audiences that then completely abandoned Nintendo the following generation, resulting in an 87% hardware decline) this has held true since their start:
Yes, the 3DS has roughly 60m owners (though we can't say legitimately how many of those people are represented in Wii U ownership), but that's not terribly helpful either. One third is in Japan, where they very little interest in a console experience, either at home or on the go, and are defecting to smartphone-based mobile gaming with such speed that in 2016 that 20m accounted for less that one-third of the gaming population in that country. Further at issue is that a sizable portion of the portable gaming population wants nothing to do a machine like the Switch, which is much larger than a typical gaming handheld, is costly and fragile (no built-in screen protector like a 3DS) and will almost certainly have substantially inferior battery life (I would wager a loss of 1 - 1.5 hours of gaming time).
'I can also see a lot of PS4/Xbox One owners buying a switch as a nice addition to their main console,if the machine is priced right and Nintendo keep it supplied with a steady stream of software,this should be far easier as all their development teams will be focused on one format.'
What on Earth would make you think that? Sony already had a powerful handheld and it sold terribly. Nintendo first-party titles? If that were enough to move hardware, the total lifetimes sales of the Wii U wouldn't have been 13m. No, the audience that will be drawn to the Switch is that tiny segment of the population that:
1.) Favours handheld gaming over console
2.) Games portably for extended periods (no 5 - 10 minute Pokemon grinds between bus stops)
3.) Has no interest in the Sony/MS duopolopy hardware but wants SOME third-party support
4.) Doesn't care that their vast 3DS library (which they'll have because they're a portable gamer primarily) is functionally useless on the Switch, meaning they'll have to carry a second handheld to have any great variety of games for the first year.
That's a losing value proposition however you want to slice it.
'Also if Nintendo get the price right the Nintendo switch can be pretty much an impulse buy for the casuals,I think Nintendo may have a massive hit on their hands with this.'
$150 isn't an impulse buy and $250 definitely isn't one. $70 for an NES classic, MAYBE, but even in large cities $250 is a quarter of the rent or two utilities.
@HappyMaskedGuy Perhaps you might desist from calling rightfully-wary detractors of the 'console' brainless just because they disagree with your cheerleading. Then you won't get called on your rubbish.
@HappyMaskedGuy Says the guy shilling for the console safe in a Nintendo fan echo chamber. There's real problems with bucking standards in a mature market; a prospective user has certain expectations, both in profile and aesthetics, and not delivering on them can scuttle your chances before you're even out of the gate. Everyone oohs and aahs and talks a brilliant game about how 'revolutionary' your product is, but when it hits the street, it gets ignored.
@Spoony_Tech Which is what I've argued from the start. In a mature market, where improvement via evolution has become the standard, where there's no excitement to offset limitations, a product is defined by the category in which it has the weakest performance. It's not an advance handheld competing in the console market, it's an once-again-underpowered console attempting to masquerade in the dedicated handheld space where Nintendo already has dominance, in essence competing with itself. It does not have the power for third-party support longevity, no compelling titles beyond Nintendo first party titles, which we know from Wii U sales does not have the draw to move systems. If the leaked MSRP is to be believed, we know that as a handheld it will max out at 3 of dedicated gaming, and will lack the backward compatibility that helped to move the 3DS. To my own eyes, it's not a jack of all trades, it a system that's playing Russian roulette with five chambers filled.
Color Splash, you blood shills? Trying to drive up sales of that unmitigated disaster so that you can get that 8/10 rating into a reasonable margin of error?
Yikes, at least with the Wii U third-party devs waited till the actual launch before they started walking back support. As the furor over the machine dies down, which it was inevitably going to, I expect to see more equivocating like this from others. Based on the technical specs that have been teased or rumoured thus far, as well as the cost, this console will not be a competitor to the PS4, PS4Pro or Scorpio. It MIGHT be to the XBONE is docked mode.
@yomanation 'That's how cult classics work. Only a few people buy them, so they circlejerk over them for years once they find like minded individuals. It's undeniable that Wii U has some good stuff, so it's not like it has zero merits. It's just nowhere near as good as it should have been. People that praise it in a few years will blow its positives out of proportion and underplay the negatives. That's how it always is. Same could be said for Dreamcast, Beyond Good & Evil, and anything else with a cult following. For me, Wii U is as close as it ever got for me to abandon Nintendo, and that's saying a lot, because I've been a loyal fan since '90.'
A thousand times this. I loved the Dreamcast, still do, and I recognise that it was a failure in any objective estimation of its performance. Did it have some great titles, even fantastic ones? Yes, absolutely. Was it a failure? It's performance ended SEGA's presence in the hardware market, so that isn't a serious question.
The gaslighting for this console is so absurd. The console was a failure. The market says so and your beloved tin god has admitted to it as well. If you enjoyed it, great, I'm thrilled for you (and I promise you that isn't sarcasm), but have the good grace to accept fact as fact: in terms of market performance, versus its competitors, versus its predecessors and versus its projected sales internally, the Wii U was a abject failure from start to finish. Full stop.
Someone should screencap this page and repost it when the $400+ bundle price point is formally announced and people realise that they're going to have to shell out Scorpio/Neo money for a 'console' that has tenuous third-party support and whose primary hardware, which is predicated on having portability as a feature, is subject to the same limited recharge cycle as any tablet and is equally impossible to service.
