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At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time… :-)
It’s interesting that your example is Dreamcast, because while every company that doesn’t put out a console also has an incentive to make great games, this also shows that making great games isn’t enough.
Kind of. A big part of Sega’s situation is that they shot their reputation in the ass with a 12 gauge in the mid 90s. They were pumping out platforms left, right and center only to discontinue them within a year or two (Sega CD, 32X, Saturn).
Nintendo have been very careful not to make the same mistakes, but even then a lot of people initially had little faith in the Switch because of the WiiU. Even Gamefreak didn’t want to release Pokémon games for Switch initially.
As for other companies, their goal is to make titles that sell well on the platforms it releases on. They can afford to rely almost completely on what has come before, all they need to do is do it well.
The goal of a first party game is to sell itself and the platform. So they need to be doing things that other games aren’t, in order to sell the idea of ‘you can only get this experience with platform X’.
I think this is the exact idea that Sony and Microsoft realized doesn’t make financial sense anymore, and that Phil expected Nintendo to come to late.
Phil Spencer of Microsoft thinks this idea doesn’t make sense because they haven’t been doing it well in years. The big innovation with Halo Infinite is live services and an open world. Their exclusives aren’t doing anything other games aren’t.
Sony is a bit better and covers a few more genres, and if you’re into heavily-cinematic games, Playstation is your no-brainer choice, they’ve got you covered in all sorts of genres. And they’ve got the Spiderman games.
Nintendo, meanwhile practically owns the kart racing genre. There is literally no other AAA effort that isn’t cash in crap or loaded up with so much MTX crap that even Fortnite would blush.
Mario Oddesey might have a bit more competition nowadays but in 2017, your only options were Oddesey, a (very good) indie game, and a neutered reboot of Ratchet and Clank.
Breath of the Wild came at a time when most open world games were very rigid when it came to how players dealt with tasks and enemies. BoTW gave players a lot more options thank simply going in quiet or loud, and ToTK took it much further. They practically changed how other companies look at open world games.
Nintendo puts AAA efforts into entire game genres that most other companies ignore entirely, even if the audiences do not. This is how they’ve maintained crazy Switch sales.
Sony’s games are on PC now. Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed. Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now. Nintendo generally spends less, but they’re still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware, just like what happened with Sony and Microsoft, which means fewer and fewer games that can only be played on that specific set of hardware. Third party exclusives mostly disappeared because, for the same reasons, restricting yourself to one platform is generally a stupid idea these days.
As an aside, racing games in general are rare these days, not just kart racers. My options are Mario Kart, sim racers, one step down from a sim racer like Forza Horizon, and little else. I like racing games, but not any of those. The market will come back around; I’ve got Trail Out right now and Aero GPX in the near future that will hopefully tide me over until someone makes racing games for me again.
Years after their playstation debut. Because they know that people who want to play AAA games on a PC do so for reasons the PlayStation platform just doesn’t cater to, thus they aren’t exactly competing. That and porting costs are reasonably minimal, so it’s money on the table.
Do you really think the PC market is that big that it’ll plug a shortfall like that?
Xbox initially only did it because both platforms were controlled and toll-collected by Microsoft (I’m talking specifically about Windows Store, they only put their stuff on Steam much later).
That’s not what Square’s been saying.
The switch has about 98 first party games, and isn’t exactly slowing down. That’s not counting third party exclusives, either.
Nintendo generally gets around this by having certain third parties develop its first party games. It also acquires some of these studios to develop these titles. Smash was a Bandai Namco game. Mario + Rabbids is a Ubisoft game. Hyrule and Fire Emblem warriors were made by Team Ninja and Omega Force.
Nintendo also has one more reason not to port: there is much less customer mutual exclusivity between switch and other platforms as there is between Xbox, PS and gaming PC. That is, a person who has one of the three is unlikely to have one of the other two, but may have a Switch for portable gaming.
Do you realize how large the PC market has become? Games that used to only be available on consoles now sell more on PC than any single console.
Hmmm. I did some research on a few games and you are surprisingly correct. However, I did notice something else too.
Nintendo doesn’t need extra sales numbers from PC. Their games sell record breaking amounts while being exclusive. Of the top 50 best selling games of all time, 7 are Nintendo games that are either Switch exclusives or WiiU ports, where they did much better on the Switch. Sony, in total, has 1, and Microsoft, in total, also has 1 (2 if you count Minecraft, as they bought Mojang during the latter’s heyday). Half of that list is Nintendo.
That’s true, but again, I think they’re going to run into more resistance with development time as they upgrade their hardware and the art assets have to rise to meet the new spec and the new audience expectation. Those Wii U ports had the benefit of being ports, which is a situation that will never happen again. Since basically no one played the Wii U, it was more like a machine gun fire of games for the Switch that already had the hardest part done. Also, unlike any time in history except for the lifespan of the PSP, there are real alternative options for handheld gaming now as we head into this new Switch successor, which probably doesn’t affect anyone buying the machine for Pokemon in hell or high water, but it will have an impact on the buyer who just wants to play Hades or Doom in bed or on a road trip and now has that many fewer reasons to buy Nintendo’s console over a more open platform.