Nintendo Burned By EA

Nintendo stormed the world in late 2006 with the Wii, a console that sold faster than any console in history and oftentimes in it's early years sold twice the amount per month that the PS3 and Xbox 360 sold combined. But in recent times Nintendo has struggled to gain any traction, oftentimes seeming like an afterthought and scraping by on sub-40K units a month sales in the United States. Numbers that low aren't just bad, they're shockingly bad and usually only seen by aging platforms on their way to retirement. To say the WiiU is struggling is an understatement, it seems more like a case of being stillborn.

In this sad state of affairs for the Big N, who managed to get a decently positive reception at their E3 Nintendo Direct broadcast based on the exclusive titles Bayonetta 2 and X, the wrap up to their E3 week came with EA making a public statement that's certain to cause some corporate hand-wringing. In an interview with CVG, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau had the following to say:

"Gibeau told Joystiq this week that Nintendo must "sell more boxes" for EA to resume full support for the platform."

Also of mention in the article were a number of annual EA sports games, which typically release on as many devices as humanly possible, passing on WiiU this year. This is not a good sign for Nintendo, who is already facing a continual downward revision of their forecasts, has a stagnating handheld market and has a CEO who will likely be forced to live up to his promise of resigning if Nintendo doesn't make their fiscal year goals. At this stage, with third party games support rapidly drying up and industry trendsetters like EA starting the ball rolling on publishers and developers actively making it public knowledge they are abandoning the platform, I think it's only a matter of whether Iwata remains CEO for the full year or resigns his commission early.

Even though I have been a critic of Nintendo in recent years due to their localization failures, their increasingly repetitive game releases, their long droughts of software support on their platforms and their inability to adapt to modern internet fucntionality in regards to online accounts and transactions, it really is sad to see them in this shape. Nintendo was a vital part of my childhood and it's amazing that the company which brought us so many all-time classics now can't figure out how to stop their recently launched platforms from dying on the vine. With exclusives like X and Bayonetta 2, along with the inevitable high definition Legend of Zelda, it would be nice if they could get in touch with the gaming audience at large again, but it seems they are struggling to even comprehend how to begin.

I suspect EA sounding off on dropping support will be a catalyst for more companies to follow suit and begin removing WiiU from their mutliplatform strategies. Hopefully the Big N can turn the momentum around and regain the support of the third party publishers, if for no other reason than to become a worthwhile opponent to the seemingly increasing juggernaut of Sony's Playstation 4 and help insure that good competition will keep Sony from regaining the incredible arrogance they displayed prior to the PS3 launch.

E3 2013: X

E3 2013: Bayonetta 2

The Calm Before the Storm

 

Today is the final day of relative peace and quiet before E3, and for the first time I'm not excited by the prospect of what I'm going to hear. I should be, considering that we have 2 brand new consoles debuting and we have a contender who's not doing so well right now and knows they need to knock it out of the park with killer games to stop the stagnation of their recently launched platform. This should be a grand show with the blockbuster announcements from all those hungry to get a foothold in the hearts and minds of the gaming audience as the new generation descend upon us.

But thanks to the malicious activity of the industry of late I'm filled with dread instead of hope. The WiiU is DRM-free but 3rd parties have all but abandoned the device. Microsoft is going forth with a horrible DRM platform on Xbone that virtually ensures I won't ever own one so long as that software is a "feature". It's still unclear how Sony is proceeding on the DRM front. If Sony advances a DRM scheme similar to Microsoft I may just call it quits on console gaming altogether. Even if they announce that the forever-in-development games The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 5 and speculated unannounced games like Kingdom Hearts 3 are now being designed for the Playstation 4, I would be hard-pressed to find justification in buying the machine to play them. And yes, if Sony has DRM similar to Xbone on the PS4 they will receive just as much hatred as Microsoft has in my future ranting blog posts.