And Japan's FW numbers for Color Splash, rather than being simply a case of the Wii U install base limiting the sales, is indicative of the general trend of the series' sales in Japan. As you can see below, the attachment rate in Japan started strong (not surprising given the nation's fondness for RPGs) peaked strongly with TTYD (even higher than the general WW rate of 8.8%), and cratered with SPM and fell down the cellar stairs with SS:
Paper Mario
FW: 118,322
% of LTD: 27.8%
LTD: 425,609
Install Base: 5,540,000
Attachment Rate: 7.68%
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
FW: 137,750
% of LTD: 33.6%
LTD: 409,600
Install Base: 4,040,000
Attachment Rate: 10.14%
Super Paper Mario
FW: 156,055
% of LTD: 30.8%
LTD: 506,298
Install Base: 12,750,000
Attachment Rate: 3.97%
Paper Mario Sticker Star
FW: 130,009
% of LTD: 23%
LTD: 564,823
Install Base: 2,132,0000
Attachment Rate: 2.65%
Using some scratchpad maths, if this title follows suit for Japan, you would expect:
Paper Mario Color Splash
FW: 20,894
% of LTD: SERIES AVG ± STDEV
LTD: 62,634 - 86,065
Install Base: 3,210,000
Attachment Rate: 1.95-2.68%
Which means, at best, it matches SS and slips below 2% attachment at worst. It's not inconceivable that such a performance would serve as the rather ignominious end of the Paper Mario series.
@Mahe You can't go by raw sales numbers, you have to go by attachment rate. TTYD 1.91mn on a total of 21.74mn, an attachment rate of 8.8%, as opposed to PM64, which had a rate less than half that at 4.2% (1.37mn/32.93mn). SPM, likewise, had a 4.2% attachment (4.23mn/101.63mn), and Sticker Star had an absymal 3.7% (2.21mn/59.79mn). Still want to argue that its popularity was comparable, when the series popularity shows a demonstrable and entirely unsurprising rise and fall?
Have there been any actual sales numbers, because the list positioning tells us nothing at all?
As for the game, it's mediocre but mostly fun title that, like Sticker Star and SPM, does not deserve the moniker Paper Mario, as merely a papercraft aesthetic does not a PM title make. In anticipation of the release, I replayed both PM64 and TTYD and I can say, both unequivocally and with utter subjectivity, that its farce of a story does not hold a candle to its forebears. I admit that that has everything to do with Nintendo and IS capturing lightning in a bottle in two successive attempts, but oh well. There's a reason that Godfather Part 3 is so maligned.
Software sells hardware, it's as simple as that. Quality software is good, but with a platform refresh cycle that is becoming increasingly abbreviated, Nintendo can't generate interest or promote the value proposition of its hardware with an average 8 - 10 first-party main-series titles and a smattering of derivatives each year for four years, not when their competition can offer four times that or more.
Regardless of what the Nintendo supremacists choose to shout into their echo chamber, the company needs third-party support with CONTEMPORARY titles if it wants to gain any sort of traction beyond being the console mistress of perhaps the 5 - 6 million Nintendo consumers that buy into the gospel of hardware integration.
@Moshugan Rubbish, the Wii U wasn't a unique lapse, it was, until this most recent rumour I thought, the culmination of Nintendo's asinine hardware 'innovation' over content philosophy, which I've always attributed to them sulking because third parties didn't feel particularly beholden to them after being held like indentured servants during the third and fourth generations. Nintendo took its ball and said that it didn't need them any longer anyway. Well, those companies took them at their word and rather than eat some crow and decide that a company, even with the richness of IP that it has, can't go it alone, they're doubling down on their nonsense. There's too much fantastic content out there that people want, and they don't want, and increasingly cannot, go to the trouble of having a second console just to get access to it.
Nintendo is now where Mac was in the nineties, and in terms of gaming still is: they have a product built on years of good will and are slowly squandering it. If the NX is just another rabbit-hole descent into Nintendo's fetishism of hardware uniqueness without the internals to carry third party support, I believe thoroughly that the story of the Wii U will be less a fluke and more a happy memory.
@Gerbwmu 'I'm not worried about specs or power, just give me great games for my TV and make it a viable platform so the 3rd parties want to be involved...'
You can have a Wii U-style underpowered semi-portable or you can have have a viable third-party console, but not both. Third-party devs are spoiled now: the three largest platforms are all x86 architecture and the two non-upgradeable platforms are close enough in power that per-game parity is a matter of minor optimisation.
If this truly is the NX, triple-A console-title support will finally and irrevocably disappear, and all that will be left will be a platform for hardware integrationist fanatics and brand enthusiasts with more money that good sense.
@ThanosReXXX I sincerely hope you're right. I want to support Nintendo, but I unequivocally refuse to buy the NX as advertised these past few days. As someone that'll be a father in the near future, my days of buying two or more consoles per generation is gone. The console maker whose hardware will support the greater variety of title will get my money.
I wish Nintendo the best of luck in being a third-party software developer when the finally bury their hardware division in 2019/2020. Perhaps they'll do what they should've done years ago and absorbed SEGA whilst they're at it.
in all seriousness, I will not buy another piece of Nintendo hardware that has rubbish third-party support. Absolutely shall not do.
