Game Over for Nintendo?
July 28th, 2011 - 4:03 pm
Nintendo is slashing $80 off the price of its 3DS handheld game rig, to undercut the starting $199 price of the iPod touch.
People have written off Nintendo before. This is a company that just gets gaming. But the market they invented changed dramatically and quickly — can they recover one more time?
Pokemon’s their ace-in-the-hole. Turns out that every generation of kids has one thing in common; a love of enslaving obscenely powerful monsters and making them fight each other.
No, the most popular gaming console is in fact the iphone and the ipad. Between Apple and Google, Nintendo will be ground up into hamburger, followed soon after by Sony and Microsoft.
Nintendo made several misteps with the 3DS out of the gate
1) Too high a price
2) Battery Issues
3) Not having the software out of the gate
For #1, they set the price high because they thought it was going to be in high demand judging from E3. Bad move, no doubt. They’re fixing that issue, but there’s going to be residual bad feelings from consumers. Particularly the early adoptors, even if Nintendo is providing a bunch of free games as a ‘thank you’ package for buying early.
For #2, it’d be interesting to see why the battery is drained so much. The system is more powerful than a regular DS, with it (the 3DS) being compared to a portable Wii. But with the Wii already having been a low-power system (in terms of wattage used), the four hours of battery life seem rather low. This has been used as a blackmark on the 3DS.
For #3, think about the iPhone games that made it the ‘Juggernaut’ in gaming it is. Now, of the ones you can think of, how many were there at the starting gate, or even 6 months after the release? Take Angry Birds. That was released two and a half years after the iPhone was released. It took a while to get a library of good games for the iPhone, and there’s certainly a library of bad games you have to weed through. For the 3DS, we were promised a library of games for the system at and near release. While there were about 16 games, the ‘big guns’ such as the Zelda remake and the new Kid Icarus were delayed. Again, a bad move to not have a killer app on release, but the correlary is not releasing an imcomplete and bad game.
Nintendo is not dead. They’ve even got their next console system (Wii U) planned for next year. They have made missteps with the 3DS… but didn’t they do the same with the DS? Wasn’t that written off with the PSP poised to be king of the handheld?
They’re responding to their customers in a way that acknowledges they made a mistake (the price) and that they’re trying to make up for it. Whether they come through with the games is a good question, and that still remains to be seen. But that means another year for the ball to get rolling, at least. Rather than assuming them to be DOA.