Why has Nintendo shifted towards producing underpowered consoles? I used to play the Super Nes when I was a kid, and it was the most powerful console of its generation. The N64, the GameCube, the Wii and subsequent offerings were all underpowered in terms of graphical abilities and raw power after that. I hear people say "But the gameplay is what matters", which I agree with, but my question in the end is "Why can't we have both?".
It is mostly credited to Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy:
"Yokoi articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology". [...] "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product"
Nintendo consoles have always been a bit behind technologically; but I think this became really accentuated with the Wii, which was by design not that far ahead of the Game Cube- when the rest of the industry went full steam ahead fighting on specs.
I think there's a bit of a darker side as well. The Wii was so unbelievably successful, and profitable that it seems to have created a kind of corporate-level of addiction, and subsequent profit-seeking behavior. The Wii was underpowered, quirky, but just happened to hit all of the notes that a ton of people who hadn't played games before (and would later move on to playing on phones and tablets) were looking for.
Most of all, they made a profit per unit sale of the Wii, when the standard at the time was (is?) to sell consoles at a loss and make it up on fees and sales of games. They made profit on the base Wii, then they profited from all of the other shit they made up to sell for it. When the time came to move on from that gold mine to something new, they predictably tried to strike gold a second time.
They didn't.
Now they're trying a third time, and I suspect it will end badly for them. They've increasingly lost sight of what made them great, blinded by the allure of unbelievably quick and vast quantities of hard cash.
Nintendo has a history of doing quirky things, in an effort to differentiate themselves. They've always been innovative.
- Directional Pad (NES)
- Shoulder buttons on controller (SNES)
- third handle on a controller and controllers with expansion slots (N64)
- portable gaming systems (starting with gameboy, which didn't even have a backlit screen)
- subsequent iterations that included: folding designs (SP), Touch screens for interactivity (DS), game sharing (DS), 3D (3DS, designed before 3D was "a thing")
- RFID out-of-game experiences (Amiibos)
- Innovative nunchuck design where moving the controller is an axis of control (Wii)
- A second-screen experience (Wii U)
- ... and these are just the recent/well known innovations. I'm sure I'm missing many (link cable, anyone?)
So, basically, Nintendo has always tried to push the envelope with their consoles. Nintendo isn't interested in making a boring "not-a-pc-i-swear" console.
Nintendo hasn't lost sight of what made them great. In fact, I'd argue that they're still very much on that path. The day we see uninteresting hardware is the day Nintendo has strayed from what made them great.
Power Glove was Mattel, not Nintendo. (Though it was featured heavily in The Wizard, which Nintendo was involved with; and its name evokes Nintendo trademarks from the era like "Nintendo Power" and "Now You're Playing With Power", so lots of people thought it was Nintendo's.)
You can really divide that list into two distinct eras:
Era 1: Nintendo is the head of the pack in software and hardware, and not afraid to try new things.
-NES
-Gameboy
-SNES
-Partly N64
-DS
Transitional period: Gamecube. At this point it's pretty clear that Sony is bringing things to the table that Nintendo is struggling to match. It's not a bad console, the GC, and it ends up being almost laughably affordable, but it's the slowpoke of the gen.
Era 2: Wii->Present.
-The Wii, as you say a pretty quirky and novel take on interfaces. This is the period when Nintendo makes a huge part of the fortune they're sitting on today, and expands to a truly staggering userbase. Traditional Nintendo fans (i.e. people who want Mario and other key franchises) are happy, new gamers are happy, people who want one console are not.
-WiiU, frankly stunk. It didn't do what anyone really wanted it to do, it wasn't as inexpensive and cheaply fun as the Wii or GC. The WiiU tried to be the Wii, and a mainstream console, and it wasn't.
-3DS. Not a bad thing, but I'm yet to meet anyone who really gives a shit about the 3D. Another gimmick that gets forced into things, but ultimately the portable brand is full of such incredibly good games that it doesn't matter.
-Modern portable: ... Fantastic. It's hard to argue against Nintendo's mastery of this aspect of gaming. Underpowered, still too focused on gimmicks instead of perfecting the core experience.
-Amiibo... brilliant business move, it's hard to argue against how happy it made some people, but it was also a manipulative money-grab. It was a case of Nintendo understanding how to maximize a fad, but it brought nothing of value to games.
