The damage control around the Switch is still going on full force, with Nintendo die-hard fans, optimistic gamers and gaming journalists trying to whitewash and gloss over the console's flaws. And granted, maybe we're all being overly dramatic about the Switch; after all, many of the system's initial flaws can be managed and even entirely erased. Sure, the battery life is pitiful; but trust Nintendo to produce another more endurant model down the line. Sure, the idea of a paying an app for voice chat is ludicrous; but trust Nintendo to backpedal and make the thing entirely free if gamers are becoming too angry and vocal. Sure, the console, games and accessories are ridiculously overpriced; but trust Nintendo to lower prices massively if their stuff doesn't sell, just like they did with the 3DS. There is, however, one glaring flaw that cannot be mitigated or sugar-coated, and that flaw is the shocking lack of games. And this time, you cannot trust Nintendo to come up with a magic fix, because they've proven with the WiiU that they were unable to produce more games or to bring in third-party developers even if their life depended on it
— and in a way, it
did. But that doesn't prevent the damage control brigade from bandying all sorts of disingenuous justifications and excuses for the Switch anaemic's launch line-up, such as:
"But we already have a meaty AAA game at launch, and that's Breath of the Wild! A game that huge and amazing should surely occupy you for many months, right?" Well, I hate to point out the obvious and piss on your bonfire, but we don't know
yet if
BOTW is going to be a game meaty enough to occupy us for several months. For all we know, it could have a 5-hour-long main quest with tons of fluff and filler on the side. But there is more: we don't even know yet if that game is going to be good
at all. Nintendo have built up the hype around
BOTW so skillfully that we all assume that this game is going to be a masterpiece; but for all we actually do know at that point, it could be just a mediocre or barely satisfactory game. To bet so much on a game that we still know so little about and that has yet to be reviewed is just unreasonable, especially considering Nintendo's recent track record when it comes to their own IPs. The latest entries of
Animal Crossing,
Star Fox and
Paper Mario were deemed quite mediocre; and Ninty has not exactly been delivering on the
Zelda front either, with only four HD remakes, a derivative follow-up to a 1991 entry and a clunky multiplayer spin-off released in the last console generation. And even if
BOTW turns out to be the best
Zelda entry ever released, there are gamers out there that don't fancy the
Zelda series and/or open-word games with tons of crafting and running around, and
BOTW won't make these gamers warm up to the idea of purchasing a Switch day one.
"There are enough great games slated for release as it is! How many games do you need exactly? Just stop piling up stuff and focus on one game at once!" While it's true that my backlog could use a bit of shearing, this argument doesn't hold water in the current gaming landscape. In the early '90s, a single high-profile game could easily unify all gamers under its overbearing and encompassing greatness. Things were simpler back then: the overwhelming majority of gamers followed the dominant gaming trends with a enthusiam only matched by their zeal to get rid of games that were not trendy anymore, and it was easy to feed them any killer app. Nintendo themselves gave birth to some of these massively successful and highly revered crowd-pleasers:
Super Mario 64,
Super Mario World,
Ocarina of Time, you name them. However, the gaming industry has changed since the '90s, and so have gamers' expectations. The meteoric rise of indie, retro and portable gaming has created a gaming landscape in which every gamer can find games tailored to their tastes, no matter how niche or quirky these tastes happen to be. We gamers have grown used to being pampered and treated to the exact games we want, and we're not going to renounce cherry-picking our games just because Nintendo cannot be bothered to release games catering to all gaming tastes
— not when there are others console manufacturers around. My point is: in today's gaming scene, you
need a wide array of games covering many gaming genres to bring a large audience to your console. You can't simply release one high-profile game every three month and call it a day. Heck, you can't even get away with releasing one high-profile game and five digital indies every three months like Nintendo is about to do until the end of the year. This kind of publishing policy simply doesn't cut it in 2017, and no gamer beyond hardcore Nintendo fans are going to be content with that.
"A huge launch line-up doesn't automatically imply success! The Vita failed with 25 launch games, and the Game Boy soared with only 5!" Sure, numbers don't lie, and those facts are pretty much undeniable. But someone coming up with this argument has to be either extremely disingenuous or naive beyond belief; because once again, these wild variations boil down to gaming eras and concurrent expectations. While Nintendo could still afford to release the N64 with only two launch games in North-America in 1996, such a behaviour would be nothing short of suicidal nowadays. The PS4 struggled to gain traction despite its 25 launch games, and the 3DS' 15-or-so games left gamers so unimpressed that the system very nearly died in its first months of existence. What was still perfectly acceptable two console generations ago
— the PS3 launched with 14 games and the DS with just 7 in North-America
— is totally unthinkable nowadays. As I mentioned above, most of us gamers want many games to choose from; and if a game manufacturer don't provide enough games for our tastes, we will simply jump ship and take our business to the next console manufacturer or to PC. We're not willing anymore to purchase a console bereft of games and grind and bear it until games start arriving, especially not when other consoles with bulging game libraries are courting us.