So we now stand on the eve of E3, with both the Microsoft and Sony conferences happening tomorrow. I find myself wondering, as I did in one of the very first blog posts I wrote here, if the AAA Gaemz Industree™ which is pointing a gun at it's own head will squeeze the trigger and pre-emptively ruin the entire next console generation before it even starts. Is there is anyone coming to their senses before they ruin things? Microsoft can choose to remove the DRM if they want to, Sony can choose to not implement it at all, the question is will they? The ball is now in their court and all we can do is wait. 

The storm is coming my friends, the storm is coming.

Will The Industry Squeeze the Trigger?

Right now it seems that our beloved games industry is in trouble. Publishers and game developers within the mass market "AAA" games space have become bloated behemoths who spend absurd amounts of money on game development, oftentimes resorting to firing their CEOs, closing long-running studios and posting financial results in the red even after having games that top the charts and sell 3 million units in a fiscal quarter. We've seen entire companies go under and others consolidate and contract, all while homogenizing their products to imitate the top franchises in their chosen genres and creating an environment where most major $60 games all feature the same modes, the same mechanics, the same character and plot archetypes, the same features and the same dependence on pitiful pre-order DLC bonuses and gimmicky downloadable garbage which one would expect to see from a free PC game modding community.

The worst we've seen is the stale and bloated corporate industry masters, unable to grasp what it is their audiences want, flail around wildly at every strawman they can to find something, anything, to blame their performance and management woes on. Piracy, used games, Gamestop, game rentals, negative reviews and all manner of other excuses have been made, and the industry has marched ever onward with badly implemented and sleazy digital rights management schemes to try and curb behavior they disapprove of. Oftentimes these schemes result in trampling on consumers' expected rights to use products they purchase in the manner they choose and burdening paying customers with barriers to their gaming while doing almost nothing to curb things like internet piracy.

With the Nintendo Wii U currently bombing at trainwreck-spectacle levels in the market and the upcoming Xbox One console implementing system-wide DRM measures that penalize those who might wish to trade or borrow games, use Gamefly or Redbox or allow someone to use their disc on their own account, it's become clear that the gamer backlash against Nintendo's hardheaded insistence on ignoring their own market and Microsoft shitting all over theirs outright has become a very, very noticeable trend that should cause the industry to shake in fear. Out of the "Big Three" who have dominated living room gaming for the past few decades, two of them are seeing an outright revolt, with one dying on the vine from apathy and one facing the collective wrath of the entire gaming community before their product even enters the market.

This leaves us with one last contender to the next-generation throne, Sony, and their upcoming Playstation 4 console. Sony is at the crossroads now, and the decisions they make before launch I believe will determine whether we go back to a PS2 era situation where one console takes 80+% of the market and offers a viable outlet for developers and publishers to succeed and expand even as the competing platforms struggle to gain significant marketshare, or if we see a collapse of the industry to levels more reminiscent of the late 80's and early 90's.

If Sony follows Microsoft in restricting the rights of paying customers then I predict there's a good chance that console gaming as we know it will become an irrelevant niche, suitable only for the most sycophantic of corporate cockmunchers who will willingly part with their money to buy an expensive pseudo-computer with $60+ software that will be unusable once those who grant us permission to use the products we buy decide to axe their services.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth"

The above quote is from the famous poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, and is a perfect description of the state of the industry. As low budget consumable titles ascend and high budget behemoth games fall like stacked dominoes it seems that everyone in the corporate offices of the platform holders and publishers face a choice. They can either double-down on the losing strategies they've employed so far or change to control their costs and serve the end-consumer better. Unfortunately it seems the early outlook has seen many of the big players continue on their path of self annihilation. As this current generation of hardware rapidly reaches it's end, time is running out for the industry players to reverse course and stop a self-inflicted implosion. Will they take the road less traveled and succeed at expanding the gaming business again, or will they end up putting the gun to their head once and for all and squeezing the trigger?