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Comment by susanhi | Hacker News Reader

“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.”

Love this. Focuses you without restricting what you’re doing. We have a now 10 year old app/social community that we’ve been trying for several years to grow/innovate. In past years, we focused on growing revenue, which we needed to do to pay the bills. It helped some but not as we expected. Recently we decided to double down on our product, innovating our community and app to try help users. I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Will be putting that into play.

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Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."

> obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

It's a nice way to look at it, but then it's hard to explain why they force-feed Amazon Fire TV Sticks as a poor man's alternative to Chromecasts and prevent Chromecasts from being sold on Amazon at the same time. Costumer focus much?

They are focused on their customers, not Google's.

I bet a huge chunk of their customers is Google users/customers as well.

Also how they force-feed you Prime Video and make you pay extra for it (compared to Prime prices before they launched this) even though you already have other streaming services or generally not interested in it at all.

Not to mention how many consoles are sold by third party and are imports.

I’ve stopped buying expensive electronics on Amazon. It’s too much of a pain to deal with. I will buy cheap junk because at least I am paying for what I’m getting.

> I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users.

Except that when users complained about the WiiU not being fun or remotely interesting, nobody listened at Nintendo and they kept marching to release it as is.

It's nice to have narratives, but when facts don't match it, it's just a nice PR story and nothing more.

Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games.

Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.

> N64

In what universe is the N64 a turd?

(I am asking objectively, not as a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboy.)

I like the N64, but for the sake of argument (from a few different directions, and each one debatable whether it made it a "turd"):

- Sony moved over three times as many Playstations, and there were about 2600 PSX games and 400 N64 ones. In contrast to the previous generation, the SNES handily outsold the Genesis, even with somewhat fewer released games.

- The cartridge format caused problems with production price and storage potential, which disk-based systems didn't have

- It was an overly-complex, difficult-to-program machine

- The 4K of texture cache and other weird design choices really hampered the graphics quality.

Aha. That's the answer I was looking for.

All fair points, all objectively true. Thank you!

In the era of optical media and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, N64 was still using cartriges. They were expensive and offered little space, so a non-trivial amount of hackery was needed to even squeeze a soundtrack there. In fact, all N64 development was arcane magic due to this.

I think if would be a bit of fun to see a revival of cartridges. Though just jam a 250bg ssd in it and bang! big games and no restrictions.

-edit, on second thought, i don't really want to be paying > $150 bucks for the game and the storage medium.

The biggest advantages of using ROM chips were their speed and ease of access. You could just address any data in the ROM space, without caching or transferring anything to RAM, essentially expanding the avaliable memory. Today you are forced to keep the memory hierarchy because the different memory types have different speeds/latencies, so using cartridges would make little sense in any modern system.

The Nintendo Switch uses cartridges.

No, they use solid state disks.

If you want to get technical, it's flash ROM chips; more akin to an SD card than SSD (though the technology between the two isn't far apart these days). But for all intents and purposes Nintendo's Game Cards are cartridges. They're designed in the spririt of cartridges and thusly are often referred to as cartridges.

But they're not cartridges, regardless of how people refer to them. To be a cartridge, as traditionally applied to video games, the ROM must be directly accessible from CPU space (whether completely, or through banking).

They might be designed in the spirit of cartridges, but they load files into RAM from a filesystem, and never access them directly from the storage media. Thus they're fancy SD cards that really, really want to be carts, but aren't.

Cartridges died with the GBA. Unless you count the myriad unlicensed, bootleg, or knockoff consoles that exist with multigame carts.

Edit (30 minutes later): The inherent nature of cartridges also allows direct access to peripheral chips (coprocessors, etc) found in the cartridge in CPU space as well.

You're confusing typical implementation as a technical definition. There's no actual rule which states a "cartridge" has to follow that definition (and in fact some 8bit micro computers with support for cartridges didn't follow your specification).

Given modern systems have a fat OS rather than a thin layer of firmware like the consoles of old, it would but highly illogical to build a cartridge system to the identical specifications of the 70s to mid 90's consoles. But that doesn't diminish the literal definition of the term "cartridge" just because you happen to nitpick the technical implementation.

If we're going to quibble about the definition of cartridge, I'd submit a far more interesting dimension is the ability of a cartridge to extend the console in meaningful ways, in the way that a SNES can not, on its own, run Star Fox.

That new definition covers off the majority of 8 bit micros (to the best of my knowledge) but I believe the CPC 464 Plus (read: not the regular CPC 464 but a later gaming model) couldn't be extended by it's cartridges; and frankly why would you need to as it had its own expansion port in addition to the cartridge slot.

I'd also like to add that I wasn't quibbling over the definition of "cartridge". I understand the term is quite broad but I am happy with that recognised definition even if it isn't a technical description. I know us engineers have a need to describe technology but not everything needs to be jargon.

I was just trying to inject an interesting angle to the discussion, not trying to be precise about what they are. It was an interesting characteristic they had for a while there. Personally I'm satisfied with "if it looks like a cartridge, it is", in which case absolutely yes the Switch uses cartridges.

Even thier "turds" weren't because of a lack of customer focus. Sometimes bad decisions can be made for seemingly right reasons.

> N64

The biggest problem with the N64 vs other consoles of its generation was the lack of a CD-ROM. But carts were specifically picked because Nintendo, at the time, thought they were better for consumers (eg less time spent on loading screens).

> VirtualBoy

This was originally planned as a virtual reality handheld device but as the project progressed different safety concerns were raised (eg what might happen to kids wearing the device in the car during a car crash). This is what lead to the device being crippled to the extent it was.

The Wii U was a failure, yes, but that didn't stop Nintendo from releasing excellent first-party games for it. Besides, Nintendo was able to (relatively) quickly come up with a much cooler and more practical console.

The Wii U was a good console that failed for a lot of reasons that didn't have much to do with the console itself. It had some of the best games Nintendo ever released.

I don't know what kind of response to feedback you expect -- once the console was out, there wasn't really much to do other than try to support it, and once that failed the only reasonable option was to try to quickly develop a successor. That's what they did.

> It had some of the best games Nintendo ever released.

Not really, because most people did not feel they were enough to warranty a purchase of the hardware.

> I don't know what kind of response to feedback you expect

At the first E3 where they unveiled the WiiU to the public something about a year before release the reception was mixed. It should have been a red flag that something was wrong. Nintendo did not listen.

While I do agree the WiiU was a kind of failure, I think not listening too much or being too reactive has served Nintendo so well that I hope they keep doing what they do.

Plus, if not for what they tried with the WiiU, we might never have had the Switch, which feels like an iteration on the same concept (but a much more successful one).

I genuinely believe the Switch is what Nintendo wanted the Wii U to be, but couldn’t pull off at the time.

eFusing to revert their "upgrades" is "pleasantly surprising" their users?

Oh please. Most of us just want to play games and not being able to do unofficial things makes exactly 0 difference.

Won't somebody please think of the disgruntled edge case user who just wants an excuse to be bitter?

Yeah, Nintendo has a few issues with being unwilling to do what's best for business/customers in favour of something 'different' even when the new idea isn't any good and the simple one would work significantly better.

See also how they treated F-Zero, Star Fox, Paper Mario, Donkey Kong in the GameCube era, Chibi Robo, etc. All things which had a perfectly fine formula that would have made for fantastic games if Nintendo did what people expected, yet which ended up commercially failing or being abandoned due to an obsession with the 'new'.

It's nice to try and surprise people, but you have to also ask yourself "Is this new idea any good, or is it being different for the sake of being different?"

Care to share a link? I’m interested in community software and how the market will evolve to serve these groups.

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