There was a recent article on next-gen.biz, where an analyst was bemoaning the fact that few publishers would make money off of the Wii this holiday. Well, that’s certainly not Nintendo’s fault. Nintendo has laid quite a bit out on the table for a while now. It’s up to the publishers and developers to choose to support it or not.

The last few years, everyone has cast doubts on Nintendo, and perhaps rightfully so. With ever declining sales on each new iteration of their home console (N64 and Gamecube), and with the rise of Sony, some out there were calling (or expecting) Nintendo to eventually pull a Sega and retreat from the hardware side of games altogether. Never mind that Nintendo has been the only console maker to consistently pull in a profit year in, year out. So even as Nintendo was still in the early stages of developing the Wii (Revolution at the time), still people called for Nintendo to throw in the towel.

A lot of people based their judgment on past behavior, on past success. Those aren’t necessarily bad criteria to use, but they did not wait to see what Nintendo actually intended to offer with the Revolution. When the first details came out, the same people became alarmed. The console would try to appeal to non-gamesr, and not just hardcore players. The console would not support HD. This caused quite a stir at the time. Nintendo was trying to move in separate direction, and some people saw this as catastrophic, perhaps even suicidal for Nintendo.

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When the DS was first announced, again, most thought it was either a gimmick, or another indication that Nintendo should give up on the hardware market. Either way it looked bound to failure. People did not know what to make of it. On the flip side, usually the same people saw the PSP as the next big thing. The PSP was touted a sleek, sexy, technologically advanced piece of hardware. The general opinion was that the PSP would triumph over the DS.

Almost 2 years later, everything has turned. Neither the PSP nor the DS is a failure, but the DS has exceeded many expectations by quite a bit, and helped drive a n unexpected resurgence in overall game sales. People are (finally) starting to jump on the Nintendo bandwagon once more. And I don’t say it as if it’s a bad thing. It would have been terrible if Nintendo had actually packed up and gone home, and left the game to Microsoft and Sony. It is obvious that Nintendo is beginning to have success with their somewhat off-the-wall strategy of trying to make fun games. It’s causing both competitors to react and to adapt. Most importantly, through solid sales of the DS, and through a (so far) very decent marketing campaign with the Wii, Nintendo has renewed confidence in its brand (beyond its loyal core customers). One of my favorite ways to measure current market trend is to watch who EA supports. Recently EA has added a lot more support to their DS and Wii SKUs. Note that I said current and not future trends. EA will always go where there is money to be made, but one should not expect this method to predict market trends beyond a 6 month period.

“I think, candidly, we misread Nintendo when it first started this endeavour. But we became a believer when we saw how consumers reacted at E3.” [David Gardner, executive VP and COO of EA’s worldwide studios]

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Nintendo made it’s first big announcement when they showed off their motion sensing controller at last year’s TGS. It was the first concrete feature shown to the public. While there have been a few more interesting features announced since then (WiiConnect24, the VirtualConsole, etc), none of these as fundamentally central to the console as the is the controller. 3^rd party publishers and developers have had since last August to decide whether to jump on the bandwagon, but most chose to play it safe, so it’s no surprise if the chief benefiters of Nintendo’s new found success has been Nintendo, first with all their million-selling games on the DS, and the impeding success they will experience with the Wii. Ubisoft seems to be the only major third party publisher to have anticipated the Wii’s potential early on enough to cash in (with 7 launch titles).

We’re not Nintendo fan boys here at InnerBits, but I can claim that I can’t wait to play on the Wii. Aside from being able to play old games from childhood, what really impresses me about Nintendo is their commitment to develop fun games, and to provide an environment where others can continue to do the same. Nintendo has realized that they will eventually lose if they try to keep up in the digital arms race with its two competitors, and have wisely chosen to step aside go in a completely different direction. If Nintendo manages to achieve their objectives, they will have not only re-invented the standard console interface once more, but will also greatly expand the games market. They should be applauded for simply trying, let alone pulling it off.

Posted by Raoul on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 10:15 am.