2011 was a year of disappointments in the gaming world. Sure, the industry as a whole made a lot of money and some games broke sales records, as happens every year. But financial success does not equate to quality or contentment. Modern Warfare 3 may have made Activision even more wealth than it already had, but that wealth does not compensate for losing the Hero franchise of games for the company. While the employees of MW3’s design studios are cashing their fat bonus checks, thanks to Activision’s mismanagement the employees of the Hero studios are cashing their unemployment checks. The point is this: the bad things that happened in the industry this year far outweigh the good things.
Let’s use Duke Nukem Forever as a case in point. Here is a game that no one thought would ever see the light. While most games are in development for two or three years, this game was in development for fourteen years. It was first announced in 1997 and when it didn’t appear within a reasonable time frame, most gamers wrote it off as canceled and forgot about it. When Gearbox Software announced that the game was finally being released this year and actually had a working demo to back up their claims, the anticipation was therefore extraordinary. And then the game was released and the end product was . . . less than anticipated, to put it kindly. To be fair, the game was designed last century, and there is fun to be had in playing it, but it cannot stand up to contemporary games, including those made by Gearbox itself. If Duke Nukem Forever had come out in 1997, it would have been an excellent game. As it is, the game turned out to be a bigger disappointment than if it had never come out at all.
But okay, Duke Nukem Forever is a single game and not every game can be a winner. That is in the nature of creative work. For as lackluster as the game is, that poor level of quality is the product of creative missteps, not corporate mismanagement (although its publishing history is a product of such mismanagement). The quality of the game is not an indicator of the industry as a whole, although the disappointment surrounding the game is indicative of the year’s events. To get a sense of the industry as a whole, let’s go back to the example of Activision. The management—and mismanagement—over at Activision found expression in two notable occurrences this year: the killing of the Hero games (Guitar Hero, Band Hero, DJ Hero) and the company’s ugly feud with EA.
Let’s begin with the Hero games. Activision announced that they were killing the games because the music game genre wasn’t selling well anymore and there wasn’t enough demand for those games. It’s a small wonder why there was no demand for those games: Activision glutted the market with them, releasing multiple iterations of the Hero games of successively poor quality. In fact, the company released fourteen games in the Guitar Hero line alone in only five years, each one worse than the last. The problem Activision ran into is one of basic economics: too much supply of poor quality for too little demand. In order to maximize its profits, the company produced shovelware that caused gamers to turn away in disgust.
Speaking of disgust, Activision’s feud with EA took a particularly distasteful turn this year. Leading up to the release of Modern Warfare 3—part of the company’s Call of Duty franchise which has itself received annual iterations—Activision began disparaging EA’s similar game Battlefield 3 in a very public manner, going as far as to seize a website owned by a Battlefield fan that dared to mock Modern Warfare. For its part, EA descended into the muck as well in order to respond to Activision’s attacks. The whole situation was akin to the immature trash talking found in online gaming except writ large for the whole world to see. It was a prime example of why the gaming industry is perceived as an illegitimate pastime for emotionally stunted shut-ins.
These situations make it clear that Activision puts profits before quality or even common decency. Of course, such corporate greed should come as no surprise considering the current state of the U.S.’ economy. After all, it is just such corporate greed that got us into this mess. It is also just such corporate greed that resulted in the industry crash of 1983 and I fear that if this greed is not checked the industry will experience another such crash.
Of course, when reviewing gaming news stories from this year it is impossible to overlook the problems faced by Nintendo and Sony. I’ve discussed Nintendo’s travails in depth elsewhere in this blog, so I will not repeat that here. I will, however, mention their latest mishap regarding Shigeru Miyamoto’s retirement. After he stated in an interview with Wired that he plans to retire from his executive position so as to go back to a more hands-on role in designing games—which is exactly what he should do—Nintendo quickly forced a retraction of that comment, saying that Miyamoto was misinterpreted. Whether he was misinterpreted or not—I think not—Nintendo’s response just reinforced the impression that the company’s executives don’t know what they’re doing.
But the biggest news story in the industry this year was by far the Playstation Network outage in the spring. When hackers stole passwords and, possibly, credit card data from the PSN, Sony was forced to shut down the service so they could rebuild it. Although this event in itself should not have been a big deal, the way Sony bungled the handling of it made it much worse. Not only did they shut down the service for over a month, which deprived its customers of the functionality they were promised when they bought their systems and cost publishers large amounts of money in lost revenue, the company failed to disclose the problem in a timely manner. The resulting impression was of a company that was clueless and irresponsible at best and outright devious at worst. Sony’s initial handling of the situation prompted lawsuits and even a Congressional investigation and rightly so. Although I believe the company redeemed itself in the end by formally apologizing for the fiasco and offering free games and upgrades to its customers, the damage had been done. The company lost a lot of money and, worse, credibility.