"Ok, there's been this ongoing false misconception about Star Fox Zero's sales that naysayers cling to and report as fact so allow me to clarify for those who want to read facts. Fact #1: Star Fox Zero had the lowest sales opening of the series.... in Japan (which isn't really news because of the Wii U is Nintendo's worst selling home console and it sells the worst in Japan anyway). Fact #2: Star Fox Zero made NPD's best sellers list in April. Fact #3: Star Fox Zero also topped Amazon's best sellers list a week before it was even released. So please, stop fabricating sales data just because you don't agree with a game's design or controls."
Do you have numbers for it that top the 300k units that I see as of today? 'Cause if you have them, I'd love to see them.
@brandonbwii No, I don't think it's dark in the least. Whatever he had to do with the past generation's success or failures, I'm becoming increasingly disinterested in or confident of Miyamoto's input. And I would have retired Satoru Iwata long before his sad passing, and trying to make that dicey statement just because he has since passed is sentimentalist rubbish.
Where Star Fox Zero is concerned, Miyamoto went on record numerous times saying that what prevented them from doing it earlier was that they didn't have a novel control scheme. Not a different story (given that it was the same story as Star Fox and Star Fox 64) but a new way to control the game. One was invented, and we saw the results in the title's sales. The days of 'creativity' being its own virtue need to give way to reality again.
Getting very tired of Miyamoto's novel input shenanigans. Just give me a console on-par with its competitors, a normal controller and decent third-party support.
Meanwhile, put His Quirky Majesty out to pasture; trot him out for shareholder meetings or industry shows to bask in the goodwill, and leave it at that.
@SpykeKat Same. It had the updated SNES graphics that made X look to terrific, it felt like the most well-matured set of mechanics I encountered in the classic series.
@whodatninja Even if the NX had an 8x, it would have a max DTR of 36MB/s. A SanDisk EP UHS-1 64GB has a tranfer rate of 95MB/s. What's more, and especially attractive to me, is the prospect of the NX being able to re-write the memory card to include updates and DLC purchases, so that you don't have to rely on likely-defunct servers when you want to replay a game in ten years time.
@TreonsRealm Your defence of this pile of rubbish is to compare it to Star Fox Zero, which sold fewer copies than Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric? Winning strategy there, mate.
I'll be the first to admit that reviewers are sometimes, even often, biased, but you can't argue with sales. SFZ did awful business and I have every reason to believe that MN9 will as well. Not just because of all of the controversy but because it is, at its heart, a Mega Man game. The only gamers that want to play that are old fossils like myself that grew up with it, hardcore platformers, and Dark Souls-loving, arcade-style masochists that are obsessed with mining the outer darkness of the art form.
My problem with the DLC/episodic culture is what it means for the attitude of the current dev culture, i.e. use of DLC to justify an initial gaming experience that is generally subpar or the use of episodic content to amortise development cost and in the process essentially telegraphing that the dev is either entirely interested in leeching money steadily or has no confidence at all in the their product.
As a primarily retrogamer, what troubles me about this change in dev culture is how much it reduces the longevity of modern titles and devalues the notion of self-contained and complete entries. Unless a modern games does exceptionally well, in which case one sees the release of a GOTY or 'definitive' edition, then going back to play a great many of the modern Wii U titles with all content intact will be an exercise in frustration if not an outright impossibility. A prime example for me is Hyrule Warriors, which is probably my favourite game of this generation for Nintendo and one of the few games that has done DLC correctly (in that the game as initially released on disc is extremely playable with no sacrifice in content or story resolution). That said, the significant revisions that have occurred to base game (from a mechanics perspective), and the DLC which has added great value and diversity to the gameplay, likely will not be accessible some years down the road. As someone that considers replay potential to be a major part of a title's value, that's an enormous issue.
@Nicolai "The deku shield is way too shiny, Link's face looks pretty weird, the stitching on the tunic is too noticable, the gleaming from the shiny surfaces (especially Link's charging sword) is way too distracting for gameplay, many of the animations look amateurish (especially during the time traveling scenes), the triforce designs on the ground are so basic-looking, and so on. But otherwise, I guess it looks pretty. Though it looks like monks must be dusting and polishing the Temple of Time on a daily basis, lol."
I know, right? You expect more from a studio with a multimillion dollar budg...oh, wait.
I would love to see you do something a tenth as impressive. Self-important ponce.
Does anyone here seriously think that a company as corrupt and combative as Konami didn't foist a NCC on Kojima the last time that he re-upped his contract? Depending on how stringent it is, it could be several years before he'd even be able to do anything, to say nothing of producing a 'spiritual successor' to MGS; I can't begin to imagine the legal hoops to be negotiated on that account.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm forced to agree. There have been far too many shenaningans with Nintendo this generation for me to commit sight unseen. And my willingness to buy the NX will predicated as much, if not more, on their account system/digital service overhaul as it will the console itself.
Comments 161
Re: Talking Point: Important Features Yet to be Revealed for the Nintendo Switch
@Anti-Matter A mobile broadband connection would have to have been included in the FCC filing, both for the hardware and the leasing of spectrum bandwidth. They can't just say surprise!
