By the end of January it’s almost safe to predict that the NPD Numbers for the US will contain within them the single largest monthly sales number of a console since, well, ever. The Wii decimated the November record (by a cool 700,000 units, or nearly as many as the Xbox360 sold all month) and is bound to do the same again, the current record of 2.7 million PS2’s is in serious jeopardy. Now I think it’s easy to take these numbers in without really appreciating the sheer scale of this achievement. Just to think that over 2 years since its release the Wii is still hard to find, it is still the number 1 searched for and desired gift. Its sales are only getting bigger as supply finally begins to meet demand. From Nintendo’s position 3 years ago this would have seemed impossible and faintly ridiculous, yet now its constant outselling of all the other consoles combined is not only expected, it has become the norm.
As a Nintendo fan this has made me happy, I liked the Gamecube but as it drew to the end of its life I held out hope for the Wii, but only to keep Nintendo in the game for one more round, I honestly couldn’t see them catching up to Sony and Microsoft, let alone breezing past them as if they weren’t even there. You see Nintendo have always marched to the beat of their own drum and I liked their focus on the games rather than the technology, and their step away from the macho one-upping of Sony and Microsoft was a wise one. They were never going to have the resources to be able to compete on that level and by creating their own market they have changed the rules, moved the playing field and left Sony and Microsoft to fight for second place.
So why is it that I can’t help feeling twinges of disappointment and regret when glancing at the Wii sat in the corner of my room? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing it off, nor assuming in anyway that this feeling will prevail but it is worth analysing I feel. I think the sense of regret is what has been lost in the clamour for this new market, this new way of playing. Nintendo have gained a huge audience, massive popularity and shedloads of money, but their cutting edge has been dulled, their innovative company line compromised at the altar of the all-powerful dollar. Case in point the latest Animal Crossing game, a game I was anticipating upon its announcement, the promise of an online world which is customisable and inhabitable by people all over the world sounded exciting. Having only played a bit of the previous games I was struck by the possibilities available on the Wii. Even with the friend code restrictions the idea of visiting friends within the same game world and impacting their game was intriguing. Maybe there would also been tasks and challenges you could complete together online? The annual celebrations could be witnessed globally perhaps, and the idea of leaving presents, or notes and messages with others and receiving such thing yourself on returning to the game was an appealing one. Animal Crossing to me always felt like a game hindered by a lack to true connectivity and one that would, or could, flourish in an online environment.
Yet the final game achieves very little of this inherent promise, it is in fact more an upgrade of the Gamecube and DS games, retaining all the previous features and adding very little new. The voice chat add-on is welcome but restrictive and has no great purpose in the game. The graphics and world are near identical to those that have gone before and the much touted ‘city’ of the title is a small collection of shops previously accessed from inside your own village. More than any recently released or even historically released first party Nintendo game this is the one that has felt most like a lazy and cynical upgrade. And the worrying sign is that this may well be the direction Nintendo head towards as time goes on. Now I don’t think that the major franchises will ever be treated with such disdain (Mario Galaxy after all was a magnificent game full of innovation and creativity) but I feel that this style of more casual releases (apologies for using the word, I am not a fan of categorising everything into hardcore and casual games much in the way that I would not categorise films as art-house or populist) will be one we see more of.
For starters next year sees the beginning of Nintendo’s re-releases of Gamecube games with added Wii controls, another fad that has plagued the Wii from becoming home to truly new and innovative games that are built to take advantage of its unique control style. Now I will concede that for games that never saw the light of day on a Nintendo console such as Okami this can be a good thing, and I am enjoying the game very much, but for games such as Pikmin it feels like another rather lazy way of gaining some extra money rather than pouring resources into creating new games. Just because the Wii isn’t much more powerful than the last generation of consoles doesn’t mean it should languish alongside them in terms of content and gameplay.
But what’s wrong with milking something that is so popular for some more money? After all there is a definite justification in spending a small budget on an upgraded game and gaining the same or even more revenue than you might from spending millions on a new and innovative product. I understand the business logic and Nintendo are perfectly justified in doing this, you could even argue they would be foolish not to. But this is where, as a fan, it hurts. Nintendo have never been a logical company, whilst everyone else moved to CD’s they stuck to cartridges out of a stubborn dislike of piracy. Rather than use DVDs with the Gamecube they manufactured their own mini-DVD’s and their fabled reluctance to get involved with online gaming is well documented. But that is partly why I loved them; they zagged when everyone else zigged, they planned crazy add-on’s and extras for bizarre Japanese games such as the N64 DD and gained fame from naming a Gorilla after a Mule. So for a company like this to suddenly seem so profit-focused and predictable feels a little bit sad. Now I’m not saying Nintendo were not profit oriented before, the prevalence of Mario licensed games in their history is more than testament enough to this, but they always had this crazy edge as well and they always had a focus on quality and innovation; even when it didn’t always work. Now it seems that beyond the Wii remote itself there have been fewer and fewer glimpses of this in recent years.
But all this does not mean I have given up hope. 2008 was a quiet year in terms of gaming from Nintendo and it has been a barren few months for Wii owners in terms of games as 3rd party developers get to grips with the system and how to produce quality games for it, but 2009 is full of promise. Nintendo’s recent strategy of announcing games only months before they will be release may well prove successful this year, the thought of a new Zelda, Mario or Pikmin game (or an entirely new game of course) being announced in May and released in November is an exciting one and much more preferable to the old system of announcement then release 2 or even 3 years later.
Where they go from here no-one knows, but the fan in me has his fingers crossed that the old Nintendo makes an appearance soon, if only briefly, to confuse and surprise us once again.
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