So is there a lesson in all of these disappointments? I truly do not know. The game industry is still relatively young and youth is prone to mistakes and indiscretions. However, the industry has been around long enough that such issues should have been outgrown by now. So if there is a lesson for the industry, I think it is this: act your age. If you want to be taken seriously and be viewed as a legitimate business that produces a product of legitimate social value, then stop acting like a drunken frat boy.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Nintendo Should Fail
I love video games. That much should already be evident here. Sure, there are specific games and genres for which I do not care, but I do not begrudge their existence. And yet, somehow, I am rapidly becoming a hater of Nintendo.
How can this be? The Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the Nintendo) forms a significant part of my childhood in a good way. I played that thing for uncountable hours and it represents a keystone in my cultural development. I may not remember the names of my elementary school teachers or nearly anyone with whom I went to school, but I damn well remember the Konami code for Contra and which pipes to take in Super Mario Bros. to get to the bonus coin rooms. And no, I don’t remember these things because I was an asocial shut-in with more games than friends. I was an active kid. Nintendo was just such a huge thing back then.
So how can this affection—nay, love—for Nintendo have turned to such revulsion? I suspect it’s for the same reason that I have come to loathe the once-beloved Star Wars: the creators have tampered with the product to such an extent that they have, in effect, raped my childhood.
My disenchantment with Nintendo began with the Wii. As I’ve documented here, I found the Wii to be an ultimately useless device. It is a game system that, unlike its competitors, only does one thing: play games. This wouldn’t be a problem if there are any games worth playing on the system, but there aren’t. Now, even the Nintendo company itself has officially given up on the Wii and is focusing on their next game platform, the incredibly stupidly named Wii U.
My disgust with Nintendo has only grown over the last year. As I said, the NES was an important piece of my childhood. However, when I became a teenager I outgrew that console and video games as a whole. At the time, games were being marketed as kids’ entertainment, as toys, and they weren’t sophisticated enough to hold my maturing interest. As a result, I missed out on most of Nintendo’s other games and systems after the NES (of course, I played Tetris on the Game Boy, but who didn’t?). It wasn’t until I was in college that I was drawn back into gaming by Sony’s Playstation, a device whose mature games were marketed specifically to adults such as myself. It was at that point that I became the avid gamer that I am today. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to miss the things I had in my youth and so I’ve recently become a part of the retro gaming community, seeking out the older games and systems that I enjoyed—or missed—back in the day.
The point is this: my experience with Nintendo’s game systems other than the NES is not colored by nostalgia. I am able to experience them fresh, warts and all. And let me tell you, there are an awful lot of warts.
Nintendo’s mistakes are legendary. This is the company that released a laughably bloodless version of Mortal Kombat, a game in which the appeal lied in its absurd amounts of gore. This is the company that released the Virtual Boy, a portable device that wasn’t really portable and which automatically paused every fifteen minutes to prevent severe damage to its users’ eyes (you know you’ve made a bad game when the game itself forces you to stop playing it). This is the company that released the N64, a console that used cartridge-based games when CD-ROMs were the industry standard and that had the most frustrating and uncomfortable controller ever devised.
And the hits just keep on coming. Although Nintendo has had great success in the handheld gaming marketplace, let’s not forget that they had to redesign the Game Boy Advance twice because they forgot to include a backlit screen and headphone jack, so the GBA was unplayable unless you were sitting alone and in direct sunlight. The Developers’ System (DS) has gone through four full iterations for various reasons. The current 3DS (which is not actually part of the DS series, despite the name) has experienced significant problems due to being rushed to market before it was ready. It is on the brink of failure for three main reasons: it was overpriced, costing more than a home console; it was released with only a handful of third-party games and no first-party support; and it was designed without a second control stick when modern games require two. Nintendo has tried to rectify the mistakes with the 3DS by cutting the price of it and releasing a control stick add-on, but by doing so in less than six months after the device’s release they have admitted effectively that they don’t know what they’re doing. It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?
And let’s not leave out the colossal turd that is the Wii here. Sure, the Wii was extremely successful for the first few years of its life, consistently outselling every other console by a wide margin. But those days are past. Nobody’s buying the Wii anymore, for two main reasons: a) everyone who wants one has one by now, and b) people who have them—or had them—found out they aren’t worth having. Nintendo’s leaders famously, and correctly, stated that they had done more to bring new people into gaming, but once they had these new people hooked Nintendo did nothing to hold onto them. The vast majority of the Wii’s games were directed only at novice gamers, so once those gamers became more experienced and savvy they graduated to the more mature hardware, just as I went from my NES to my Playstation.