"Third-party devs and Nintendo themselves are cooking up some games as we're speaking! Just you wait until E3! There will be tons of games released before the end of 2017!" No, there won't. If tons of games had indeed been in the pipeline, they would have been shown at the Switch presentation. Why on earth would Nintendo present us with mere concept art, declarations of goodwill and trailers totally devoid of any gameplay if they had games slated for release in 2017? It's not like they wouldn't know about these games at that point, now would they? And why would third-party developers themselves be so hush-hush about their upcoming releases for the Switch, in a gaming era where games are teased years before their actual release? (
Kingdom Hearts III, anyone?) And why would Nintendo themselves feed us so many ports of already released games if they had some new material nearly ready for launch? Sure, Nintendo and third-party devs
are indeed cooking up some games right now; but these games won't be released before 2018, maybe even 2019 for the slowest developers. (If we see
Octopath Traveller before the end of next year, I'm ready to eat my special edition of
Bravely Second.) The only developers that could pull off 2017 surprise releases while having no material ready at the time of the Switch presentation are super-niche developers
à la Experience Inc. and indie devs, and there's nothing to expect from them; the former are too busy crafting games for the Vita and the latter usually need months of Kickstarting before they can even write a line of code. Let's face it, people: what we've seen at the Switch presentation is what we'll get in 2017. There will be no releases coming like a bolt out of the blue, and the whole Nintendo E3 conference will be devoted to showcasing footage from
Super Mario Odyssey. And that
Pokemon Stars game we were all waiting for? I'm pretty sure it's not coming before 2018. If it's coming at all.
"Nintendo just published a list of all the upcoming Switch games, and now we have 106 games to look forward to in the next years! There's nothing to worry about!" Fair enough; but unfortunately, a good two thirds
— if not three quarters
— of these games still don't have a release date. Heck, I'm sure that the development process for those games hasn't even
started yet, which means that we won't see them before 2018 or even 2019. And mind you, just because third-party developers are announcing their intention to release games on the Switch doesn't mean that these games will actually see the light of day: those developers are simply keeping their options open, and they will be quick to pull out the plug and cancel these games whose development has probably yet to start if the Switch doesn't sell well enough. The exact same thing happened with the WiiU and is even more likely to happen nowadays: no game is safe anymore and any game can be cancelled without mercy, as the
Scalebound fiasco abundantly proves. So until these games have release dates set in stone, we can as well consider them as gaming potentialities rather than actual games.
Mark my words: the Switch is a console starved of games and will remain that way for a very long time. Heck, it could even remain that way
forever. If the WiiU debacle has taught us something, it's definitely that no console can thrive without a solid library of games and that not having enough games available in the early stages of a console's lifetime can scare away third-party developers and create a vicious circle in which the number of games developed for the console steadily decreases over time. Too bad Nintendo didn't learn that lesson as acutely as we did and didn't bother securing third-party support and developing a slew of first-party high-profile titles
long before the Switch's release. They're obviously being stingy, lazy and complacent when it comes to the Switch; and that stinginess, laziness and complacency may be their downfall. The Switch launch could have been the most epic, glorious and flamboyant console launch of them all, with games up the wazoo and Nintendo making their second coming; instead, it's a dud of massive proportions that has the audacity to line up even less games than the WiiU did. Damage-control all you want, but there's no escaping that dire reality. And let's remember, people, that the WiiU actually had a rather good launch before third-party devs deserted it and made it the failure it is today. If the WiiU failed despite its more consequent launch line-up and stronger initial third-party support, what hope is there for the Switch to soar and be Nintendo's saving grace? Only time will tell. I'll be waiting for the games to appear; and if they don't, I'll pass on the Switch with no regrets. With that, I rest my case. Thanks for reading, dear fellow gamers, and be my guest anytime!
