EA Sports Developer Calls Wii U 'Crap' and Nintendo 'Walking Dead'
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Nothing at all surprises me about the mixed reaction. Some people are mad because they love Nintendo. Some are mad because they hate EA. But I haven't seen a lot of people mad because they disagree with his message -- because he's speaking the truth. Nintendo's platforms are disappointing and underwhelming. Just do a search for "Nintendo Wii U sales". It's a fact. (Yet at the same time, like Bob says, Nintendo makes great games -- it's strange how that particular comment seems to have been lost in the noise!)
It's hard to tell the truth sometimes, but especially in the games industry. Gamers get emotionally attached (or opposed) to companies, platforms and games more intensely than anything else in life. Any time you say anything about anything you're risking the digital mobs coming out with the pitchforks and the torches.
And we know how mobs always take the time to pause and reflect.
His only mistake is not being Linus Torvalds talking about Nvidia.
On the other side, we have EA, best known for insulting people and lying about DRM, including their ex-customers, who they like to imply are homophobes. They haven't managed anything more inventive than tired Madden retreads and they're best known as a company for having their devs toil away in the EA slave mines, where they make minor stat tweaks to Madden for 26 hours a day.
As a gamer, I know which company has more credibility with me. It's not EA.
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating two different topics. I'm not a fan of EA's DRM schemes any more than you are, but that's just not relevant in this discussion.
Maybe... if they are 3rd party verified. And even then you can skew numbers in whatever direction you like just by allocating promotional budgets.
http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...
It appears that EA is looking only at quarterly revenue and not taking anything else into account. It's exactly what I would expect of them. It's one of the many reasons I mistrust them. People play games to have fun. Dealing with assholes is not fun. If I played EA games, I'd have to deal with EA. So the only winning move is not to play.
Yup, 1889 to be exact. [1]
They made "Hanafuda" cards, which are a very old, traditional set of cards, sometimes used for gambling. Comparing it to poker I think is a somewhat inaccurate yet simultaneously fair comparison [2].
There was nothing factual about any of Bob's comments. Had I been ignorant of his resume I would have assumed that series of tweets came from a teenager; pissed off because he can't play Mario on a machine he and his circle of friends deem sufficiently "adult".
I wish somebody would explain to me what technical sin Nintendo has committed for WiiU to be regarded so poorly by western developers. As far as I can see the machine is more capable than what the competition has available right now.
They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.
This is why the "hey, come work here, we have XBoxes and Playstations" model is crap: You don't get a job to play video games, and people don't hire you do play video games (unless you're a playtester, then you'll play them til you hate them, if you can really call that playing).
/sarcasm
If I had a game company and I had an employee that was not spending at least 25% of their time playing our game and other games and telling me how to make our games better, I'd fire them.
You could say exactly this about most Japanese companies these days. Now what's interesting is that change may be in the air. The current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has managed to line up the incentives correctly in the Japanese government's notoriously intransigent bureaucracy and started massive economic reform (often referred to as "Abenomics"), a topic that is the cover story of this week's issue of The Economist[0,1].
What Abe has done so far cannot create permanent change by itself, but if he is able to follow through on his other goals and make lasting structural reforms to the Japanese economy and society, then we may see an economic resurgence in Japan. That's something that the West should be looking forward to and supporting, given the need for a stronger counterweight in the Asia-Pacific region to China. It was previously believed that India would take this role, but things haven't progressed there as fast as people had hoped a decade ago[2].
0: http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-05-18
1: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21578052-shinzo-abe-s...
2: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21577373-india-will-s...
'Abenomics' is forced inflation (which is drawing more and more concern from the G8 since it's going to become a problem for the rest of the world soon) accompanied by massive public works spending (which was a failed previous LDP platform that they can't seem to get past) that provide absolutely no change, and only work in the short-term, if you can even consider this "working," as it's creating no lasting change.
printing money / pork is obviously easier politically. if there is to be any significant reforms, my guess is it will not kick in until well after the upper house elections.
edit: worryingly the gov appears far more interested in nationalism then economic reforms... so my hopes are not high.