Why has Nintendo sabotaged itself in this way? Why didn’t the company encourage making more sophisticated games for the Wii? Quite simply, it couldn’t; the Wii’s hardware limitations prohibit it. In order to keep the console’s cost low—and thus more appealing to new gamers—the Wii has a smaller memory capacity and less processing power than the other consoles of this generation. The result is a console that cannot support online multiplayer gaming, that has no multimedia capabilities (no CD or DVD playing allowed) and that outputs only in standard definition when HD is the norm in both the game and television industries. The hardware limitations constrain game developers, putting them in the position of having to choose between making games for one limited console with limited appeal or making games that can be released on multiple consoles with wider appeal. That’s not a difficult choice to make.
Looking at Nintendo’s history as a video game company has revealed that its success owes more to dumb luck than to business savvy. With all of the costly missteps the company’s made over the years it’s a wonder they’re still in business. Which begs the question: should they still be in business? I don’t think so, and the way things are going for them they won’t be in business much longer. Their decision to jumpstart sales of the 3DS by slashing $80 off the price less than six months after its release has served to alienate the company’s fans and customers. Nintendo tried to offset the damage by giving free games to the 3DS’ early adopters before the price cut took effect, but that plan backfired when retailers dropped the price early, allowing anyone who bought the 3DS at any price to receive the free games. Oops. Nintendo has driven its fan base even further away by ending its support for the Wii this year and releasing the Wii U in 2012. The company claims that the Wii U represents the next generation of gaming and that the company has a headstart on its competitors, but in truth the specs released so far show that the Wii U is really the current generation console that the Wii should have been and that the competitors are really years ahead of Nintendo. Oops again.
The future looks dim for Nintendo as a hardware company. So what is the company to do if it is to survive? The answer is simple: Nintendo needs to follow the lead of Sega and get out of the hardware business and focus instead on making games. After all, making really good games is what Nintendo has always done really well. I mean, come on! The company’s general manager of development, Shigeru Miyamoto, is the creator of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda! He should be making games, not running an office. The company needs to capitalize on its assets and do what it does best. But so far the leaders of the company have refused to do that. The company’s shareholders have repeatedly called upon its leaders to make games for other, non-Nintendo platforms, notably cell phones and tablet computers. However, those leaders have steadfastly refused to do so. The company’s position has been that Nintendo games will only be made for Nintendo systems. This is yet another costly mistake on Nintendo’s part, the final mistake that I fear will be their undoing. And that is why Nintendo should fail. A company this stupid deserves it.
How can this be? The Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the Nintendo) forms a significant part of my childhood in a good way. I played that thing for uncountable hours and it represents a keystone in my cultural development. I may not remember the names of my elementary school teachers or nearly anyone with whom I went to school, but I damn well remember the Konami code for Contra and which pipes to take in Super Mario Bros. to get to the bonus coin rooms. And no, I don’t remember these things because I was an asocial shut-in with more games than friends. I was an active kid. Nintendo was just such a huge thing back then.
So how can this affection—nay, love—for Nintendo have turned to such revulsion? I suspect it’s for the same reason that I have come to loathe the once-beloved Star Wars: the creators have tampered with the product to such an extent that they have, in effect, raped my childhood.
My disenchantment with Nintendo began with the Wii. As I’ve documented here, I found the Wii to be an ultimately useless device. It is a game system that, unlike its competitors, only does one thing: play games. This wouldn’t be a problem if there are any games worth playing on the system, but there aren’t. Now, even the Nintendo company itself has officially given up on the Wii and is focusing on their next game platform, the incredibly stupidly named Wii U.
My disgust with Nintendo has only grown over the last year. As I said, the NES was an important piece of my childhood. However, when I became a teenager I outgrew that console and video games as a whole. At the time, games were being marketed as kids’ entertainment, as toys, and they weren’t sophisticated enough to hold my maturing interest. As a result, I missed out on most of Nintendo’s other games and systems after the NES (of course, I played Tetris on the Game Boy, but who didn’t?). It wasn’t until I was in college that I was drawn back into gaming by Sony’s Playstation, a device whose mature games were marketed specifically to adults such as myself. It was at that point that I became the avid gamer that I am today. As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to miss the things I had in my youth and so I’ve recently become a part of the retro gaming community, seeking out the older games and systems that I enjoyed—or missed—back in the day.