"The gameboy color launched with 5 games." Yeah, and it also launched in a time where games for it could be made in 4 months, maybe even less. Some games took years (like pokemon), but games for that system were easier and faster to develop. But even the mid-tier games we like nowadays take about 2 years to develop them, a year at minimum. Remember that when we see a company announce a game that's going to be released in 6 months, they only shows games that are about 60% developed already. Which means that game had at least another 6 months of development where we didn't even know about its existence.
ReplyDeleteSo in the old days of the gameboy a poor launch wasn't bad. The system could be flooded with games in a mere half a year. But now, a crappy launch means the console will have a crappy release year, at the least, most likely two years. And games were also way cheaper to develop for the gameboy, so developers could take a gamble on it and not lose much if the game failed. Even mid-tier games are more expensive to produce. Which means if the console you're developing for is not shown to be profitable, it's cheaper for the developers to cancel the game then to push it out the door. And leads to the vicious cycle you mentioned...
Do Nintendo defenders really think it's still the same market as the nineties? Have they been under a rock for the past decade? Things don't work that way anymore.
And yeah, the PS4 also launched with few titles and mostly ports. But like I said in another comment, it came out at a very specific time. People were salivating for a new generation of consoles but were also mad at the time at XBox, their main competitor. If the PS4 had come out at another time, things would have been different. But at that specific time it was successful, which lead developers to heavily invest on it, which lead it to be even more successful. And now it has so many different games that it's a boon for non-PC gamers. But even that console took time to get good. Most people agree that last year was when it became excellent, and this year is already making it better. If even a successful console took that long to get enough games, then one with a poor launch...
(continued in the next comment because my rants are reaching biblical proportions)
And even worse, Nintendo isn't even good at having sales. One of the major reasons I was eager to buy a PS4 was because I knew from my experience with the Vita and PS3 that, at least in Europe, PSN sales absolutely rock, even without PS+.Case in point, I just bought 5 PS4 games 2 days ago for under 40$. Cheaper than a new Vita game. They were: two short but unique indie games (Grow Home and Grow up), a very niche indie game that will provide me plenty of replayability (Armello, a digital board game/strategy game mix), the deluxe edition of an AAA game with all DLC (Tomb Raider Definitive edition), and a mid-tier game that I know I'll be playing for years (Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires, already had for the vita, it’s that good). As you can see, a great variety for my tastes.
DeleteNormal price for all those games: 117,95 euros. What I saved: 78 euros.
Now THAT is a sale. Now that is the reason why the 70$ price tag for new releases isn't so terrible, because I know if I wait for 6 months I can get a sale where I can buy it for 35$ and if you wait longer sales get even better. That is a good reason to get a console. That is a good reason for customers to forgo physical copies despite the fact that the future of digital games is still a bit of a gamble. But being poor and with prices like that, yeah I'll take that gamble. I also take a gamble and buy games I might not have had that much of an interest in and wouldn't have bought otherwise. In the past year that having a vita forced me out of my "no digital games" policy, I've bought a new game for my sony consoles every two weeks almost constantly. This despite the fact that my financial situation is worse than it was 3 years ago. This has been good for me, Sony and the developers. Everyone wins!
But Nintendo doesn't get that. Sales on the eshop are almost as rare as a chicken laying a goose egg, and they should know because of the European PSN and Steam that constant sales are the way to go. And even when there is the rare sale, it's never something too substantial like you see with those other stores. In their case, it's usually faster to wait for the games to drop to 20$ on ebay or just buy it used. You won't get it in the eshop for cheaper and you'll have to wait longer, and this also means there's fewer reasons to buy a digital only game. And now those games are going to cost 60$. Which means that even when there is a sale, we'll have to pay 40$ on average for most of them since the sales are stingy. What a deal! Not!
This is why I've amassed 100+ titles for the Vita in little over a year, and barely 50 for the 3DS in 3 years even though the 3DS has more games and I've bought a lot of used games. Sad.
You can also see this crappy attitude in their online service for the switch. Yeah, it’s cheaper than Sony and Microsoft’s, but it’s crappier because of the external app you need and they don’t even give good freebies. Sony and Microsoft give you free games until you cancel the subscription, which is especially good with Sony if you have their 3 consoles, where then you can get 6 games a month. This makes the service good even for people who don’t play online. And people complain about that! Nintendo gives you an NES/Snes game for a MONTH, no matter if you keep paying the service until you die. What??
And they don’t even have enough multiplayer games to justify having the service either. Sony and Microsoft have a bazillion FPS, fighting games and even a couple of multiplayer only games. Nintendo has Splatoon, Mario Kart, Pokken and…Mario tennis? Is there online multiplayer in Mario tennis? Bottom line is, it doesn’t matter how cheap the service is, it’s not worth it. You just can’t charge for online because “everyone else does it” and then not provide any of the benefits you competitors provide. You can’t Nintendo, you can’t!