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
@DanteSolablood With a $70 collector's edition, I would place the standard release at around $40 probably. So far as I know, it's digital only for everyone. All of the collector's editions have metal cards engraved with redemption codes.
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
@Ed_Fairway It's an absolutely legitimate criticism that they as much as admitted to last year. I think, for the most part, that SEGA stayed out of the devs way whilst they were working. They own the IP, they're handling the publishing and I believe that had yea or nay on new level design. Other than that, so far as I've been told, it's Taxman, Headcannon and PagodaWest.
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
If WaterMelon can do it (they claim that all of the materials in their carts are new) and make it cost effective then I'm sure that SEGA, Taxman and Headcannon between them could get the job done.
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
@samuelvictor I don't know about you, but I would have paid an extra $60 for an edition that came with an actual working Mega Drive cartridge, not just a cosmetic one. Pier Solar had a Mega Drive release so it wouldn't have been an impossibility.
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
@Whopper744 I almost never purchase special editions but I grabbed the Collector's Edition for PC. I love the Mega Drive cart that comes with it.
Re: First Impressions: Feeling Young Again With Sonic Mania
If someone had told me, aged ten, that one day I would be more excited for a Sonic game than a Mario game, I would have glared at them intensely, but it's true. A strong 2D Sonic interests me far more than another 3D hub-world Sunshine derivative.
I've been looking forward to Mania since that atrocious anniversary celebration and it certainly doesn't look to disappoint. Of course, with Yuji Naka 2.0 (Whitehead) at the helm, the quality should be right up there with the original titles.
Re: DFC Intelligence Believes Nintendo Switch Can Shift 40 Million Units by 2020
@Ralizah 'If the first 12 months are what set a console's reputation in stone, then the 3DS, PS3, and Xbone wouldn't have done nearly as well as they ended up doing. Continued software support and marketing are much more important.'
It's my fault for not using the more concrete 'consumer conception' rather than 'reputation' but you're misunderstanding me. I don't meant that the opinion of a console is set in stone, in the sense of being a net positive or negative, but that the consumer conception of its value proposition tends to remain static after that point. An example is the GCN, whose diminutive physical appearance and relatively innocuous early lineup labelled it a kiddie console and it was never able to alter that conception. The problem at that the Switch faces is that its category conception is in turmoil. Ostensibly it fills the role of being both a home console and a handheld, but the consensus I've seen from gamers is that it's generally viewed as a handheld that is dockable. The problem with is that that conception goes contrary to Nintendo's vested commercial interest. It HAS a portable, a strong one with with at least 12 months more life left in it, while it rather brutally and unceremoniously killed its failed home console, which needs a successor to keep that product category relevant for Nintendo's brand; that's why Nintendo, and especially RFA, is pushing the 'home console first' narrative so hard in during the pre-launch window. The very last thing that Nintendo wants or needs is for the consumer to view the Switch as primarily a handheld because that puts it into direct competition with its current primary handheld, and against the value proposition of the 3DS which, with better battery life, more robust physical construction (clamshell protecting screen and controls), smaller size, lower price, and thousand-game library, the Switch has only novelty and the draw of the triple-A experience (you can look to the Vita for how great a draw that is).
With mobile taking up so much slack in portable gaming, Nintendo cannot afford for 12 - 18 months of lacklustre Switch sales (ex the launch which should be reasonably strong) with the 3DS continuing to bat cleanup because they can't kill it outright. If they have a performance miss during that window, then the Switch remains a 1st party machine only, and we saw what the meant for the Wii U.
Re: DFC Intelligence Believes Nintendo Switch Can Shift 40 Million Units by 2020
@Jessica286 It won't, 'dude', because you don't understand the portable market. Is non-home console gaming an increasing trend in Japan? Yes. Know what else is increasing? The defection rate of Japanese gamers away from dedicated gaming hardware to other mobile devices.
Re: DFC Intelligence Believes Nintendo Switch Can Shift 40 Million Units by 2020
@Mando44646 That would be about 56% over the current unit sales for the XB1.
Re: DFC Intelligence Believes Nintendo Switch Can Shift 40 Million Units by 2020
@Jessica286 Which it won't, at least not during the most important time which is the first 12 months of retail availability. That's when a console's reputation is set in stone, and where an enormous chunk of its total unit sales and profit lifetime comes from.
Re: DFC Intelligence Believes Nintendo Switch Can Shift 40 Million Units by 2020
All of the Kool-Aid drinkers should be well-apprised: this is the same 'analyst' firm that confidently proclaimed that the Wii U would hit 25m units sales lifetime.
http://gimmegimmegames.com/2013/11/dfc-wii-u-lifetime-sales-will-pass-25-million-nintendo-using-right-strategy/
Whoops.
Re: Uncharted And Last Of Us Designer Says Super Mario Run Is One Of His Games Of The Year
Creator of two critically acclaimed non-games says he loves non-games. In other news, sky remains blue.
Re: Review: Super Mario Run (Mobile)
'Game' is rubbish, and it's no more a Mario game that Smash was a FF game just because Cloud was in it. The only convention that remains of Mario is that the player agent jumps. On-rails pseudo-platformer. I would much rather have had a Mario Kart game.
