Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival

theatlantic.com

40 pointsmimbs38 comments

I don't understand everyone's response to literally everything Nintendo does ever.

The stock drops like 15% in a weekend, because Super Mario Run came out and made a ton of money...? It's got numbers comparable to Pokemon Go, which tripled Nintendo's stock price and Nintendo only owns 1/3 of Pokemon, but Run brings it down? And it's not even on Android, which makes up what, 80% of all mobile devices? (I know, not in the US, but still...)

It's like someone writes an article about how gamers don't like a specific design decision, and all of a sudden Nintendo is about to go out of business?

Nobody talks about Nintendo's successes, like Pokemon Sun/Moon kicking ass, Amiibo still selling like hotcakes, the Switch coming out with tons of first and third party support, game sellers and game makers endorsing the Switch as something awesome. Who was the king of the last console wars? Pretty sure it was the Wii.

Can you even name a famous video game character, other than Sonic, who isn't a Nintendo brand? Can your kids?

Enough of this bullshit. Nintendo isn't going anywhere.

That's just the way it is: The title of articles are misleading clickbait.

> Can you even name a famous video game character, other than Sonic, who isn't a Nintendo brand?

Master Chief (Halo). Lara Croft (Tomb Raider). Duke Nukem. Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII). Solid Snake (Metal Gear).

there are a few. I could go on. a lot of extremely famous/popular game franchises don't stick with a single iconic character though. Assassin's Creed is a good example. The archetype is consistent but it's a different character in each game. A lot of games are like this. Nintendo has pursued a branding strategy based around a handful of "mascot" characters (Mario, Link, Samus, Donkey Kong) but it's not like those are the only famous video game characters around.

Maybe that's what you're pointing out though? Besides Sonic (which was Sega's attempt to make a Nintendo style mascot character) most other game developers don't use mascots. That's true. They generally don't. The games themselves are still incredibly well known and popular though.

Master Chief and Cloud Strife? Honest question, perhaps I'm missing the intended meaning of iconic.

maybe its generational. I'm a 90s kid. Cloud Strife was an icon in my childhood.

I am too, but in fairness my circle of friends was not especially 'into' JRPGs until the release of Final Fantasy 9. Maybe we're outliers, but Cloud did not resonate a whole lot with us.

Those were provided as examples of "famous" Non-Nintendo characters. "Iconic" is a higher bar to reach. So, I might argue that those characters are famous, but not iconic.

Lara Croft is the only one my spouse could name. My spouse teaches a university class on video game narrative.

I'm confused, Lara Croft is the only non-Nintendo video game character your spouse knows? But they teach a class on video games? I'm not trying to be insulting, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something.

Edit: I guess OP said "famous" characters, as in generally known by non-gamers, and that makes lots more sense

Pac-man!

Nintendo is extremely conservative fiscally and will have no trouble surviving purely from a corporation point of view.

In my opinion, their largest threat is a new generation that does not know who their characters are. Mario has a ridiculous level of nostalgia for me as someone in his early 30's, but who knows if my son will have anything close to that.

Disney solved this problem through a literally awe-some multi-channel strategy combining movies, both new and re-releases on latest platforms, theme parks, video games, TV shows, toys, etc. My nieces are very familiar with Cinderella and Snow White, who is as old as my grandma, but their brother probably doesn't know who Yoshi is.

I think the trick is to ride the generational wave. Again, something Disney excels at. A young mother takes her daughter to see the live-action Cinderella movie because of the nostalgia she has for the character, which she in turn got when her mother bought the VHS for her because of the nostalgia she had from seeing it in the theater as a little girl...

There is a limited window of opportunity that Nintendo has. Personally I would love to share Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Link, etc. experiences with my son vs. random new IPs that mean nothing to me.

Speaking of Disney, the Nintendo catalogue is one of the few remaining significant cast of characters not owned by Disney. If Nintendo does hit dire straits and I were Disney, I would aggressively try to bring them into the fold, although it is extremely unlikely Nintendo would capitulate.

Doesn't Nintendo do the same thing? Sure, they don't have the same "multi-channel" platform as Disney, (does anyone?). But they've been releasing Mario games steadily for 30 years. If someone doesn't know mario, it's only because they arent involved in video games at all.

> they don't have the same "multi-channel" platform as Disney, (does anyone?)

On a smaller scale: Studio 100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_100

This author woke up on the wrong side of the bed before writing this article. If Nintendo can achieve $4M in mobile sales in 1 day as it did with Super Mario Run -- does it really matter if the company is conservative or revolutionary?

See: Hollywood in recent years and its constant need to do sequels because they guarantee a successful and profitable venture.

I bought Mario Run, but, subjectively, it doesn't feel like a success. This article captures the nebulous subjective experience fairly well. We don't need a thinkpiece to cover the sales numbers - those are obvious.

Talking about the Classic NES system that was recently released: "It’s possible Nintendo limited stock to create a bottleneck, and thereby a holiday phenomenon. But more likely, the company just didn’t anticipate demand for an official re-release of its three-decade old flagship."

Isn't it kinda Nintendo's thing to bottleneck their consoles? Does anyone else remember having to wait in huge lines to get a Wii? The Switch will likely have the same "issue"

Nintendo does lowball console production, but the Wii is a bit of an abnormality. At one point it was selling more than the Xbox 360 and PS3 put together.

This is actually an old accusation of Nintendo going back to the original NES and it's cartridges.