Oh, and the reason why I even mentioned sales in the first place was because you said the price of the console, accessories and games could be dropped (I had to edit my comment since it was so huge). And while I can believe in the first two, I'm doubtful of the last one, and their stingy sales is the reason why. If they're so unwilling to have sales in the first place, and even when they do, they're stingy about it even when the games are old, are that really willing to drop the price of the games? They're even stingy about giving away 30 year old NES games for their subscription service and even if one hates indies and think Sony skimps out on their subscribers when they offer them for free instead of an AAA game, one still has to admit that even the weaker indies have more value than Balloon Fight and a lot of other NES titles, classics or not. And yet Nintendo is awry to give balloon fight away for free, whereas Sony has given away such meaty games as Don't Starve.
DeleteSo I'm doubtful...they also didn't lower those prices with the Wii U even last year, when it was clear the console was over and dead. Which probably lead to poor Tokyo Mirage FE failing even harder, poor thing.
I'll make a confession: I mentioned the possible lowering of prices purely for rhetorical purposes. I don't believe for a second that Ninty will lower prices, just like I don't believe for a second that they will go to the E3 with tons of games in their suitcases. Nintendo are a bunch of greedy bastards who see their loyal fans as walking wallets first and foremost.
DeleteYou're making a VERY good point by mentioning development times. There was already a significant gap on that front between the DS and the 3DS; and since the Switch is that complicated dual system that's pitched first and foremost as a home console, development is going to take even longer. There will most definitely be game cancellations down the line, and maybe sooner than we expect. Heck, I totally expect Mario Odyssey to be delayed by a couple of months at that point.
This further proves that Nintendo now fails on all fronts. Not only are they out of touch with current trends, but they can't even be genuinely original and think outside the box like they did in the Game Boy era. In an era where game development tend to stretch into infinity and more and more games become vaporware, the real cutting-edge thing to do would have been to release a solid handheld specifically designed for mid-tier games, with stellar battery life and a clean-cut design. There is still some room in the market for such a device, as the 3DS success abundantly proves.
But such a move would obviously be a giant leap of faith, all the more so in a gaming industry that still considers handhelds as inferior pieces of kit to this day. (Telling anecdote: I have a subscription to a game magazine that mentions the 3DS and Vita once or twice a year. When I sent them an email last year to ask why they weren't more zealous to cover handhelds, they answered that they'd like to do that but that there was unfortunately nothing interesting being released on handhelds. I nearly choke when I read that.) It would take a tremendous love for portable consoles and unwavering faith in their potential to bet everything on a handheld; and ironically enough, I think Nintendo lack both of these things despite having single-handedly created the whole handheld scene in the first place and maintained it for decades.
One thing must be admitted though: for all their growing irrelevancy in the hardware market, Nintendo sure have us ranting and arguing. Guess there's still a bit of relevancy in them after all, at least for the time being.
...I wonder if they're truly relevant, or if we want them to be relevant because, deep down, we know the cornerstone of our gaming is in danger of going down like the titanic. Sony has said they've left the handheld market, Nintendo is apparently leaving too, there's no new competitor in sight and even other gamers are saying that the handheld market should die due to the existence of the mobile market making it obsolete. Our beloved market is seen as unprofitable and unwanted now.
DeleteNow, you and I know it's not the truth, and that there's plenty of money in the market. There's a reason many of us die hard portable gamers don't touch the mobile games with a ten-foot pole, and there's a reason why it's been about 7 years since mobile was supposed to take over but it hasn't. This market may not be the one that leads into ridiculous wealth like the AAA market is, but it has life, sustainability, variety and a dedicated fanbase.
But the extremely sad thing is, those facts don't matter. The bigshots think its dead, so in their eyes it might as well be. This is why that magazine you subscribe to doesn't even know of the variety of games we enjoy. This is why Nintendo is potentially dooming themselves.
Remember how it was with horror games a few years ago? Devs said the genre was dead, so almost all horror franchises died and those that didn't got changed into action games. But it was a lie, gamers were so starved for horror games that they jumped on the offerings the indie market gave them like locusts and shunned many of the action franchises until they became a mockery. This why Resident Evil finally went back to horror after almost a decade. But the truth didn't matter. For that decade there was an extreme drought of horror games after the genre enjoyed popularity during the playstation 2 era. The same thing is possibly going to happen to our beloved market.