-"Second Screen Experience"... again, it was something you could work with, but it mostly got in the way of developers and ended up being underwhelming.
Nintendo has lost sight of doing something simple, extremely well. The Gameboy was great because it was just a portable gaming machine, and it kept on that way until two screens and 3D gimmicks, and multiple iterations of largely the same handheld started to muck it up.
Hardware has made Nintendo rich, but it's the software that made them great. Mario as a concept and a game was much better than the NES platform and interface. The more Nintendo has made money on hardware, the more their software has suffered.
Gamecube was the slowpoke of that generation? That sounds wrong. Official specs suggest Dreamcast < PS2 < GC < XBox. But it seems to be generally accepted that XBox specs were a bit overblown and in practice GC and XBox were almost equal in overall real world results. (And the weak PS2 clearly won that round anyway.)
I think that's a good assessment, but Gamecube wasn't a slowpoke. More powerful than PS2 which won the generation. Games looked really good on that system compared to PS2. It really suffered from arriving late, after PS2 had huge momentum. It also had the smaller 1.5GB optical disc that might have held it back.
I'm not really sure I agree. I think the eras you've chosen are pretty contrived.
If the gimmicks that "muck up the same handheld" aren't worth anything, then the vita should have captured a large segment since it had virtually no gimmicks and just solid hardware. Not the case.
Nintendo's portables have added a lot. Please don't tell me that juice is "essentially just water with some flavor gimmicks." yes, everyone is iterating. No, nobody knows what will ultimately pan out and what won't. If you want Mario on PS then say so, but Nintendo is genuinely trying to innovate and think differently. Move and Kinnect are gimmicks. Nintendo will happily devote a generation to do something interesting.
The day Nintendo gives that up and makes an x86 platform running expensive hardware with no "gimmicks" is the day they become a primarily a software developer.
I still can't for the life of me understand why they didn't slap a gps chip on it. I was so hoping that Nintendo would develop the gameplay that will become the standard for AR games.
From what I understand, they can readily afford to make these bets though. If Switch turns out not to be another Wii, but rather a WiiU, that's no sweat to them and they can easily figure something else out.
Shareholders aren't impressed by "our quarterly losses only burned through a tiny portion of our stockpile", though. The pressure on Nintendo to deliver with the Switch is quite high.
The SNES, N64, and the GameCube were not really behind technologically (they were different from their competitors, but not behind). The Wii was the first Nintendo console that was clearly just flat out technically inferior to all of its competitors.
I think the GameCube was actually ahead of the PlayStation 2 and behind the XBox in terms of raw power. But it might have had other limitations that I'm unaware of.
I like this utilitarian perspective and believe it could strike a good content/profitability balance if done correctly. Constantly pushing new hardware specs is what has allowed the novelty of franchises to wear off into tired rehashes with better graphics. So we have to buy new hardware to push the new rendering engine that powers the new Call of Duty game that is ... the same as the previous 3 Call of Duty games, with more realistic 'splosions and faces.
If a company could, and would, pour its resources into a novel concept that leveraged existing, known technology, then I could be pretty happy with that. I don't like having to buy/accumulate more "stuff" but that's what we're being sold.
The closest I've seen Nintendo come to allowing this "Lateral Thinking ..." philosophy was with Xenoblade Chronicles X. Otherwise I've been wholly disappointed with the Wii U and the Wii before it (once the novelty wore off).
The SNES is not underpowered compared to the genesis if you compare them as a whole and not just spec for spec like comparing mhz on a CPU. Console hardware is made for running games and are not general computing devices.
The snes hardware had many hardware supported graphical modes that allowed it to push the envelope without relying on a beefier CPU, the most famous of which is Mode 7 which allowed the pseudo 3d you see in games like F-Zero, the FF world maps, Mario Kart, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG and so on. And then there was this very common practice on SNES to embed coprocessors and DSP on the game cartridge, which is what allowed the graphical effects of Star Fox and Yoshi's Island notably. There was no such practice on the Genesis.
> The list of Super NES enhancement chips demonstrates the overall design plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whereby the console's hardware designers had made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. This standardized selection of chips was available to increase system performance and features for each game cartridge. As increasingly superior chips became available throughout the SNES's vintage market years, this strategy originally provided a cheaper and more versatile way of maintaining the system's market lifespan when compared to Nintendo's option of having included a much more expensive CPU or a more obsolete stock chipset.
