NEWSLETTER
FEither for better or for worse, the video game industry is obsessed with novelty. New consoles, new technology and of course new games are what grab the headlines. So it’s easy to overlook one of the oldest gaming companies and underestimate the scale of its success. This month, Nintendo announced its quarterly financial results, saying that the Nintendo Switch is now the third best-selling game console of all time with 122.5 million units sold, behind Sony’s PlayStation 2 (somewhere north of 155 million) and Nintendo’s own DS (154 million). As gamesindustry.biz journalist Christopher Dring he pointed, has surpassed the DS in software sales, selling almost 1 billion games (994 million) compared to 949 million for the DS. TO billion games!
Nintendo is an entertainment company, of course, but it’s also a technology company, and surely one of the most successful technology companies, both in terms of longevity and cultural impact, if not outright market value. However, it has never behaved like a technology company. The tech industry likes continuous disruption and unstoppable growth, while Nintendo likes to experiment with relatively modest hardware for as much fun as possible. The company is years behind in online gaming, where Microsoft’s Xbox took the lead. It stopped competing with PlayStation on the technical specifications of its game consoles back in the 2000s. Rather than join the mobile gaming gold rush of the early 2010s, it waited until 2016 to release its first smartphone games. in partnership with mobile developers, and was rewarded later that year with Pokémon Go.
For the better part of the 17 years I’ve been covering video games, I’ve been reading opinion pieces about how Nintendo is doomed and stuck in the past. And yet it is still here. It doesn’t follow trends and it confounds expectations: I remember sitting in the newsroom of my first journalistic job, watching my colleagues sneer at the unveiling of the motion-controlled Nintendo Wii on the Tokyo game show. of 2005, a console that would go on to break several sales records. Sometimes his experiments end in failure, as with a muddled follow-up to the Wii, the Wii U, in 2012, but when that happens, instead of turning the entire company upside down, firing executives, and revamping his strategy, he simply go ahead and carry on
What is Nintendo’s secret? Aside from a willingness to fail from time to time, and a commitment to keeping hardware costs down so that you make money on every sale (unlike Microsoft and Sony, who lose money on Xbox and PlayStation consoles and make it back on game sales), there’s an obvious answer: their games are a lot of fun and have been since the 1980s. Their game design philosophy has been shrouded in mystery for decades, but when we come to understand what goes on inside their secret headquarters in Kyoto, we see a process that prioritizes fun over anything else.
“Nintendo has been excellent at growing and retaining talent and ensuring the continuity of game design knowledge,” says Chris Kohler, author of Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. “The fact that Nintendo continues to make hardware is extremely important as they can create these great experiences to grow their own ecosystem without having to chase the latest trends.” Kohler also notes the company’s early gaming principles: ‘If you look at Splatoon’tofu prototype‘, you can see that core design philosophy: they get something that’s fun to play, and so Start thinking about the story, characters, visual design, etc. Those skins then feel much more appropriate to the game because they come out organically. of gameplay, but also because no one is trying to turn fun gameplay into pre-existing visual design.”
That fun-first design applies equally to Nintendo hardware and software, fueled by a willingness to take risks; Anyone looking at 30+ years of Mario and Zelda releases and coming to the conclusion that Nintendo is not a maverick company is dead wrong. It has a long history of technological and creative innovation in video games, from the directional pad of the NES to the Wiimote and the worlds and proper 3D movement of the Nintendo 64. A few years ago, it released a nifty piece of software that converts models cardboard into playable tech toys.
At this time, the homogenization and consolidation of the video game industry is a great concern. The increasingly troubled acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, including major mobile developer King, is emblematic of this, along with Chinese gaming giant Tencent, which owns stakes in more than 40 different game studios around the world. , as well as his huge home business. In the last 10 years, games have gotten so expensive to make that trying new things comes at a huge cost to publishers, and glitches are getting harder to absorb. The industry has been stratified into ongoing games that amass user bases in the millions and monetize them for years on one end (hello Fortnite, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, and Destiny) and indie games that are relatively cheap to create on the other. In this climate, Nintendo is a comforting presence, making gaming and consoles not all that different than they always have been.
Nintendo Switch is nearing the end of its life; launched in 2017, its sales projections softening, Nintendo shares tumbling as temperamental investors scramble for the next thing. It’s got one more big game on the horizon: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, out in May, and conventional wisdom suggests a new console is set to be revealed before the year is out. But with Nintendo, you’re never sure what’s going to happen next. It marches at its own pace, rather than the market, or a series of impulsive and ever-changing CEOs, something much of the tech industry could learn from.
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Keza MacDonald is the Games Editor for The Guardian and writes our games newsletter, Pushing Buttons, every Wednesday. Sign up here.