The point is this: my experience with Nintendo’s game systems other than the NES is not colored by nostalgia. I am able to experience them fresh, warts and all. And let me tell you, there are an awful lot of warts.
Nintendo’s mistakes are legendary. This is the company that released a laughably bloodless version of Mortal Kombat, a game in which the appeal lied in its absurd amounts of gore. This is the company that released the Virtual Boy, a portable device that wasn’t really portable and which automatically paused every fifteen minutes to prevent severe damage to its users’ eyes (you know you’ve made a bad game when the game itself forces you to stop playing it). This is the company that released the N64, a console that used cartridge-based games when CD-ROMs were the industry standard and that had the most frustrating and uncomfortable controller ever devised.
And the hits just keep on coming. Although Nintendo has had great success in the handheld gaming marketplace, let’s not forget that they had to redesign the Game Boy Advance twice because they forgot to include a backlit screen and headphone jack, so the GBA was unplayable unless you were sitting alone and in direct sunlight. The Developers’ System (DS) has gone through four full iterations for various reasons. The current 3DS (which is not actually part of the DS series, despite the name) has experienced significant problems due to being rushed to market before it was ready. It is on the brink of failure for three main reasons: it was overpriced, costing more than a home console; it was released with only a handful of third-party games and no first-party support; and it was designed without a second control stick when modern games require two. Nintendo has tried to rectify the mistakes with the 3DS by cutting the price of it and releasing a control stick add-on, but by doing so in less than six months after the device’s release they have admitted effectively that they don’t know what they’re doing. It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?
And let’s not leave out the colossal turd that is the Wii here. Sure, the Wii was extremely successful for the first few years of its life, consistently outselling every other console by a wide margin. But those days are past. Nobody’s buying the Wii anymore, for two main reasons: a) everyone who wants one has one by now, and b) people who have them—or had them—found out they aren’t worth having. Nintendo’s leaders famously, and correctly, stated that they had done more to bring new people into gaming, but once they had these new people hooked Nintendo did nothing to hold onto them. The vast majority of the Wii’s games were directed only at novice gamers, so once those gamers became more experienced and savvy they graduated to the more mature hardware, just as I went from my NES to my Playstation.
Why has Nintendo sabotaged itself in this way? Why didn’t the company encourage making more sophisticated games for the Wii? Quite simply, it couldn’t; the Wii’s hardware limitations prohibit it. In order to keep the console’s cost low—and thus more appealing to new gamers—the Wii has a smaller memory capacity and less processing power than the other consoles of this generation. The result is a console that cannot support online multiplayer gaming, that has no multimedia capabilities (no CD or DVD playing allowed) and that outputs only in standard definition when HD is the norm in both the game and television industries. The hardware limitations constrain game developers, putting them in the position of having to choose between making games for one limited console with limited appeal or making games that can be released on multiple consoles with wider appeal. That’s not a difficult choice to make.
Looking at Nintendo’s history as a video game company has revealed that its success owes more to dumb luck than to business savvy. With all of the costly missteps the company’s made over the years it’s a wonder they’re still in business. Which begs the question: should they still be in business? I don’t think so, and the way things are going for them they won’t be in business much longer. Their decision to jumpstart sales of the 3DS by slashing $80 off the price less than six months after its release has served to alienate the company’s fans and customers. Nintendo tried to offset the damage by giving free games to the 3DS’ early adopters before the price cut took effect, but that plan backfired when retailers dropped the price early, allowing anyone who bought the 3DS at any price to receive the free games. Oops. Nintendo has driven its fan base even further away by ending its support for the Wii this year and releasing the Wii U in 2012. The company claims that the Wii U represents the next generation of gaming and that the company has a headstart on its competitors, but in truth the specs released so far show that the Wii U is really the current generation console that the Wii should have been and that the competitors are really years ahead of Nintendo. Oops again.
The future looks dim for Nintendo as a hardware company. So what is the company to do if it is to survive? The answer is simple: Nintendo needs to follow the lead of Sega and get out of the hardware business and focus instead on making games. After all, making really good games is what Nintendo has always done really well. I mean, come on! The company’s general manager of development, Shigeru Miyamoto, is the creator of Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda! He should be making games, not running an office. The company needs to capitalize on its assets and do what it does best. But so far the leaders of the company have refused to do that. The company’s shareholders have repeatedly called upon its leaders to make games for other, non-Nintendo platforms, notably cell phones and tablet computers. However, those leaders have steadfastly refused to do so. The company’s position has been that Nintendo games will only be made for Nintendo systems. This is yet another costly mistake on Nintendo’s part, the final mistake that I fear will be their undoing. And that is why Nintendo should fail. A company this stupid deserves it.
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