The Future of Nintendo, Part 1
With some rumors floating around about a Wii 2, there has naturally been speculation about what the next generation of Nintendo’s console will look like. Here are my thoughts about what Nintendo is probably considering in design
More Competitive Processor:
The gamers don’t care, they don’t see any limitation and we’re loving the low price. But it has been hard to get third party developers to take the Wii seriously with so little power. Developers want to make the next big bad beautiful game and the Wii just doesn’t seem powerful enough to break any molds. Instead of top of the line stuff, third party developers have been dumping drivel for the Wii, and that has made the average rating of Wii games significantly lower than the other consoles.
I’ve got some news for those developers, the Nintendo Wii has had two games so far with unheard of rating, over 97% according to Game Rankings — Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation on the other hand have had a total of zero titles in that category. The Wii is big, bad and beautiful, and developers need to realize that the gold standard in gaming if no longer in how many triangles you can show a second. In fact, there has only been one other game ever — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo
64 — to get such high ratings.
On the other hand, 36% off all Wii titles have failed (gotten a average rating under 60%), while only 23% of Xbox 360 games have failed and only 15% of PS3 games. Why are developers unloading worthless junk onto the Wii? Because they don’t think the Wii is ‘powerful’ enough for grand slam games. They can’t think outside the box of processing power. So, next generation, now that Nintendo has their fans back, I think they’ll be ramping up the power to woo game developers. In the meantime, they have to keep the good games coming so that their fans don’t leave by next generation.
More Robust Online Support:
Nintendo should be commended for their internal Wi-Fi scheme. So far, it is working great and multiplayer games are running smoothly. But the Wii still doesn’t quite manage to pull people into a social network the same way that Xbox Live does. This is partly because Nintendo wants to keep the online area child safe, and also because they are aiming at ‘casual gamers’ and so downplay competition. But with the online gaming industry booming, I expect that they will begin to develop a good social, goal oriented online community. They might even do this for the Wii and not wait until the next generation.
I also think there will be inherent MMO support. Building the infestructure for an MMO is a huge undertaking, and something that most developers can’t devote themselves to. If Nintendo were to do it, and open up the infrastructure to developers, the genre could boom. Given the popularity of MMO games, I think this would be a plus for Nintendo.