As far as graphical capabilities were concerned, the SNES ecosystem was definitely more powerful. By the time Sega considered the idea of extending the Genesis with the 32X it was already too late into the console lifecycle to matter and flopped (very close to the release of the Sega Saturn and 1 to 2 years before the Nintendo 64, depending on your region [NA, EU, JP]).
There was also the Sega CD but all it did is enable a library of not-games pseudo-interactive movies.
I didn't want to state the obvious and be too detailed but yes that's exactly what I meant. And is what people were trying to assess above too: what are the reasons behind Nintendo hardware. And to phrase it again differently, Nintendo tries to be vertical for "entertainment", doesn't really matter how, as long as they achieve quality fun.
Yes, but the Genesis came one year before and had quite a more beefy CPU (even two IIRC). This makes the SNES "processing" power a bit tame in a way. Otherwise I agree, visual and musical capabilities were vastly more important for gamers. Lots of games looked magical on a SNES but rusty on a Genesis.
Define underpowered. It had a slower clock, but supported much more feature wise. You can't just compare clock speed when comparing different architectures. It's more appropriate to compare the entire system. By that account, the SNES was the most advanced console out. Same for the NES. Same for the 64 (which was a joint development with SGI of all things). Even the gamecube had some grunt but was hampered by it's silly disc format and poor development environment.
No, Nintendo didn't decide to go with underpowered hardware until the Wii. Prior to that they were certainly competing with the top tier systems.
But more importantly than the specs war between those two consoles, the Genesis had vastly superior games and catalogue. I had both and the only people I've met who think the SNES > Genesis were people who only had the SNES.
From what I've gathered through the years, I think there's this undertone to Nintendo's strategy around not directly competing with the likes of Sony and Microsoft: companies that tout and create powerful beefy specs that become a one if not the main driver to market their devices effectively.
Nintendo seems to continue, whether they're always successful or not (Wii vs Wii U), to push the company strategy towards make new-ish gaming paradigms and focusing more on the 1st party game quality.
We're also at a period where I feel we can all see the effect of diminishing returns on visual output (i.e. PS4 for a layperson doesn't look orders of magnitude better than PS3 releases later in that device's life), so again Nintendo is looking to differentiate where graphics quality is becoming more of a commodity amongst the major consoles.
Exactly, they have their niche and their own unique games. The scene for the most powerful gaming device is already pretty saturated with the Xbox and Playstation, and let's not forget, the PC.
If anything, the fact that the Gamecube's graphical superiority didn't help it much in the market is what made Nintendo make their shift towards innovations instead of clock cycles.
You can't have both because the market has told Nintendo specifically (via the DS, 3DS, and Wii) that it wants unique experiences, not more pixels.
Well, then Nintendo really learned the wrong lesson from the Gamecube versus the PS2, because the lesson should have been "people want to be able to play DVDs on something that costs that much and hooks up to your TV, and they don't like switching discs to play a game."
Definitely not. The N64 outperformed the PSX, but it was far harder to program for and cartridges were far more expensive than discs. That's where Nintendo's lack of 3rd party support began. The Gamecube and Xbox were about on par with each other, and both outperformed the PS2. But the PS2 had a huge lead time and strong 3rd party momentum from the PSX. The Wii was the shift where Nintendo began to fall behind on horsepower, instead focusing on broad market appeal, lower price points, and less intimidating input methods. The Wii U and Switch are continuing that trend, trying to chase the Wii dragon, but so far not succeeding.
I think there's more to it than that. Matt Leone wrote an amazing Oral History of Final Fantasy 7, published over at Polygon: http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
The switch from N64 to PS is talked about a lot - Square definitely started development for FF7 on the N64 prototype systems before switching over. Hiroshi Kawai, a character programmer for Square, has what I think are the most telling comments:
"I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time."
Kawai has more on the topic, which is fascinating. And the entire piece is just amazing, and I imagine most people on this thread would enjoy reading it.
At the time, this is true. One of the N64's primary limitations was its suboptimal microcode. It wasn't until too late in the console's lifecycle that studios like Factor 5 and Rare really showed its potential with their own custom microcode.
