Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

Post by Jommi » Thu, Apr 09, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

xythian wrote: post #146

Jommi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the biggest not-talked-about factors that has contributed to Nintendo's and Switch's success has been the amount of exclusives, especially in modern times. Looking at the PS4 and XBOX debate, going forward the architectures of these two consoles will be increasingly similar, which is translating to a very low amount of exclusives for each platform. This is harsh as exclusives used to be one of the best…

I don't think architecture has been the driving factor for console exclusives as much as intellectual property. MS and Sony have been in an acquisition war for studios for years in order to lock down exclusive IP. This is a pretty costly enterprise because Sony and MS have to buy and maintain entire companies to produce exclusive IP.

Umm, you should check that thought. The architecture of the main consoles before ps4 and Xbone were insanely different. This is coming from folks in the industry.

The reason they were locking down studios is exactly because of the hard road of making some game for both consoles. You have it backwards.

Post by njwi332 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

polm23 wrote: post #26

taneq wrote: post #5

"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts". In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickba…

The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something. Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word: https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B…

A monolingual dictionary gives 7 definitions. https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8...

I think the one that best applies here is 4 - 技術や製品などが、その登場から十分な時間が経ち、すでに問題点が出尽くし、解決も済んでいる。最先端のものではないが、不測の事態が発生しにくく、安定して動作することを意味する。

This definition is roughly "Enough time has passed since a technology, product, etc, debuted that its flaws are well known, and development has settled. It means it is not cutting edge, unexpected situations (usages) rarely occur/are difficult to create, and the usage is well understood/stabilised."

I tend to see much richer and more precise definitions from a Japanese-Japanese dictionary than from Jisho.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)