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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)

#71

Post by RookyNumbas »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

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…

That insight happened 30 years ago. Nintendo's best selling consoles and games have always been portable systems.

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

#72

Post by nikofeyn »

huffmsa wrote: post #23
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…

> pure laziness in game development Ah you're one of those "how do they keep getting away with making more Mario games?" people. The secret is that they don't release mainline games very often. You don't get a new one every year. You get one every 3-4 (or Metroid 6-10) years. And when you do get a new installment it's just as fun and joyful as the previous ones. They do need to get their shit in gear with the online…

> Ah you're one of those "how do they keep getting away with making more Mario games?" people.

no, i'm not. that's not what i'm talking about at all. what i'm talking about are poor features within their games, which are typically centered around the online and multiplayer aspects but also others as well. for example, the new animal crossing: new horizons is chock-full of these types of things. their games are indeed fun but they can also contain extremely frustrating elements. nintendo's fanbase is even more rabid than the likes of apple, and so frustrating elements get washed out, so to speak, in the community.

and as you point out, these games undergo long development cycles. it's generally unacceptable that they don't take care of these issues or add on more to their games.

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

#73

Post by karatestomp »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

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…

I don't care for portable gaming, but Nintendo's portables since the Gameboy Advance have had libraries in many respects better than any contemporary console. Some portion of their success is surely because of the library, and despite their portability (though, yes, many value the portability, I'm sure). I don't know how the controls would work but I'd love something like the Playstation TV (a stripped-down Vita that plugs into a TV and uses Playstation 3 or 4 controllers) for the GBA-3DS libraries (yeah I know about the add-on for the gamecube but that's just the GBA, plugging in non-HDMI devices is getting increasingly inconvenient, and Gamecube-era hardware's starting to get pretty janky)

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

#74

Post by haberman »

Kaiyou wrote: post #42
huffmsa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pure laziness in game development Ah you're one of those "how do they keep getting away with making more Mario games?" people. The secret is that they don't release mainline games very often. You don't get a new one every year. You get one every 3-4 (or Metroid 6-10) years. And when you do get a new installment it's just as fun and joyful as the previous ones. They do need to get their shit in gear with the online…

When was the last Metroid game that is "just as fun and joyful as the previous ones"? Metroid has had a tough 20 years or so. Last I checked Nintendo released a poorer version of a remake some fan released a year earlier.

I genuinely enjoyed Other M. I've always preferred the third-person platformer style for the franchise (Super Metroid is still the best installment in the series) and I thought Other M was faithful to this heritage while adding some more modern twists.

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

#75

Post by MegaDeKay »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

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…

I can't see Sony getting back into portables after seeing how they let the Vita wither on the vine and die. It was a very powerful system for its time and did decently faithful renditions of games running on consoles of the time. It is really too bad: the Vita is great. I just bought one a short while back now that it has been hacked wide open. With an affordable SDCard & adapter in place of Sony's proprietary and expensive memory cards, the Vita is an emulation powerhouse on top of all the original content made for it.

Nintendo's portable efforts have been honed since the Gameboy. The content really helps sell those handhelds and keeps people glued to them. Games like Animal Crossing ("Gotta play every day or I get weeds in my town!") or Pokemon ("Gotta get 'em all.") are like crack. And a lot of their other content is simply top notch.

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

#76

Post by GuiA »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

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…

Sony made several portable gaming devices (PSP, PS vita, PSN compatible phone).

The market didn’t really care for them.

Which makes sense. People already have a phone, they don’t want an additional thing to carry around. People want a flagship phone, not a worse phone that’s more expensive because it can play some exclusive games.

The Nintendo switch was the right form factor, but only Nintendo has the IP to pull it off. If MS or Sony were to make a Switch-like, it’d fail much like the nvidia shield has.

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

#77

Post by GuiA »

earthboundkid wrote: post #65
nicolas_t wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Yes but not really.

The “encoding problem” for Asian languages is real, but it goes back earlier than that, as it emerged with typewriters. See Thomas Mullaney’s “A history of the Chinese typewriter”, and Nanette Gottlieb’s “Word Processing Technology in Japan” for more. By the late 90s/00s it wasn’t a significant primary factor (that is if it was a factor, it was due to cultural inertia, and not lack of access to technology itself).

I think the problem here is looked at backwards. It’s not that Japan sucks at software - it’s that the US/North America got extremely good at software in the last 20 years (by a combination of factors that feed into each other, as always: the best research labs are in the US, the tools are built in the US, the companies that make use of them for competitive advantage are in the US, the economic context most favorable to founding such companies is in the US, etc). The rest of the world is catching up, but the gap is still visible.

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

#78

Post by gwbas1c »

fenomas wrote: post #47
polm23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I think the article was off-base there - "withered" isn't a mistranslation at all. I'd probably have gone with "dried-up", but to translate it as "weathered" changes the meaning considerably.

I disagree, weathered often implies broken in, established, mature.

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

#79

Post by oneVoiceOnHN »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

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…

If your gaming PC is gathering dust but you play the switch, you probably are falling for the marketing.

PC has nearly every game switch has, and more.

Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products.

My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Which people have been saying about Zelda since TP)

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

#80

Post by oneVoiceOnHN »

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…

Their games cost the premium. They bait you with cheap hardware but charge 60$ forever.
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