At the time the Playstation pushed more polygons per frame. I remember this debate because Nintendo said that they allowed for larger seamless polygons and said that it produced a better image on the screen.
I think the main difference was textures: on the 64 they ended up being blurrier/flatter and therefore less pixelated. That said, there were definitely PS1 games that looked great and weren't cursed with jaggies (Wipeout, for instance).
Maybe I'm super confused here, but I thought there was no such thing as "higher resolution" when it came to analog TV signals. This was before HDMI/HDTV. Your resolution was whatever NTSC/PAL dictated. Or am I wrong?
The screen resolution is the same but the resolution of the image can change. If a system's output renders to the entire screen then just imagine a 1 pixel output would make the entire screen the same color. 4 pixels could have 4 quadrants of colors. 16x8 pixels would have 128.... etc. The max resolution would be the max resolution of the display. Though a topic of interest may be sub-pixel rendering where a system/font/game can take into account the RGB color pixel layouts in an LCD screen into account in order to improve the visual quality of the max resolution.
So a system can have double the resolution of another and games can even choose to render at different resolutions depending on how intensive it is. Some games will choose lower resolution but more polygons and some might choose higher resolution with fewer polygons, among other choices. There are even modern cases where console games will change the resolution they run at to keep framerates solid https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/forums/6e35355aecdf4fd0ac...
a common criticism of the n64 was that it used cartridges while other consoles of the same era had adopted cd-roms offering much higher capacity. that lead to some games being shorter and/or simplified on the n64 compared to their equivalents on other platforms.
I'd highly suggest reading this discussion from 2000 between Miyamoto, Itoi, and Iwata. It pertains to the cancellation of MOTHER 3 on the N64, which was probably their most ambitious project at the time. It's an enlightening read.
(https://yomuka.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/earthbound-64-cancel...)
It's long, so I'll throw in a few quotes.
>Miyamoto: Game quality was at a point when it caught up with top-tier entertainment, with visuals that had come so far that all we had left was coming up with new ideas for us to express. It was like we gained incredible calvarymen to make an unstoppable army. […] We came in right during that time period. I think we got distracted by the prospect of building up that powerful army and lost sight of how we were going to form our battle strategies.
The following snippet is the highlight. Note that Iwata became the president of Nintendo shortly after, in 2002.
>Iwata: There’s this really strange common sense now that says it takes a huge team of people working with a large scale and a lot of time to create a good game. A good game is supposed to be based on a good idea that’s very fun, even if it’s small. That notion disappeared somewhere along the way, and it’s turned into a battle of who can spend the most time and utilize the most manpower. You could even say that Nintendo needs to take a stand against this.
The result: the adoption of the Blue Ocean strategy.
I'm reminded of a Twitter thread in 2013 by CliffyB, where he talks about the game industry's obsession with inflated budgets (http://www.igameresponsibly.com/2013/06/13/cliff-bleszinski-...). This is what Nintendo sought to avoid with a slower adoption of raw power and instead making more focused games.
The portable screen is just 720p, which is not the end of the world. What I found surprising is that even when it's running Zelda on a full display, it only runs at 900p. I think if it can't do 1080p in 2017, it's fair to call it underpowered.
By that standard, the ps4 and xbox one are also underpowered because some games on those platforms also run sub-1080p. Every game makes performance tradeoffs. Some games on Switch will support 1080p, others will opt for other visual bells and whistles.
Nintendo also sold consoles at a loss. The Wii U was sold at a loss, but they specifically didn't want to do that with the Switch (http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch-...). I believe the original Wii was originally sold at a loss, but it wasn't long before Nintendo got the costs down and got profit on hardware sales.
Nintendo is competing against two competitors with impossibly deep pockets: Sony and Microsoft. They can't do a loss leading razer-and-blades sales model where they lose on the system but make it up on games. Thus every system they sell since the entry of both competitors has to be both profitable and price competitive.
It's not just a costs thing. I have never, ever, ever, ever noticed a loading screen in any Nintendo game in my entire life, which is astounding. Lower-fidelity assets must be partly attributable to this, along with clever design to effectively hide whatever loading screens they do need. I have plenty of time to ponder this curiosity while waiting for Bloodborne and FFXV to load...