Re: Super Mario Run Will Require a Constant Online Connection
@Azooooz It's nothing to do with the cost, it's to do with increasing frustration with them wanting to look over our shoulders at every moment, because obviously we're all criminals that want nothing more than to rob poor Nintendo (you know, the company from which you've purchased nine versions of eShop SMB because a unified account would mean they miss out on SO MANY multi-dips) by sharing with the world the glory of an INFINITE BLOODY RUNNER.
Re: Super Mario Run Will Require a Constant Online Connection
@TearTheRoofOff Pokemon GO is free-to--play and is a multiplayer, AR game. Mario Run has no functionality to support this necessity and this move by Nintendo is entirely about foisting the cost of securing their IP onto the end-user. If they aren't able to secure their products without having a bar-coded leash being rammed up the posterior of the player, then they need remain on their mediocre hardware where they can continue the well-practiced condescension in a more traditional manner.
Re: Super Mario Run Will Require a Constant Online Connection
The Moto just lost a $10 sale and a trial download. They may own Mario, but they don't own my mobile. Microsoft had to be educated on why persistent internet connections aren't okay. I hope Nintendo gets the same message.
Re: Rumour: GameCube Virtual Console Coming To Nintendo Switch
Only if TTYD is on there. You can get every PM game on the eShop except the best one.
Re: Talking Point: The Nintendo Switch Pitch - A Jack of All Trades
@johnvboy
'The Switch is a smart move by Nintendo imo,their home console sales have been declining generation to generation,and even their handheld market is under fire from tablets and smartphones.
The switch has the ability to reach a much larger audience,you should pretty much guarantee most Wii U owners will be on board,as will a large percentage of 3DS owners,and you also have to consider that the 3DS's glasses free 3D feature has hurt sales a little in the west,the safety warning for 6 year olds and under can be a little off putting for parents,and even though you can turn the 3D feature off you can't always rely on children to do what is good for them.'
You MIGHT (and I mean best case) make the argument for 70 - 80% conversion from Wii U to the Switch (and if you look at Nintendo's console history without the outlier of the Wii, which garnered huge casual audiences that then completely abandoned Nintendo the following generation, resulting in an 87% hardware decline) this has held true since their start:
NES: 62m
SNES: 49m (-21%)
N64: 32m (-35%)
GameCube: 22m (-32%)
Wii U: 13m (-41% vs GC)
Yes, the 3DS has roughly 60m owners (though we can't say legitimately how many of those people are represented in Wii U ownership), but that's not terribly helpful either. One third is in Japan, where they very little interest in a console experience, either at home or on the go, and are defecting to smartphone-based mobile gaming with such speed that in 2016 that 20m accounted for less that one-third of the gaming population in that country. Further at issue is that a sizable portion of the portable gaming population wants nothing to do a machine like the Switch, which is much larger than a typical gaming handheld, is costly and fragile (no built-in screen protector like a 3DS) and will almost certainly have substantially inferior battery life (I would wager a loss of 1 - 1.5 hours of gaming time).
'I can also see a lot of PS4/Xbox One owners buying a switch as a nice addition to their main console,if the machine is priced right and Nintendo keep it supplied with a steady stream of software,this should be far easier as all their development teams will be focused on one format.'
What on Earth would make you think that? Sony already had a powerful handheld and it sold terribly. Nintendo first-party titles? If that were enough to move hardware, the total lifetimes sales of the Wii U wouldn't have been 13m. No, the audience that will be drawn to the Switch is that tiny segment of the population that:
1.) Favours handheld gaming over console
2.) Games portably for extended periods (no 5 - 10 minute Pokemon grinds between bus stops)
3.) Has no interest in the Sony/MS duopolopy hardware but wants SOME third-party support
4.) Doesn't care that their vast 3DS library (which they'll have because they're a portable gamer primarily) is functionally useless on the Switch, meaning they'll have to carry a second handheld to have any great variety of games for the first year.
That's a losing value proposition however you want to slice it.
'Also if Nintendo get the price right the Nintendo switch can be pretty much an impulse buy for the casuals,I think Nintendo may have a massive hit on their hands with this.'
$150 isn't an impulse buy and $250 definitely isn't one. $70 for an NES classic, MAYBE, but even in large cities $250 is a quarter of the rent or two utilities.
Re: Talking Point: The Nintendo Switch Pitch - A Jack of All Trades
@HappyMaskedGuy Perhaps you might desist from calling rightfully-wary detractors of the 'console' brainless just because they disagree with your cheerleading. Then you won't get called on your rubbish.
Re: Talking Point: The Nintendo Switch Pitch - A Jack of All Trades
@HappyMaskedGuy Says the guy shilling for the console safe in a Nintendo fan echo chamber. There's real problems with bucking standards in a mature market; a prospective user has certain expectations, both in profile and aesthetics, and not delivering on them can scuttle your chances before you're even out of the gate. Everyone oohs and aahs and talks a brilliant game about how 'revolutionary' your product is, but when it hits the street, it gets ignored.
