Are Nintendo in danger of squandering their lead?
The Wii is a success - but Nintendo is a company that has always suffered from complacency.
After enduring a tough few years with the Gamecube - which was the most fun machine of the last generation of consoles - Nintendo now find themselves at the top of the heap with the most fun console of the current generation.
Carefully thought-out innovation has always been at the heart of Nintendo’s philosophy - a high risk strategy that has not always paid off. But Nintendo once again find themselves as market leader, but there are serious questions about where they move from here. Indeed, do Nintendo actually need to do anything, now that they find themselves on the cusp of victory in the current console battle?
The signs, at the moment, point to an emphatic ‘yes’. As is usual with Nintendo, the best games for their machine are coming from them, not third party developers. However, if you go to a local videogame store, there are hundreds of Wii titles on offer – and most of them are abysmal. This is a real shame because, looking longer term, Nintendo need to build on the successes of the Wii and expand their credibility with consumers.
At present, the Wii is in danger of being associated solely as a novelty machine. This has nothing to do with the Wiimote (which was the source of the earliest criticisms of the Wii as a novelty item). The charge of novelty (which is gaining currency) comes from the dwindling quality of the games.
Third party developers have no real incentive to produce expensive games – the profit margins involved are too great to risk experimentation. Nintendo has to counter this by plunging its profits into new development teams, who need to start producing new characters, new types of game. Sure, we love games that feature Mario and Link – but Nintendo need to have other franchises, they need more variety and they need to start producing them quickly to not only lift the number of must-have titles on the machine, but also show third party developers that there is an appetite for innovation in video games.
Now is not a time for complacency. The fact is that Nintendo will experience lean times again – and it was their Intellectual Properties that saved them before.
