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

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

#61

Post by jkestner »

cannam wrote: post #20
dlivingston wrote: post #8

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…

> What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. The Switch is neat and tidy rather than premium exactly, but I do remember the first time I picked up a DS Lite. I was really impressed. The DS Lite (unlike the original DS, DSi, or 3DS) had a double-skinned cover with a thin transparent p…

That's called double shot injection molding. The cheaper Nokia Lumia phones use it to great effect. A bunch of products also use clear plastic with the inside surface painted to get a similar depth effect (think Apple Magic Mouse).

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

#62

Post by umvi »

nicolas_t wrote: post #14
Operyl wrote: post #11

While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all…

That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements... So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's gettin…

Is this why software developers are paid peanuts in Japan?

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

#63

Post by cannam »

jkestner wrote: post #61
cannam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. The Switch is neat and tidy rather than premium exactly, but I do remember the first time I picked up a DS Lite. I was really impressed. The DS Lite (unlike the original DS, DSi, or 3DS) had a double-skinned cover with a thin transparent p…

That's called double shot injection molding. The cheaper Nokia Lumia phones use it to great effect. A bunch of products also use clear plastic with the inside surface painted to get a similar depth effect (think Apple Magic Mouse).

I actually almost mentioned the Nokia phones - the Lumia 620 with its exchangeable double-shot rounded plastic backs (and near-perfect form factor in hand, with a 3.8" screen) may be the nicest phone I've ever used, as a pure physical object, despite being among the cheapest. Pity about the screen though - and, some might argue, what appeared on it, at least in terms of apps.

This sort of design for joy rather than for prestige, reassurance, solidity, sensation of quality engineering, etc is what you hope for from Nintendo. They do have a pretty decent track record at it, and their most successful designs in that respect are also some of their biggest hits.

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

#64

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

risyachka wrote: post #16
dlivingston wrote: post #8

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…

They fully compensate hardware with portability and the most polished titles you can find. Also, their first-party games look better on 720p switch display then like 98% of all games on 4k displays. You can make the best hardware possible, but practically no companies can achieve Nintendo level quality.

I hope you are kidding or you have not played anything outside of Nintendo.

Even some indies look better than the best Nintendo titles.

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

#65

Post by earthboundkid »

nicolas_t wrote: post #14
Operyl wrote: post #11

While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all…

That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements... So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's gettin…

Do you think part of the issue is that computerization of records lagged due to the difficulty of encoding Japanese? When I lived there in the mid-00s, everything was still done on paper AFAICT. By then Unicode sort of existed but was still niche.

On top of that, programming is done in English, which just adds cognitive burden. You could make a Japanese programming language, but those haven't gone anywhere, I think in part because you'd need to convert the characters to kanji as you type and that would take longer than just typing in Roman letters.

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

#66

Post by teruakohatu »

Chazprime wrote: post #59
dlivingston wrote: post #8

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. I'm not sure quality is the issue, all of my old Nintendo consoles still work years later (SNES, GBA SP, Gamecube), they simply seem to eschew cutting-edge (and often less reliable) technology. I've owned four Xbox 360s, three PS1s, two PS2s…

The joycons will unfortunately break with use to the point Nintendo now replaces them for free in the USA outside of warranty if they have stick drift. The joycons are essentially a badly designed disposable part.

If you want to play your switch in a decade buy the Pro controller.

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

#67

Post by ascagnel_ »

CookieMon wrote: post #10
nrp wrote: post #2

“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.” Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latenc…

While it's beside your [good] point - you can do VR with fifty cent lenses and early headsets did, but the lenses in headsets like Oculus are specialised and still evolving.

Oculus also spent a ton of money to source and develop the best 50-cent lenses they could -- it's easier to spread the cost of R&D over many headsets than it is to spread the cost of expensive specialty parts.

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

#68

Post by uncletaco »

bottled_poe wrote: post #40
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 article is a case of rose-coloured glassed. It helps that FLOPS per core has essentially flatlined since 2006. I’m sure Nintendo realise that’s the main reason for the hardware choices. https://www.quora.com/What-makes-CPU-models-increasingly-fas...

They've followed this philosophy since at lea st the first Gameboy though. How do FLOPS essentially flatlining since 2006 account for that?

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

#69

Post by saturdaysaint »

It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.

If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.

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

#70

Post by nikofeyn »

aikinai wrote: post #33
nikofeyn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a lot of complaints about nintendo, but nintendo's only console to be well ahead of their competitors' offerings in terms of hardware was one of their worst competing consoles, in terms of sales. and that's the gamecube. so it hasn't made and doesn't make commercial sense for them to heavily invest in the underlying hardware. ever since the gamecube, and maybe before then, nintendo has been on a divergent path…

Nintendo's game development is the exact opposite of lazy. They spend insane amounts of attention and manpower on the fine details. That's exactly how they keep succeeding despite lower power, poor cloud services, etc.

> They spend insane amounts of attention and manpower on the fine details.

no, they do not. they do on a very focused subset of what they feel the details should be, but they do not broadly apply this attention to fine detail across the entirety of a game. there are always very harsh transitions from "wow, look at this detail" to "what, how did this even make it into the game?" that really stand out.

there is something with every game beyond being considered a feature request that can only be attributed to either laziness or stubbornness or both.

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