Re: Talking Point: The Nintendo Switch Pitch - A Jack of All Trades
@Spoony_Tech Which is what I've argued from the start. In a mature market, where improvement via evolution has become the standard, where there's no excitement to offset limitations, a product is defined by the category in which it has the weakest performance. It's not an advance handheld competing in the console market, it's an once-again-underpowered console attempting to masquerade in the dedicated handheld space where Nintendo already has dominance, in essence competing with itself. It does not have the power for third-party support longevity, no compelling titles beyond Nintendo first party titles, which we know from Wii U sales does not have the draw to move systems. If the leaked MSRP is to be believed, we know that as a handheld it will max out at 3 of dedicated gaming, and will lack the backward compatibility that helped to move the 3DS. To my own eyes, it's not a jack of all trades, it a system that's playing Russian roulette with five chambers filled.
Re: Feature: 25 Essential Wii U Retail Games
Color Splash, you blood shills? Trying to drive up sales of that unmitigated disaster so that you can get that 8/10 rating into a reasonable margin of error?
Re: Back to Bits Series of Animated GIFs Lovingly Celebrates NES-Era Gaming
@PigmaskFan "That is Cranky Kong, during his youth."
That's reconning. Or, as it is more commonly known, bad writing.
Re: EA Executive Clarifies Scope of Nintendo Switch Support, but is Cautious of Its Prospects
Yikes, at least with the Wii U third-party devs waited till the actual launch before they started walking back support. As the furor over the machine dies down, which it was inevitably going to, I expect to see more equivocating like this from others. Based on the technical specs that have been teased or rumoured thus far, as well as the cost, this console will not be a competitor to the PS4, PS4Pro or Scorpio. It MIGHT be to the XBONE is docked mode.
Re: Nintendo Isn't The Only Company Impacted By The Failure Of The Wii U
@yomanation 'That's how cult classics work. Only a few people buy them, so they circlejerk over them for years once they find like minded individuals. It's undeniable that Wii U has some good stuff, so it's not like it has zero merits. It's just nowhere near as good as it should have been. People that praise it in a few years will blow its positives out of proportion and underplay the negatives. That's how it always is. Same could be said for Dreamcast, Beyond Good & Evil, and anything else with a cult following.
For me, Wii U is as close as it ever got for me to abandon Nintendo, and that's saying a lot, because I've been a loyal fan since '90.'
A thousand times this. I loved the Dreamcast, still do, and I recognise that it was a failure in any objective estimation of its performance. Did it have some great titles, even fantastic ones? Yes, absolutely. Was it a failure? It's performance ended SEGA's presence in the hardware market, so that isn't a serious question.
Re: Nintendo Isn't The Only Company Impacted By The Failure Of The Wii U
The gaslighting for this console is so absurd. The console was a failure. The market says so and your beloved tin god has admitted to it as well. If you enjoyed it, great, I'm thrilled for you (and I promise you that isn't sarcasm), but have the good grace to accept fact as fact: in terms of market performance, versus its competitors, versus its predecessors and versus its projected sales internally, the Wii U was a abject failure from start to finish. Full stop.
Re: Reaction: Our Early Thoughts on the Nintendo Switch
Someone should screencap this page and repost it when the $400+ bundle price point is formally announced and people realise that they're going to have to shell out Scorpio/Neo money for a 'console' that has tenuous third-party support and whose primary hardware, which is predicated on having portability as a feature, is subject to the same limited recharge cycle as any tablet and is equally impossible to service.
Re: Paper Mario: Color Splash Makes Modest Japanese Chart Debut
@westman98
And Japan's FW numbers for Color Splash, rather than being simply a case of the Wii U install base limiting the sales, is indicative of the general trend of the series' sales in Japan. As you can see below, the attachment rate in Japan started strong (not surprising given the nation's fondness for RPGs) peaked strongly with TTYD (even higher than the general WW rate of 8.8%), and cratered with SPM and fell down the cellar stairs with SS:
Paper Mario
FW: 118,322
% of LTD: 27.8%
LTD: 425,609
Install Base: 5,540,000
Attachment Rate: 7.68%
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
FW: 137,750
% of LTD: 33.6%
LTD: 409,600
Install Base: 4,040,000
Attachment Rate: 10.14%
Super Paper Mario
FW: 156,055
% of LTD: 30.8%
LTD: 506,298
Install Base: 12,750,000
Attachment Rate: 3.97%
Paper Mario Sticker Star
FW: 130,009
% of LTD: 23%
LTD: 564,823
Install Base: 2,132,0000
Attachment Rate: 2.65%
Using some scratchpad maths, if this title follows suit for Japan, you would expect:
Paper Mario Color Splash
FW: 20,894
% of LTD: SERIES AVG ± STDEV
LTD: 62,634 - 86,065
Install Base: 3,210,000
Attachment Rate: 1.95-2.68%
Which means, at best, it matches SS and slips below 2% attachment at worst. It's not inconceivable that such a performance would serve as the rather ignominious end of the Paper Mario series.
Re: Paper Mario: Color Splash Makes Modest Japanese Chart Debut
@Mahe You can't go by raw sales numbers, you have to go by attachment rate. TTYD 1.91mn on a total of 21.74mn, an attachment rate of 8.8%, as opposed to PM64, which had a rate less than half that at 4.2% (1.37mn/32.93mn). SPM, likewise, had a 4.2% attachment (4.23mn/101.63mn), and Sticker Star had an absymal 3.7% (2.21mn/59.79mn). Still want to argue that its popularity was comparable, when the series popularity shows a demonstrable and entirely unsurprising rise and fall?
