Where did the Wii go wrong?
- Thread starter Sevre
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Coming in way too late to do this discussion any good: I'd like to say that when the Wii debuted with it's attractively low pricepoint for it's seemingly high amount of features, I was very impressed and willing to buy it ahead of either the 360 or the PS3. Only problem is, when I began waving around my cash, there were no Wiis to be seen.
Here we are 3 years after the fact, Wiis have dropped $0 in price to compete with nobody since it's demand is still so high, and for good reason: It *is* a neat, engaging little device that seems to draw interested smiles from just about everyone you show it to. Thing is, the Wii is a very capable system that continues to expand it's appeal due to the various "gimmicks" it comes up with, WiiFit included.
Gimmicks can be parodied, but their usefulness cannot be denied. More people bought the Wiifit board than people bought Metal Gear Solid 4 (Presumably, I'm not afraid to step on that landmine) and one cost more than the other to buy and took less time to develop. I think that Nintendo's struck a goldmine and their gargantuan success should serve as a viable foundation for competitor's future platform plans... namely, you really *can't* load down a console with features a fraction of your ownership base can truly use and expect EVERYONE to buy into it.
Overtime, the PS3 was *stripped* of it's cool little features, most notably backwards compatibility. The 360, alternatively, improved it's technology and expanded it's online capabilities to include streaming HD videos from the internet: And all the while, worked to make things cheaper (Xbox Live subscriptions direct from Microsoft are now cheaper than they've ever been).
Not saying Wii's free of all mistakes, but it does seem Nintendo is still afraid of committing to a fully-penetrative online experience (Friend codes I view more as a barrier than a safeguard). Fact is, throughout ALL gaming history, there will be *some* people willing to drop serious bucks on a serious console, but damn near 100% of the time they are disappointed by their decision... this harkens back to Sega CD, to Jaguar, to CD-I, to Neo Geo, and even Sega Dreamcast.
Yeah... Dreamcast was pretty much abandoned by the time the PS2 dropped. I still have my Dreamcast and a whole spindle full of pirated games (tee hee).
Anyway. Getting kinda long. Hope this spurs more convo at least.
Here we are 3 years after the fact, Wiis have dropped $0 in price to compete with nobody since it's demand is still so high, and for good reason: It *is* a neat, engaging little device that seems to draw interested smiles from just about everyone you show it to. Thing is, the Wii is a very capable system that continues to expand it's appeal due to the various "gimmicks" it comes up with, WiiFit included.
Gimmicks can be parodied, but their usefulness cannot be denied. More people bought the Wiifit board than people bought Metal Gear Solid 4 (Presumably, I'm not afraid to step on that landmine) and one cost more than the other to buy and took less time to develop. I think that Nintendo's struck a goldmine and their gargantuan success should serve as a viable foundation for competitor's future platform plans... namely, you really *can't* load down a console with features a fraction of your ownership base can truly use and expect EVERYONE to buy into it.
Overtime, the PS3 was *stripped* of it's cool little features, most notably backwards compatibility. The 360, alternatively, improved it's technology and expanded it's online capabilities to include streaming HD videos from the internet: And all the while, worked to make things cheaper (Xbox Live subscriptions direct from Microsoft are now cheaper than they've ever been).
Not saying Wii's free of all mistakes, but it does seem Nintendo is still afraid of committing to a fully-penetrative online experience (Friend codes I view more as a barrier than a safeguard). Fact is, throughout ALL gaming history, there will be *some* people willing to drop serious bucks on a serious console, but damn near 100% of the time they are disappointed by their decision... this harkens back to Sega CD, to Jaguar, to CD-I, to Neo Geo, and even Sega Dreamcast.
Yeah... Dreamcast was pretty much abandoned by the time the PS2 dropped. I still have my Dreamcast and a whole spindle full of pirated games (tee hee).
Anyway. Getting kinda long. Hope this spurs more convo at least.
Hmmm. You've got a scoop here.Mazty said:
Not only is what you're reporting contrary to every reputable news outlet, it's contrary to Sony's own reporting of its losses in 2008.
Seriously! Google 'Sony', '2008', 'losses'. Everybody's taking about how Sony's taking its first loss since 1995.