And that is terrifying. Nintendo was the most likely company to keep the market going, but they threw it away, threw away something they created first, threw away the only thing that saved them from failure, threw away our years of undeserved loyalty to them...for a market they haven't dominated for about 20 years. That both hurts and leaves me angry. Like WTH Nintendo? I put up with your shitty 3D, region locking practices, abysmal game localization, awful digital store and just your overall arrogance...for this? For you to throw me and others under the bus for a console that is most likely going to fail? Screw you, I hope it DOES fail. Bitter me is bitter and I have no shame in that.
I do still have some hope in the market though, despite my inner worries. The market is viable, and we have seen many indies jump on previously "unwanted" markets and have great success. So maybe a new company can make a new portable. Maybe google or apple would invest into it given that they know gaming is profitable thanks to their app stores? Hey, weirder things have happened, I never thought Microsoft would become a console maker. Or maybe Sony will change their mind and give us a vita successor. Or maybe the market will die for a while and have a resurgence later when consoles become so powerful it will be extremely difficult and expensive for them to surpass one another once a new generation comes. Or maybe Nintendo will have enough money left over to make another handheld if the Switch fails. Who knows.
Either way, we still have the Vita and since it was fairly powerful when it came out, it can endure for a couple of years. And after that, there's also remote play on the PS4, a console I'm sure will last at least 3 more years, maybe more thanks to the Pro. Niche games will not die, I'm am at least completely sure of that.
"I wonder if they're truly relevant, or if we want them to be relevant because, deep down, we know the cornerstone of our gaming is in danger of going down like the titanic": I'd wager it's the latter. We all know deep down that the hardware market could survive without Nintendo, but seeing them disappear would be like seeing a part of our gaming lives die. We obviously have some emotional investment in them, and that emotional investment has nothing to do with their hardware (or even software) prowess. If that were the case, we would have dropped them long ago.
DeleteHeck, the gaming industry has been around long enough now for trends to come and go in cycles. First-person dungeon crawlers were popular in the 80's and resurfaced on handhelds twenty years later, hardcore 2D platformers are making a major comeback in the indie scene and so on. As long as there are gamers out there interested in them, all gaming trends are bound to resurface at some point. So even though the situation looks quite grim right now for portable gaming and our favourite niches genres, I'm pretty confident that they will reappear on the long run. Heck, I can pretty well envision some manufacturer producing a "retro" portable console loaded with games 20 years from now, just like Ninty did with the Nes Classic Edition.
True, anyone can see that the gaming industry has gone in circles for a long while. Even certain themes in certain genres go around in circles; case in point, FPS games. I remember World War games used to be very popular, but then everyone started doing them and people got sick of them, so games with more sci-fi war advancements became popular. And right now people are sick of those games too and going back to the realistic world war games, although they did innovate a little by finally using WWI.
DeleteHeck, even awful ideas come in circles. Motion controls were first introduced with the power glove, came back about a decade later with the Wii, and now about another decade later they are coming back again. VR isn't new either, we all remember the Virtual Boy. Even if it that "innovation" fails right now, someone will try it again once the technology evolves a bit more in about 10-20 years. If those terrible ideas that, with the exception of the Wii, have been horrendous failures and money sinks can keep coming back, then I'm sure something that was so sustainable that it keep Nintendo afloat for 2 generations will definitely come back.
Although it can be tough for someone unhappy with the current cycle to see things in that optimistic manner. I know the mainline PS3 and Xbox 360 era was rough on me until I abandoned consoles for handhelds. But I can keep going as long as there's at least one console that offers the games I like, and hopefully in a few years handhelds will come back. Maybe once the kids who are growing up on mobile games now grow up and their tastes evolves like ours did will be a potential new market for handhelds. And it's a good thing that as we age, time seems to pass faster. If I can put off getting a game for 2 years nowadays because I want a sale and I barely notice it, then I'm sure I can keep myself busy with my backlog for 5 years.
"Although it can be tough for someone unhappy with the current cycle to see things in that optimistic manner": Tell me about it. I spent twelve years away from gaming because I was not happy with the trends of the moment and boy, was it a pain. Emulation basically saved my gaming life at the time, although it could only do so much and certainly didn't replace fresh, inovative material... But like you said yourself, we now have our gigantic backlogs to provide us with gaming material! By the time we clear them, our favourite gaming trends will certainly be back again. ^___^
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