The truth then (and likey today) was that demand is hard to calculate and supply costs money. Nintendo I'm sure greatly underestimated the demand for NES Mini convincing themselves that 'nobody wants to play classic games today but what people actually want is new games with our characters and bits of nostalgia put in'.

They were wrong of course as evident by NES Mini sales versus that of Wii U sales.

Nobody accurately forecasted the Wii's popularity. Nintendo would have been insane to actually make as many consoles as they ended up needing.

Nintendo's released a lot of products and while not having enough supply is annoying, dramatic oversupply can be catastrophic.

Nintendo actually has a very sizable war chest. I don't think they are struggling for survival at all.

Although Nintendo doom and gloom has been a popular theme for many years I'm a little surprised to see it here.

I had the same thought as you and I did a quick search, the results of which are behind my company's firewall.

I think Nintendo can lose up to $250 million a year until the year 2052... so not too sure if they are struggling for survival like the title claims.

This is my thought as well. Don't think of Nintendo as a technology company, think of them as an Intellectual Property company. With Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pokemon, Metroid, etc, as their commodities. These will be money makers for decades, regardless of where the platforms go.

Honestly I read this as the Atlantic's sad struggle for survival.

I once considered a print subscription since their writing quality was high and they weren't as high brow add the New Yorker, but a lot of their output over the past few years had been embarrassingly desperate.

> I once considered a print subscription since their writing quality was high and they weren't as high brow add the New Yorker, but a lot of their output over the past few years had been embarrassingly desperate.

This was written by Ian Bogost. He's not an industry outsider, he knows his stuff.

>Facing an uncertain future, the company keeps trying to mine its storied past.

You mean like virtually every software company on the planet? Or storylines or characters from franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel/DC et al.

Give me a break. It's called working a series of franchises that people like.

After being a long-time fan of the original Wii, I was a late adopter of the Wii U about a year ago. By then, most of the system exclusives had rolled out but if you weren't into Mario, there wasn't a whole lot to do except buy emulated games and the few indie games that made it over. The main hope was that the new Zelda would be released on the Wii U -- and it is (as far as we know) -- but only after Nintendo releases its new system, the Switch. I guess I didn't invest much in the Wii U so I don't have as much room to complain as the early adopters, but it really felt like Nintendo bungled as much as they could. Not just in the overall system design, but in not providing enough first-party games to make up for the lack of AAA titles from third-party developers.

What's been shown about the Switch so far looks pretty tepid. Its clumsy publishing of Mario Run doesn't give much faith that Nintendo has improved since the days of the Wii U rollout [0]. I recently got a PS4 to try out its VR and think I'll be sitting out the Switch as I don't need a console for portable gaming in my life. Hoping Nintendo regroups in the VR age though, which will seem ripe in 5-6 years for a Wii-like system to dominate.

[0] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret...

Nintendo's first party output has been split between the 3DS and the Wii U, and it's been a been a bit sparse on each. Individually, the platforms has a few really great games. Combined, they have one of the best libraries this console generation. With most of Nintendo's effort focused on a single platform, the hope is that their output on the Switch will be significantly more frequent.

Development for the Wii U has reportedly been needlessly difficult. That much is true, but I'm not clear as to what that has to do with the purportedly 'clumsy' Mario Run release (which earned them 14m USD in the past three days[0]).

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/20/super-mario-run-sees-37-mi...

Mario run made 5 million in the first day, but it's a failure. And somehow the success of the NES classic means Nintendo is failing as well, because people are only buying it for aesthetics, not to play the games (source on that anyone?). WTF am I reading, this article is so delusional. If you don't like Nintendo or their strategies, that's fine, but they've kind of been knocking it out of the park lately compared to the last few years, it's a strange time to be saying they're doomed.

In an article about "Nintendo’s Sad Struggle for Survival", no mention of the Switch (and four paragraphs dedicated to CliffyB because...)?

The lack of Switch mentions raised my eyebrow as well. This article is right in the micro sense but omits two crucial facts:

* The Switch is a giant question mark that could be good * Nintendo is sitting on a lot of money. That money and fan goodwill means it has the time to figure out its future.

It's also worth noting that they've been active since the 19th century and have successfully pivoted twice, so I feel pretty confident about their chances.

Nor any mention of Pokemon Sun and Moon's record breaking launch: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2016/11/30/pokemon-sun-...

wtf even is this? the author literally refuses to accept that Nintendo has their own vision for their product line and isn't simply trying to do exactly the same thing Microsoft and Sony are doing.

it's such a bizarre and distorted premise to write the article from that I can't help but wonder if it's a plant.

Journalism's sad struggle for relevance.

Nintendo is leveraging their IPs in a relatively monolithic fashion, and I'm not sure why. They need to allow their different IPs to express individuality, and certain franchises certainly need more games, good and bad.

They also need to stop hand-holding gamers. Nintendo Hard doesn't exist anymore.

I think they kind of respect their own franchises, trying hard not to destroy their fame for quality, improving on them only if they have something novel to introduce in the series or a new way to do a particular game, like non-linear dungeon order on Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, or a 3D Metroid when they did Prime, etc.

They don't make the same game in different clothing just because they can. And their games generally age well.

A different approach when compared to most game makers nowadays, surely. But one I can definitely respect.

That implies that video games in general have not become significantly easier since the days of the (S)NES.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com