Little do they know!
If I were you, I'd get the Wall Street Journal on the phone.
I wouldn't say it went "wrong", but rather than focusing on makeing quality games, Nintendo and other third party developers (and this is a generalaty, not saying all Wii games are this way) began to focus on the young child/bored housewife demographic, thusly relying on gimmicks and pretty colors to appeal to the "casual" gamer, therfore leading to a drop in qaulity games,as the "bad" games were already makeing absurd amounts of money.
Tell Sony to read their reports! We've got to stop them before they admit to losses that aren't really there!Mazty said:
Which they are already doing!:
All of this led the Japanese electronics giant to announce today that it was expecting to post its first annual loss in 14 years this spring. Its 2008 fiscal year will end March 31.
Sony said it expected a net loss of $1.7 billion for the year, a stark reversal of the $1.5-billion profit it had initially forecast in October. On an operating basis, Sony today forecast a $2.9-billion loss. It also projected 2008 revenue of $86 billion, 14% lower than its October forecast and down 13% from 2007.
Mazty said:
Really?
But how do we stop Sony from speculating...?!?Mazty said:
Casuals bought the Wii for Wii Sports and Wii Fit. As someone put it on another board I frequent, Nintendo don't as much sell Wiis as they include one in the purchase of every copy of Wii Sports.Mazty said:
So what they need is a new piece of software that utilizes some new function, or otherwise appeals to casuals in ways the Wii1 games don't, and people will quite likely migrate.
Definitely!Mazty said:
If Sony only understood economics they would stop reporting huge losses!
Sony today revealed the results for their third quarter ending December 31, 2008. The company reported a loss of 18 billion yen for the three months period, down from a 236.2 billion yen profit a year earlier. The company's bottom line has been battered by the falling economy, with prices dropping across the board and demand sagging for electronics devices like TVs and digital cameras.
The company's gaming division also took a hit during Q3 2008. Sony Computer Entertainment reported sales of 393.8 billion yen, down nearly a third year-on-year. PS2, PS3 and PSP hardware sales were all down from Q3 2007 to 2.52 million, 4.46 million and 5.08 million units respectively.
While PS3 software sales increased during the same period from a year previous, it was not enough to offset decreased PS2 and PSP software sales. The PS3 sold 40.8 million units of software, up 14.8 million units compared to 2007, while PSP game sales dropped 2.8 million units to 15.5 million and PS2 software plummeted 31.2 million units, down to 29.7 million.
The obvious answer to "where did the Wii go wrong?" would be "nowhere" because it's evidently making Nintendo more money than... oh, any end to that sentence is going to sound like a Yahtzee ripoff and I'm nowhere near enough of a ZP fan to go spouting his quotes all over the place. But you get the picture. Instead, I'll just go with where they went wrong in the pursuit of my money.
I'm naturally suspicious of anything that's massively popular, even more so of things that are massively popular among an unexpected audience, so the Wii hits that particular nail right on the head. However, I could easily put that aside if there was anything to make up for it.
The controls: I'm lazy. I'll happily admit that. If I'm playing a video game (at least, one that doesn't involve flailing on a plastic guitar), I want to be sitting in a chair or laying in bed chilling out. Waving my arms around like I'm swatting flies would not be conducive to the whole chilling thing.
The system itself: Graphics are a minor issue for me, God knows I still play 8-bit and earlier games and enjoy them well enough. I guess the main thing isn't so much an issue as a query. If I were to own a Wii, I'd mainly be in it for the Virtual Console. However, I don't have wireless internet and wouldn't want to pay £20 for a LAN adapter because I don't know whether their online system is accessible on my university's network - Xbox Live is, albeit with issues; PSN certainly isn't. My flatmate has a Wii but I guarantee she wouldn't let me test it even if I bought the adapter because... that's just how she is.