In that culture of consensus, change simply has no chance. I have many friends in Japan, and my fear for them is that their government is even more obstinate than others, despite their situation being even worse. The thing that makes this problem intractable, though, is that their people are the same as people everywhere: They'll swallow the propaganda, they'll believe in the radical, just as long as the radical doesn't require they change their lives.
No one wants to change, and the current administration in Japan knows that. They're playing on it, just as the last administration did, and as the next one will. No one will do anything until it's too late; change is too hard, too expensive, too invasive, too inconvenient.
I hope things work out for Japan. I just really, really worry that if the current political movements go through and amend the constitution in the ways proposed, Japan will go from a traditional and slightly stilted democracy to an oligarchy in all but title, run by reactionary nationalists without their people's interests at heart.
[edit: This is a problem that's playing out in many industrialized nations and will play out in many more; Japan is just seeing more and different parts of it more quickly due to its unique situation.]
One of his standard questions (he's kind of a snarky guy:) "How many of your co-workers should be fired?" He generally gets answers in the range of ten percent. At Nintendo, they were saying "fifty percent."
Damn, even when Atari was screwed up, it wasn't frowned upon to play games. That's /really/ bad.
I dunno. The issue here seems more one of culture-shock than right- or wrong-styles.
I think the problem is that people see "game company" and they think "wacky-and-crazy-everybody-chillin'-in-t-shirts-and-playing-foosball-while-shooting-nerf-guns-at-the-boss-woohoo-caffeine!" American-style game company.
Nintendo isn't like that, and never has been. They're a large Japanese company, and one which has always been sort of conservative and traditional (even by comparison with other Japanese companies).
If you want to work for a wacky-foosball company, then I suppose Nintendo probably isn't for you, but it's pretty clear that good games can be made under either model. Whatever the opinion of some EA dev on the wii-u, and regardless of how "good" the wii-u is, Nintendo has had more influence on the gaming world than EA ever will.
Even the accusation of "bureaucracy" in the original post, which while certainly true—Nintendo is a large company, and large companies tend towards the bureaucratic—seems a bit off the mark. I don't think it's an issue of bureaucracy, I think it's an issue of culture.
I also think first impressions can be somewhat deceiving. I work for a very large Japanese company, which is crazy bureaucratic, and while this can be very annoying, there's also a lot of loyalty and flexibility at the small team level. That sort of thing is hard to see from outside.
In today's multi-platform market, shoehorning a game into a system that's weaker than existing consoles is going to be painful. The fact that Nintendo's market particularly exists just for first-party games doesn't motivate 3rd party devs either.
If one were to develop a modern console game with proper online functionality (multiplayer, leaderboards, dlcs, etc), doing so on Nintendo hardware would require extra efforts. It isn't as easy as getting it done on PSN or XBL. Nintendo's online system needs a much needed overhaul.
Everything about the marketing was just bizarre. I don't know of anyone who has it or even wants it.
If you extend the thinking to the WiiU then you see that because more people are familiar with tablets and touch screens these days, and in fact a huge number of gamers are now on tablet devices. Adding a tablet controller would surely make the WiiU more accessible to non-gamers. You can kind of see some sort of logic there, though it doesn't seem at all inspired or with any foresight.
Remember too that both Sony and Microsoft are pushing their own second screen technologies very hard this generation.
These two scenarios do a lot more damage to the public reputation of the companies. I don't think they can respond in anyway without taking more flak.
This sort of commentary seems to belong in private places to me, what a strange world.
But I think its become very evident that the suits, not the real creative gamers, are now running things at Nintendo. The recent Let's Play debacle where Nintendo monetizes user created YouTube videos is a relatively small example, but its a symptom of a dumb, bureaucratically led company that just doesn't get it.
Most businesses DREAM of getting their customers to make free advertising for them, and Nintendo is going out of their way to stifle any incentive to create that free advertising for what amounts to pennies for a business of that size. That's something that really kills off any goodwill and support that a lot of people had for them. That's just one small example that really illustrates how far gone Nintendo is right now.