Re: Paper Mario: Color Splash Sales Flatten Out Amid a Wave of New Releases
Have there been any actual sales numbers, because the list positioning tells us nothing at all?
As for the game, it's mediocre but mostly fun title that, like Sticker Star and SPM, does not deserve the moniker Paper Mario, as merely a papercraft aesthetic does not a PM title make. In anticipation of the release, I replayed both PM64 and TTYD and I can say, both unequivocally and with utter subjectivity, that its farce of a story does not hold a candle to its forebears. I admit that that has everything to do with Nintendo and IS capturing lightning in a bottle in two successive attempts, but oh well. There's a reason that Godfather Part 3 is so maligned.
Re: Reggie Fils-Aime on Why the Wii U Was Misunderstood
Software sells hardware, it's as simple as that. Quality software is good, but with a platform refresh cycle that is becoming increasingly abbreviated, Nintendo can't generate interest or promote the value proposition of its hardware with an average 8 - 10 first-party main-series titles and a smattering of derivatives each year for four years, not when their competition can offer four times that or more.
Regardless of what the Nintendo supremacists choose to shout into their echo chamber, the company needs third-party support with CONTEMPORARY titles if it wants to gain any sort of traction beyond being the console mistress of perhaps the 5 - 6 million Nintendo consumers that buy into the gospel of hardware integration.
Re: Poll: The Nintendo NX - Where Do You Stand on the Future of Nintendo?
@Moshugan Rubbish, the Wii U wasn't a unique lapse, it was, until this most recent rumour I thought, the culmination of Nintendo's asinine hardware 'innovation' over content philosophy, which I've always attributed to them sulking because third parties didn't feel particularly beholden to them after being held like indentured servants during the third and fourth generations. Nintendo took its ball and said that it didn't need them any longer anyway. Well, those companies took them at their word and rather than eat some crow and decide that a company, even with the richness of IP that it has, can't go it alone, they're doubling down on their nonsense. There's too much fantastic content out there that people want, and they don't want, and increasingly cannot, go to the trouble of having a second console just to get access to it.
Nintendo is now where Mac was in the nineties, and in terms of gaming still is: they have a product built on years of good will and are slowly squandering it. If the NX is just another rabbit-hole descent into Nintendo's fetishism of hardware uniqueness without the internals to carry third party support, I believe thoroughly that the story of the Wii U will be less a fluke and more a happy memory.
Re: Poll: The Nintendo NX - Where Do You Stand on the Future of Nintendo?
@Gerbwmu 'I'm not worried about specs or power, just give me great games for my TV and make it a viable platform so the 3rd parties want to be involved...'
You can have a Wii U-style underpowered semi-portable or you can have have a viable third-party console, but not both. Third-party devs are spoiled now: the three largest platforms are all x86 architecture and the two non-upgradeable platforms are close enough in power that per-game parity is a matter of minor optimisation.
If this truly is the NX, triple-A console-title support will finally and irrevocably disappear, and all that will be left will be a platform for hardware integrationist fanatics and brand enthusiasts with more money that good sense.
Re: Gallery: Let This Awesome Nintendo NX Mock-Up Excite You
@ThanosReXXX I sincerely hope you're right. I want to support Nintendo, but I unequivocally refuse to buy the NX as advertised these past few days. As someone that'll be a father in the near future, my days of buying two or more consoles per generation is gone. The console maker whose hardware will support the greater variety of title will get my money.
Re: Video: Digital Foundry Breaks Down Details on Nintendo NX and Nvidia's Tegra Technology
I wish Nintendo the best of luck in being a third-party software developer when the finally bury their hardware division in 2019/2020. Perhaps they'll do what they should've done years ago and absorbed SEGA whilst they're at it.
in all seriousness, I will not buy another piece of Nintendo hardware that has rubbish third-party support. Absolutely shall not do.
Re: Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition Coming This November, Ships With 30 Games
For the love of God, TAKE MY BLOODY MONEY!
Re: Nintendo NX Has A Core Idea Which Doesn't Just "Follow Advancements In Technology", Claims Miyamoto
@Turbo857
"Ok, there's been this ongoing false misconception about Star Fox Zero's sales that naysayers cling to and report as fact so allow me to clarify for those who want to read facts.
Fact #1: Star Fox Zero had the lowest sales opening of the series.... in Japan (which isn't really news because of the Wii U is Nintendo's worst selling home console and it sells the worst in Japan anyway).
Fact #2: Star Fox Zero made NPD's best sellers list in April.
Fact #3: Star Fox Zero also topped Amazon's best sellers list a week before it was even released.
So please, stop fabricating sales data just because you don't agree with a game's design or controls."
Do you have numbers for it that top the 300k units that I see as of today? 'Cause if you have them, I'd love to see them.
Re: Nintendo NX Has A Core Idea Which Doesn't Just "Follow Advancements In Technology", Claims Miyamoto
@brandonbwii No, I don't think it's dark in the least. Whatever he had to do with the past generation's success or failures, I'm becoming increasingly disinterested in or confident of Miyamoto's input. And I would have retired Satoru Iwata long before his sad passing, and trying to make that dicey statement just because he has since passed is sentimentalist rubbish.