The games: The sheer amount of shovelware crap makes it a genuinely daunting task to find anything of quality to play on the damn thing. As it is, I don't know what games I'd get if someone were to buy me the console tomorrow. I usually state that there's "three or four" games that I want for it, but I'm beginning to suspect I made that up on the spot at some point because I don't have a clue what those games are. Super Mario Galaxy would likely be one of them, though I haven't played or even seen it - I made the mistake of buying a Gamecube just for Mario Sunshine (based on my love of Mario 64) which turned out to be dire, so I'd think twice before doing that again. I've never been a massive Zelda fan, but I'd feel obliged to get Twilight Princess just... because. Trauma Center might be fun, but the DS version almost gave me an aneurysm so maybe not. As per the thing above, I don't know if I'd be able to get Virtual Console games. The only Wii game I look at and think "yup, that'll be genuinely excellent" is Sadness, which is under a permanent question mark and being regarded as vaporware by most sources. Long story short, I don't know what I'd play on it if I had one.
The fans: ...do I really need to explain how fanboys have the effect of putting me off a product?
Having said all that, I'm probably going to end up getting one. Why? I don't know. I really don't. It's like anything that I hate for a while - I'll hate it, then go through a phase of not caring (that's where I am now) and eventually end up getting into it before getting bored and dropping it again. I know I'll end up regretting it after realising there's nothing in it for me and then leaving it unused for countless months before selling it for a ridiculously small amount just to stop it cluttering the place up, just like I did with the Gamecube, but all it'll take is a price drop and I reckon I'll be there buying one.
...blimey, that turned into a bit of a ramble, sorry.
EDIT, 12 hours later because it takes that long for my brain to work: Okami. That was probably the other game that interested me.
I'm naturally suspicious of anything that's massively popular, even more so of things that are massively popular among an unexpected audience, so the Wii hits that particular nail right on the head. However, I could easily put that aside if there was anything to make up for it.
The controls: I'm lazy. I'll happily admit that. If I'm playing a video game (at least, one that doesn't involve flailing on a plastic guitar), I want to be sitting in a chair or laying in bed chilling out. Waving my arms around like I'm swatting flies would not be conducive to the whole chilling thing.
The system itself: Graphics are a minor issue for me, God knows I still play 8-bit and earlier games and enjoy them well enough. I guess the main thing isn't so much an issue as a query. If I were to own a Wii, I'd mainly be in it for the Virtual Console. However, I don't have wireless internet and wouldn't want to pay £20 for a LAN adapter because I don't know whether their online system is accessible on my university's network - Xbox Live is, albeit with issues; PSN certainly isn't. My flatmate has a Wii but I guarantee she wouldn't let me test it even if I bought the adapter because... that's just how she is.
The games: The sheer amount of shovelware crap makes it a genuinely daunting task to find anything of quality to play on the damn thing. As it is, I don't know what games I'd get if someone were to buy me the console tomorrow. I usually state that there's "three or four" games that I want for it, but I'm beginning to suspect I made that up on the spot at some point because I don't have a clue what those games are. Super Mario Galaxy would likely be one of them, though I haven't played or even seen it - I made the mistake of buying a Gamecube just for Mario Sunshine (based on my love of Mario 64) which turned out to be dire, so I'd think twice before doing that again. I've never been a massive Zelda fan, but I'd feel obliged to get Twilight Princess just... because. Trauma Center might be fun, but the DS version almost gave me an aneurysm so maybe not. As per the thing above, I don't know if I'd be able to get Virtual Console games. The only Wii game I look at and think "yup, that'll be genuinely excellent" is Sadness, which is under a permanent question mark and being regarded as vaporware by most sources. Long story short, I don't know what I'd play on it if I had one.
The fans: ...do I really need to explain how fanboys have the effect of putting me off a product?
Having said all that, I'm probably going to end up getting one. Why? I don't know. I really don't. It's like anything that I hate for a while - I'll hate it, then go through a phase of not caring (that's where I am now) and eventually end up getting into it before getting bored and dropping it again. I know I'll end up regretting it after realising there's nothing in it for me and then leaving it unused for countless months before selling it for a ridiculously small amount just to stop it cluttering the place up, just like I did with the Gamecube, but all it'll take is a price drop and I reckon I'll be there buying one.
...blimey, that turned into a bit of a ramble, sorry.
EDIT, 12 hours later because it takes that long for my brain to work: Okami. That was probably the other game that interested me.