by
Published on April 20th, 2013 22:03
Software delays on Wii U may frustrate - but Nintendo knows that its long-term success is built on game quality, not "winning" sales wars
nintendo-europe.com
Of the many and varied approaches to PR which have been attempted by game publishers and platform holders in recent years, few have been quite so successful as Nintendo's now semi-regular "Nintendo Direct" broadcasts. Not only has the content being announced generally been of a very high standard - and particularly pleasing to the Nintendo faithful, of course - the presentation style has helped to humanise Nintendo's executives, making likeable personalities out of people in rules traditionally dismissed as "suits" at other companies. Nintendo now enjoys the unique privilege of a devoted following and guaranteed coverage for its broadcasts, along with a halo effect of likeability around the company as a whole - a superb pay-off for a clever but reasonably straightforward approach to PR.
"The presentation style has helped to humanise Nintendo's executives, making likeable personalities out of suits
This week's Nintendo Direct was no exception. It was light-hearted and likeable, but included plenty of impressive, crowd-pleasing news about 3DS software - most notably the announcement of a sequel to 1991's much-loved Zelda game, Link To The Past. Arriving on top of what's already an extremely impressive pile of software in the 3DS pipeline, it's hard to see how 2013 could be anything but a success for Nintendo's handheld; October's Pokemon titles alone should guarantee a Christmas bonanza for the platform, with the rest of the line-up being the icing on the cake.
Even as the 3DS builds and builds towards a market size which many considered impossible only a couple of years ago (my own take was that 3DS would do well but wouldn't rival the ultimate success of its predecessor, the DS; I stand by that, but it looks increasingly possible that I'll be proved happily wrong), rumblings of discontent abound. Nintendo made clear in advance of this week's broadcast that it was going to be about 3DS software, yet the announcement of new titles for 3DS seemed only to deepen dissatisfaction with the slow pace of launches on the Wii U.
This is a merry-go-round with which we're probably all familiar by now - Nintendo launches a new console, there are several months of slow software launches and title slippages, then finally things seem to get into gear and software starts to pour out of the creative floodgates in Kyoto. Apologies are profuse; next time will be better. Next time, of course, is exactly the same. Recently, Satoru Iwata has been criticised - not unfairly - on the grounds of this pattern. "We'll do better next time!" sounds a lot less credible the fourth or fifth time. For new Wii U owners wondering where Pikmin or The Wonderful 101 are, these pledges certainly sound hollow.
While criticism of any company on the grounds of failing to live up to its promises is completely valid - and it is absolutely not the place of consumers to come up with excuses for multi-billion dollar corporate behemoths - I'm not sure that this specific criticism has legs when it comes to Nintendo, at least from a business perspective. It seems to me that it misses the point of what exactly Nintendo is; what exactly the company does, and where its value lies.
"Nintendo would survive the failure of a console platform. It will not survive a sufficiently serious sullying of the Mario brand"
Certainly, if you look at the Wii U right now, it's not doing well. It's probably overpriced, it's certainly lacking in seriously compelling software and it's not building its installed base at the rate it needs to in order to be a sustainable platform for developers. While the 3DS is going great guns (slower in the west than in Japan, but still by no means doing badly), the Wii U is a dark spot for Nintendo - a product which shows all the hallmarks of potential market failure.
That would be bad. Yet there's something that would be worse - much worse, in fact. Imagine a scenario in which Nintendo, shaken by slow sales of the Wii U, reacted by doing what many commentators seem to demand of them - speeding up the release schedule for Wii U software. I have no doubt that, given sufficiently aggressive management and a sufficiently devil-may-care attitude to bugs and balance issues, Nintendo could pump out a number of really big-name titles on the Wii U before the end of the year - possibly even getting all of its biggest franchises represented on the console. This is hardly blue-sky thinking; nearly every developer has experience of seeing a game they worked on being pushed out unfinished to meet a schedule.
The reason Nintendo, thankfully, doesn't do this is because Nintendo's management understands where the value of its company lies. The "Wii U" brand, or even the "Wii" brand, has only been around for half a decade and probably won't be around for much more than another half-decade, at best. This console generation will only last five years, if things
...
Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita