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You serious, Reggie? Really?

 

This E3 has been an absolute wreck for the guy.

 

This entire interview is incredibly funny.

 

'We're still very early in this generation'.

 

For the other consoles yes - This was the fifth E3 we've seen the Wii U and the generation is practically over for it. I can see Sony supporting the PS4 for many years, just as they did with the PS3 as late as 2013, but it's over for Nintendo and Wii U. The consumers just don't care enough.

 

'We've got strengths'...Oh lord. :shakehead

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Nintendo Is A Slave To Its Past Success, Says Gearbox President Randy Pitchford

 

During this year's E3, a whole bunch of industry veterans met at the Lunch with Luminaries event. In this yearly talk Gaikai and Shiny founder Dave Perry invites big names for a in-depth discussion about the games industry, and this time around we had Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford, Boss Key Productions co-founder Cliff Bleszinski, ngmoco and N3twork founder Neil Young, Double Fine Productions founder Tim Schafer, Entertainment Software Association president Michael Gallagher, Amazon Games VP Mike Frazzini, and Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe.

 

While much of the chat was about big trends in the industry - such as mobile and VR - the group did touch upon Nintendo's current situation. The Japanese company's E3 presentation didn't go down as well as was hoped, and Randy Pitchford believes that the problem the firm has is that it is locked into serving its existing fans, when it should really be trying to reach new ones - as it arguably did with the Wii.

 

Pitchford explains that while Nintendo's games are highly rated and very playable, not enough people know they exist - and he likens the situation to visiting the movie site Rotten Tomatoes to find the best films currently available:

 

 

 

Amazon's Mike Frazzini backed this up with another example. He recently took his kids to Disneyland and asked them if they wanted to see Mickey Mouse, but found that they didn't even know who he was. However, they had heard of Anna and Elsa, the stars of Frozen - one of the biggest movies of all-time and Disney's most recent animated success.

 

Pitchford pointed out that Nintendo is in the position of being a "slave to its former success", and that it needs to try something new to gain more fans:

 

 

 

Should Nintendo be trying new things - like Metroid Prime: Federation Force, for example - or should it be focusing on pleasing its existing fanbase? When the existing fans have only managed to notch up 10 million Wii U hardware sales, then you could argue that Nintendo needs to heed Pitchford's advice and branch out a little.

 

---------------

 

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/06/nintendo_is_a_slave_to_its_past_success_saysngearbox_president_randy_pitchford

 

Hard to disagree with any of that. It's what made the Wii so successful, going after the casual market.

 

I agree with this and its something people have said for years. Nintendo produce great games, it cannot be denied the quality of games they produce are arguably critically the best in the industry however who are they serving? There will always be an audience for these games and they need to keep making these games but nothing is stopping them branching out into different genre's and giving the Nintendo faithful something different as well as those who don't buy Nintendo consoles games they like to play on different platforms.

 

I really don't understand the reluctance to take on other genres of games. They have more than enough money to buy western studios to produce that kind of content if they wanted.

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I don't agree with this type of sentiment, that Nintendo is a slave to its past success etc. Nintendo could either aim for that massive "casual" audience like it did with the Wii (and don't get me wrong, I'm glad it's not at the moment) or cater to more traditional gamers. I'd say it's not actually doing either.

 

It tends to be that some of the highest rated things on Rotten Tomatoes are films I've never even heard of. They're indie things that are marketed not to me. Nintendo's gotten really good at talking to Nintendo customers. But I think that Nintendo could at least lead more if they figured out how to talk to new people that they're not already talking to. And that's a very difficult problem.

 

This, for example - is Nintendo really good at talking to Nintendo customers?

 

We're always trying to invent the new thing, and it's scary because no one knows what the new thing is, so you have to build the gravity up. Meanwhile, your existing customers are screaming, 'Give me more of the old thing!' But we know the biggest brands of the future don't even exist today. And the brands that are biggest today will fail, will go down. So from my point of view, the only option is to create new stuff. I'm making a new game and nobody knows what it is. A lot of people know and like the last big thing we did and ask why aren't you doing more of that? It's funny because I had the exact same thing happen the last time. When we were trying to figure out Borderlands and telling people why that was going to be cool, everyone was like, 'Why don't you make more Brothers in Arms?'

 

Thing is, we use those "old things" as yardsticks.

 

Just because Nintendo is re-using some existing assets at the moment (eg. the multiplayer Zelda, Animal Crossing board game) doesn't actually mean it's catering to the fans. In an era where Nintendo won't make a Metroid or F-Zero for either of their games machines, how can anyone honestly think they cater to the existing fans too much?

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I'd have more respect if they were honest instead of all the lies. I'm sick of the BS. As a result over the years I've come to hate Reggie and I believe very little they say anymore. But yes I can understand it's part of his job.

 

You "hate" someone you've never met, who is as you admit, just doing their job? Mature as ever.

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You "hate" someone you've never met, who is as you admit, just doing their job? Mature as ever.

 

He ain't the only one. I haven't cared for Reggie or what he spouts out of his mouth for years. It's possible to do PR in a way that doesn't make you come off as a delusional prick. There's a certain smugness about him that has always rubbed me the wrong way.

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He ain't the only one. I haven't cared for Reggie or what he spouts out of his mouth for years. It's possible to do PR in a way that doesn't make you come off as a delusional prick. There's a certain smugness about him that has always rubbed me the wrong way.

 

Its funny, I used to really like Reggie but I absolutely cant stand him now. I was finding him more and more annoying as the years went on but I think it was the E3 where his answer to most question was just "PLAY THE GAME" in the most obnoxious way that broke the camels back.

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It is true though @Ronnie, why should we believe what Nintendo tell us going forward when they have lied a fair bit?

 

The WiiU doesn't do what they said it would (have online functions on par with the competition, work with 2 Gamepads, have huge 3rd Party support), they've not shown any evidence or backed up things that they've said they would address (no droughts after having learnt from the 3DS and then again, after having not learnt that first time, saying they'd not suffer droughts in the WiiU's 2nd year... which they then have done).

 

How can we take them on what they say? How can you not call it lies?

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The best Reggie quote by far is 'Online is the air we breath' at E3 2005, just 12 months after Iwata said people weren't interested in online gaming.

 

Friend codes ftw!

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Just a portion of a massive interview with Miyamoto.

 

On why Nintendo hasn’t tried making a more powerful console with better graphics…

 

So unfortunately with our latest system, the Wii U, the price point was one that ended up getting a little higher than we wanted. But what we are always striving to do is to find a way to take novel technology that we can take and offer it to people at a price that everybody can afford. And in addition to that, rather than going after the high-end tech spec race and trying to create the most powerful console, really what we want to do is try to find a console that has the best balance of features with the best interface that anyone can use.

 

And the reason for that is that, No. 1, we like to do things that are unique and different from other companies, but we also don’t want to just end up in a race to have the highest-tech specs in a competition to try to find how we get these expensive tech specs to the lowest price of the other systems. And so there’s different ways that we can approach it, and sometimes we look at it just from the sense of offering a system that consumes less power and makes less noise and generates less heat, or sometimes we may look at the size of the media and the size of the system and where it fits within the home.

 

But really what’s most important to us is, how do we create a system that is both unique and affordable so that everyone can afford it and everyone can enjoy it.

 

On the most important thing about making a successful game…

 

For us, the most important thing in making a game is that we make a game that’s unique — something that no one else has created, and something that no one else can create, something that’s uniquely Nintendo. That, for us, is what’s most important in creating a game.

 

On whether the Wii U’s price is one of the reasons why it hasn’t sold so well…

 

So I don’t think it’s just price, because if the system is appealing enough, people will buy it even if the price is a little bit high. I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn’t understand the system. But also I think that we had a system that’s very unique — and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up. And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you’re playing on a device that’s connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play.

 

I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time whre the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them. So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we’re constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they’re not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we’re hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.

 

So this with Super Mario Maker and being able to design levels on the touchscreen in your hand while watching on the big screen, and with games like Star Fox Zero where the big screen represents sort of a movie-like experience, but with the gamepad and the gamepad screen in your hands, you’re able to play a video game simultaneously with the excitement of these cinematic scenes happening on the TV. And I think that’s going to give people a lot of excitement, and I’m hoping that people will be looking forward to playing those games on Wii U in the fall.

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/06/19/415568892/q-a-shigeru-miyamoto-on-the-origins-of-nintendos-famous-characters

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You "hate" someone you've never met, who is as you admit, just doing their job? Mature as ever.

 

You told us you were going to ease up, Ronnie.

 

Your post literally adds nothing to the conversation here save to serve to attack Wii personally - and that's the sort of thing that starts to lead to people getting a.)fed up with the place b.)feel the need to defend themselves at every other oppurtunity.

 

So...think about it if you want to start losing threads again.

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Whatever happened to the AAA port Tantalus were meant to be working on?

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Nintendo have very few Western based studios and I got to thinking about what they've been doing the past couple of generations.

 

Retro Studios during the Wii made Metroid Prime 3, Metroid Prime Trilogy and Donkey Kong Country Returns.

 

Next Level Games made Mario Strikers Charged and Punch Out!! and also worked on various third party games for Wii including Ghost Recon, Spiderman and Transformers. They also did a Wiiware spin-off of Punch Out.

 

This generation Retro have made Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and that's most likely all they'll do and Next Level Games have made nothing for Wii U.

 

It's a sorry state of affairs. That's 5 main first party games versus 1.

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Nintendo have very few Western based studios and I got to thinking about what they've been doing the past couple of generations.

 

Retro Studios during the Wii made Metroid Prime 3, Metroid Prime Trilogy and Donkey Kong Country Returns.

 

Next Level Games made Mario Strikers Charged and Punch Out!! and also worked on various third party games for Wii including Ghost Recon, Spiderman and Transformers. They also did a Wiiware spin-off of Punch Out.

 

This generation Retro have made Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and that's most likely all they'll do and Next Level Games have made nothing for Wii U.

 

It's a sorry state of affairs. That's 5 main first party games versus 1.

It's almost as if making games became more complicated.

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It's almost as if making games became more complicated.

 

It's almost as if your fanboyish defending has become more blind and knows no bounds, Seggiebii.

 

1 game in 6 years(unless something springs out of the ether before the NX arrives) from 2 studios, is that acceptable? A whole console generation.

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It's almost as if your fanboyish defending has become more blind and knows no bounds, Seggiebii.

 

1 game in 6 years(unless something springs out of the ether before the NX arrives) from 2 studios, is that acceptable? A whole console generation.

Ignoring handheld titles as well to make your point? Next Level Games have been working on Luigi's Mansion 2, Metroid Prime Federation Forces, Metroid Prime Blast Ball and reportedly other things in the last few years.

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1 game in 6 years(unless something springs out of the ether before the NX arrives) from 2 studios, is that acceptable? A whole console generation.

 

Retro Studios output has been very thin. I know a lot of people class these guys as a replacement for Rare but they aren't even in the same league as those guys. There's only Tropical Freeze that I like from what a Retro have made, yet there's a host of Rare games I enjoyed playing.

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Ignoring handheld titles as well to make your point? Next Level Games have been working on Luigi's Mansion 2, Metroid Prime Federation Forces, Metroid Prime Blast Ball and reportedly other things in the last few years.

 

This is the Wii U discussion thread. They both helped and made games for handhelds during the Wii generation as well so what's your point?

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Retro Studios output has been very thin. I know a lot of people class these guys as a replacement for Rare but they aren't even in the same league as those guys. There's only Tropical Freeze that I like from what a Retro have made, yet there's a host of Rare games I enjoyed playing.

TBF, Retro have helped with other titles in the interim as well

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A new low ;)

 

Damn that Seggiebii and his love for amoeba and Pukemon!

Edited by Ronnie

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It is true though @Ronnie, why should we believe what Nintendo tell us going forward when they have lied a fair bit?

 

The WiiU doesn't do what they said it would (have online functions on par with the competition, work with 2 Gamepads, have huge 3rd Party support), they've not shown any evidence or backed up things that they've said they would address (no droughts after having learnt from the 3DS and then again, after having not learnt that first time, saying they'd not suffer droughts in the WiiU's 2nd year... which they then have done).

 

How can we take them on what they say? How can you not call it lies?

 

it's not just the droughts, but the fact that for about a year all they released were bloody platformers. And they've done nothing to replace all the missing 3rd party games. To let both FIFA and PES go is insanity, i don't think you can underestimate how damaging it is to not have a football game on the console.

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it's not just the droughts, but the fact that for about a year all they released were bloody platformers. And they've done nothing to replace all the missing 3rd party games. To let both FIFA and PES go is insanity, i don't think you can underestimate how damaging it is to not have a football game on the console.

 

 

Other consoles release nothing but shooters, Nintendo consoles release nothing but platformers.

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Other consoles release nothing but shooters, Nintendo consoles release nothing but platformers.

 

This statement isn't correct.

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To let both FIFA and PES go is insanity, i don't think you can underestimate how damaging it is to not have a football game on the console.

 

And because of that, you'd maybe expect a Mario Strikers being released to make sense... But they make Tennis instead...

 

This statement isn't correct.

 

Probably best to just ignore now? :hmm:

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