PS: While the Wii U has a number of pros and cons, the console's relative lack of power is almost completely irrelevant to how fun the actual games are. That's one criticism from the article that I still argue that most people don't care about. Maybe game developers care about it, but as long as the games are fun most average people don't notice or care.
I didn't even know it existed up to a month or two ago. Add into the mix the fact that Japan is no longer the gaming manufacturing powerhouse it once was and I won't be much surprised if they have rough time ahead of them.
How open are nintendo to indies? Most of the fun stuff happens there and it seems like a natural fit to me.
Absolutely not at all. The only way for joe schmoe indie developer to make games for a nintendo platform is to crack the console and make homebrew games that only work on other cracked consoles.
edit: looks like someone needs to be reminded what the downvote button is for. Everything I said is factually true, and the fact that Nintendo shows "interest" at a convention or allows some of the top selling indie titles onto their platform doesn't change how hostile they are towards the homebrew community.
They generally only take more famous titles IIRC, but saying they hate indies is not true at all, especially with their presence at that conference recently.
They have changed their stance towards indies significantly in the past 12 months.
No one is really friendly with homebrew communities because those communities have a lot of ties to the hackers/crackers that reverse engineer their consoles. Indie devs != homebrew community. There is some crossover but we are talking about 2 different groups.
The 3DS is doing fantastically right now, and the Wii U's getting some heavy hitters very soon. They're not going down for a while.
Who knows if Nintendo can survive ~5 more years with that sales model though as I am pretty sure in 2 years time they will begin to feel the pain from phones and tablets a lot more for the casual gamers that they won over with the Wii.
Look, just because it takes someone with many billion dollars a long time to run out of money doesn't mean they aren't going down.
Obviously any talk of Nintendo being 'dead walking' is nonsense, if their hardware business would turn really sour they could do extremely well by just making games for other companies hardware given that it's their games that is selling their own 'often not particularly stellar compared to the competition' -hardware.
Things like them demanding to get all ad revenue of videos of Nintendo games on Youtube makes me shake my head though, hardly the signal you want to send to fans.
Wii U sales aren't great, they're decent but not great. Almost every console manufacturer makes money through software sales, but when there isn't much successful third party software sales, the investment required to develop for the WiiU can't really justify the pithy returns.
(Have a look at their long term stock price especially since 2008.. ouch!)
The Wii was in a similar situation but got a reprieve via novel controls, but of that generation while countless 360s and PS3 units are still in heavy service, the Nintendo devices gather dust (mine never got unpacked after moving. Non-HD just destroys it in an HD world). The WiiU novelty seems to be a nonstarter. The device has the stench of a serious failure.
Anyways, the U's launch library is admittedly abysmal, but it seems they've finally got their head around online services that don't fail completely. It only took 2.5 console generations, but there you go.
I'd compare it to the early PS3 launch if anything. Critically panned, overpriced, bad launch library.. give it some time, and I've got a good feeling the situation will improve. PS3 turned into one of the better consoles of this generation, despite Sony's best efforts to the contrary.
Also, complaints about underpowered hardware go to the bit bucket, Nintendo has pretty much always lagged behind the cutting edge on tech, any buyer/developer who doesn't understand and expect that at this point in time is not paying attention.
The PS3 succeeded because it could be justified as a superlative blu-ray player, at the perfect time that people started looking for blu-ray players. The WiiU has no such advantage. The WiiU has done dismally in reviews, has little software (and little hope of much to come, given that a growing number of game makers have declared it a non-starter), and is widely anticipated to be destroyed by the soon-to-be-announced next generation of consoles. It is DoA, given that its sole opportunity was a first mover advantage but that didn't pan out.
Also, complaints about underpowered hardware go to the bit bucket
Sure...okay...
Time to calm down.
It isn't EA making the point about the Wii it is a developer at the company. So how is the developer being hypocritical? Furthermore, hypocrisy is taking different positions on similar issues. I'm not sure EA's position is that it is okay they are (hypothetically)a poorly managed company.