I believe this allows them to be more profitable than Xbox/Playstation where they try to squeeze in the best hardware. I also think it aligns well with the younger target audience. The graphics restrictions has also given us some of the more interesting graphics styles in modern Nintendo games.
It's cost thing, but not just at the hardware level. Developing cutting graphics is always more expensive than settling the the level of what your could do 2 years ago.
Since they are not in a race, they prefer investing in other things.
Nintendo can't sell consoles at a loss the same way sony and MS can. You're also forgetting their portable lineup, their portables have always been under powered compared to their competitors.
Nintendo can't really afford to sell hardware at a loss, for years, just to build-up market share, like Sony/MS can. Sony/MS can just do some Excel accounting magic to hide those losses under the giant umbrella of all their other businesses, but Nintendo - they have to make a profit, period.
Also, yes, gameplay is what matters. I have a PS4 Pro/VR combo and I can't say the games are that much more exciting than what I played on the PS3. Is Open World Game XYZ so much more incredible than what Rockstar pulled off with GTAV on the PS3? Eh....
We're plateauing quickly in terms of graphical fidelity. The PS3 was an easy sell, a huge upgrade over the PS2, but the PS4 - not so much. "It's kinda like the PS3, but crisper!" is how I'd describe it to a non-hard-core gamer.
Give me 60 fps and 1080p and I could give a rat's ass about how complicated the shader that renders photo-realistic ear wax in my RPG protagonist's ears is - that's not going to make me shell out another $400.
> Nintendo can't really afford to sell hardware at a loss, for years, just to build-up market share
Not really. It's old but back in 2014 we saw Nintendo could run at a lose for many decades if necessary and still be fine because they were sitting on almost $11 billion in cash [1]. Today I thought I read that it's higher but not sure how to look it up.
> like Sony/MS can. Sony/MS can just do some Excel accounting magic to hide those losses under the giant umbrella of all their other businesses, but Nintendo - they have to make a profit, perio
The PS4 sold for a profit from day one. I'm not sure if the XBox One was similar or not but they're likely making a profit as well.
Selling at a loss isn't as common in the latest generation.
> We're plateauing quickly in terms of graphical fidelity. The PS3 was an easy sell, a huge upgrade over the PS2, but the PS4 - not so much. "It's kinda like the PS3, but crisper!" is how I'd describe it to a non-hard-core gamer.
Problem is you're only thinking in terms of graphical power. The PS4 has easily a better network for online gaming along with a ton of great games. Don't forget about PSVR being a really nice, mid-level entry into the market and is currently the leader as far as all currently released numbers indicate.
Being an easy sell or not is going to depend on the person you're selling to but I wouldn't dismiss the PS4 as just "crisper" than the PS3.
The SNES was extremely underpowered compared to my desktop at that time. A 3 MHz 16 bit CPU in the early mid 90s like I had in my 80s home computer, except it was 1994 not 1984 and I had a 40 mhz 32 bit 386 and was playing with this new "linux" thing I downloaded as a series of floppy disks from a local BBS.
Nintendo hasn't changed, but the console market has, such that their competitors gave up on the console ideal and now ship what amounts to strange desktops with mid grade video cards.
First, PCs were extremely expensive at the time compared to the SNES. Your desktop likely cost $2000 or more I'm guessing.
Second, the graphics co-processors for rendering sprites and tiles in the SNES where much more interesting than what you'd get on a computer of the time.
Commander Keen was the most advanced PC scrolling game back then and it used a severely restricted colour palette compared to the SNES.
That's great.
Except it wasn't until the year 1990 that someone like John Carmack could make a smooth-scrolling 2d platformer that would rival Super Mario Bros in terms of performance.
So yes, please tell me more how an early 1990's PC, without the specialized hardware that consoles had, in the hands of a programmer not-quite-up-to-par in the skills department as John Carmack, would kick the SNES's butt when it came to smooth-scrolling games.
This is usually the point where the Amiga fans come out of the woods to point out that the Amiga was actually the best hardware for gaming at that time.
Why has Nintendo shifted towards producing underpowered consoles? I used to play the Super Nes when I was a kid, and it was the most powerful console of its generation. The N64, the GameCube, the Wii and subsequent offerings were all underpowered in terms of graphical abilities and raw power after that. I hear people say "But the gameplay is what matters", which I agree with, but my question in the end is "Why can't we have both?".
Is it a costs thing?