Where Star Fox Zero is concerned, Miyamoto went on record numerous times saying that what prevented them from doing it earlier was that they didn't have a novel control scheme. Not a different story (given that it was the same story as Star Fox and Star Fox 64) but a new way to control the game. One was invented, and we saw the results in the title's sales. The days of 'creativity' being its own virtue need to give way to reality again.
Re: Nintendo NX Has A Core Idea Which Doesn't Just "Follow Advancements In Technology", Claims Miyamoto
Getting very tired of Miyamoto's novel input shenanigans. Just give me a console on-par with its competitors, a normal controller and decent third-party support.
Meanwhile, put His Quirky Majesty out to pasture; trot him out for shareholder meetings or industry shows to bask in the goodwill, and leave it at that.
Re: Review: Mega Man 7 (New 3DS / SNES)
@SpykeKat Same. It had the updated SNES graphics that made X look to terrific, it felt like the most well-matured set of mechanics I encountered in the classic series.
Re: Trademark Listing Adds Fuel to Talk of Nintendo NX Using Cartridges
@whodatninja Even if the NX had an 8x, it would have a max DTR of 36MB/s. A SanDisk EP UHS-1 64GB has a tranfer rate of 95MB/s. What's more, and especially attractive to me, is the prospect of the NX being able to re-write the memory card to include updates and DLC purchases, so that you don't have to rely on likely-defunct servers when you want to replay a game in ten years time.
Re: Round Up: First Mighty No. 9 Reviews Suggest The Wait Hasn't Been Worth It
@TreonsRealm Your defence of this pile of rubbish is to compare it to Star Fox Zero, which sold fewer copies than Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric? Winning strategy there, mate.
I'll be the first to admit that reviewers are sometimes, even often, biased, but you can't argue with sales. SFZ did awful business and I have every reason to believe that MN9 will as well. Not just because of all of the controversy but because it is, at its heart, a Mega Man game. The only gamers that want to play that are old fossils like myself that grew up with it, hardcore platformers, and Dark Souls-loving, arcade-style masochists that are obsessed with mining the outer darkness of the art form.
Re: Talking Point: The Popularity of Nintendo Selects, Updates and DLC Expansions Can Change How We Buy Games
My problem with the DLC/episodic culture is what it means for the attitude of the current dev culture, i.e. use of DLC to justify an initial gaming experience that is generally subpar or the use of episodic content to amortise development cost and in the process essentially telegraphing that the dev is either entirely interested in leeching money steadily or has no confidence at all in the their product.
As a primarily retrogamer, what troubles me about this change in dev culture is how much it reduces the longevity of modern titles and devalues the notion of self-contained and complete entries. Unless a modern games does exceptionally well, in which case one sees the release of a GOTY or 'definitive' edition, then going back to play a great many of the modern Wii U titles with all content intact will be an exercise in frustration if not an outright impossibility. A prime example for me is Hyrule Warriors, which is probably my favourite game of this generation for Nintendo and one of the few games that has done DLC correctly (in that the game as initially released on disc is extremely playable with no sacrifice in content or story resolution). That said, the significant revisions that have occurred to base game (from a mechanics perspective), and the DLC which has added great value and diversity to the gameplay, likely will not be accessible some years down the road. As someone that considers replay potential to be a major part of a title's value, that's an enormous issue.
Re: Shadow Mewtwo's Place in Pokémon Canon Remains Uncertain
Part of me would love to see it but I doubt it'll ever find its way to a main Pokémon title. Weren't Shadow Pokémon limited to Gen III console titles?
Re: Video: Ocarina Of Time's Legendary Master Sword Cutscene Gets A Fan-Made Makeover
@Nicolai "The deku shield is way too shiny, Link's face looks pretty weird, the stitching on the tunic is too noticable, the gleaming from the shiny surfaces (especially Link's charging sword) is way too distracting for gameplay, many of the animations look amateurish (especially during the time traveling scenes), the triforce designs on the ground are so basic-looking, and so on.
But otherwise, I guess it looks pretty. Though it looks like monks must be dusting and polishing the Temple of Time on a daily basis, lol."
I know, right? You expect more from a studio with a multimillion dollar budg...oh, wait.
I would love to see you do something a tenth as impressive. Self-important ponce.
Re: Video: Jessica Chobot Is Samus Aran In This Lavish Fan-Made Metroid Short
A 6'+ blonde with the physique to rock the Zero Suit? Only name that comes to mind is Ireland Baldwin.
Re: It's Official, Hideo Kojima Has Parted Ways With Konami
Does anyone here seriously think that a company as corrupt and combative as Konami didn't foist a NCC on Kojima the last time that he re-upped his contract? Depending on how stringent it is, it could be several years before he'd even be able to do anything, to say nothing of producing a 'spiritual successor' to MGS; I can't begin to imagine the legal hoops to be negotiated on that account.
Re: Rumour: Mega Man Is Starring In A Mega Movie Thanks To The Help Of 20th Century Fox
Hast the entire lexicon of game-based films taught studios nothing?
Re: Speculation Grows That AMD Will Provide the Nintendo NX Processor
@ikki5
Much as I hate to say it, I'm forced to agree. There have been far too many shenaningans with Nintendo this generation for me to commit sight unseen. And my willingness to buy the NX will predicated as much, if not more, on their account system/digital service overhaul as it will the console itself.