Electric Shadow

A China-Sized Door Opens for Nintendo

This is the biggest news on the business side of console gaming in 13 years, ever since consoles were banned in China back in 2000.

Consoles such as the Wii U and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation were banned under a 2000 rule to protect youths from the perceived corrupting influence of video games. Nintendo’s prospects for meeting its sales and profit forecasts this year depend on winning sales amid new devices from Sony and Microsoft Corp. released in the past two months.

“Nintendo has to explore markets in Asia, including China, in order to increase its sales and profit,” said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Holdings Inc. in Tokyo. “China is a promising market, even though there is a risk games will be pirated.”

In the same way Western companies like Google/Android (and to an extent Microsoft) have had trouble making nice with Chinese censorship laws, I can see some issues for both Microsoft and even Sony that won't be as big an impediment for Nintendo. I have a feeling Nintendo will be quicker to integrate Weibo and Weixin (WeChat) than Sony or Microsoft, for example.

XBox One's Kinect integration, along with the wild west that is XBox Live, pair for a very significant pair of stumbling blocks to get past, but they'll surmount them. Microsoft has doubled down investing in-country:

Microsoft and BesTV New Media Co., a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, in September said they formed a $79 million gaming venture to take advantage of the new rules.

The violent and extreme content of many of the Xbox's most popular games may make things more difficult, to be honest, and their draconian standards for banning and bricking consoles remotely due to suspected piracy won't go over well.

Sony's past security issues with PSN accounts might be a difficult trust issue with Chinese consumers. That Sony is an Eastern company more accustomed to dealing with strict and sometimes odd censorship laws will help them, as will the less CCTV-ish features of the PS4 as compared to Xbox. Their stronger Asian developer/publisher gives Sony a major lead with content from genre that traditionally appeal more to Chinese and Japanese gamers.

Though diminished over the last generation, Nintendo's characters carry a great deal more embedded brand value with dedicated game players and especially kids. This is especially true of Eastern players who are not as First Person Shooter-obsesssed and whose lives revolve around their mobile phones more than in the West. The re-opening of the Chinese market, more than any single event this decade, convinces me that Nintendo will revisit their cell phone gaming strategy, but not in the manner that some have insisted that they should.

Like Apple and Amazon in their own respects, Nintendo does things a certain way for long-held business and design principles, no matter what John Gruber thought (with followup) last September, and for the exact reasons that he was soundly rebuked by John Siracusa. Nintendo's signature games rely on end-to-end design planning that includes Nintendo controlling the physical control scheme. They are still and will probably always be a conservative 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men.

A Nintendo phone is not a crazy proposition, but it'll be done their own unique way if it were to happen. I just hope it isn't called Wii Phone U.

Nintendo Wants to Siphon Smartphone Games

On the heels of my forwarding the idea that Nintendo should be making their own phones in this piece about Nintendo, The Japan Times reports that Big N is doing the opposite:

Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.

The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.

The way this reads implies that they are trying to create iOS and Android middleware that will make it easy for those developers to port existing games to Wii U. That doesn't change the fact that people will be more likely to carry those games around on their non-Nintendo smartphones.

Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.

They will have to massively simplify their interface, and make the long-needed move of unifying the Virtual Console for both the Wii U and the 3DS, with Apple-like redownloading. The biggest problem facing Nintendo is that, like Toho Co., they are a 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men. They will look at backward solutions like this instead of proper overhaul tactics. Even when things are broken, the solutions do not go far enough to properly correct their course. They still view themselves internally as a Japanese company that happens to have a "foreign" audience, instead of a global company based in Japan.

Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.

The entire contents of the story read like a controlled leak designed to shape this story as "Nintendo on the upswing". The software they should be focusing on is their own Android fork ("NintendOS"?) to go with their own phone hardware.

Nintendo: Spin Attack or How They Win?

I love Nintendo. I have since I was an elementary school kid begging for an NES Action Set. The Wii U is my first Nintendo system since the Gamecube, and it hasn't been powered on in three months.

The recent System Update has drastically improved its speed, but there's a lot more wrong with it and Nintendo than loading times.

Nintendo has problems galore, many of which spilled out over the last week, following their announcement of their second consecutive annual earnings loss. I'm not sure that there is a clear path for them out of this. They have, however, done a couple of things right in the midst of a bunch of PR spin deflection. This is my analysis of the current state of Nintendo, a company that could be doing much better than they are.

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Awful Wii U Commercials

I have a Wii U. I like it. I skipped the Wii, so I have a lot to catch up on. Sales figures have been in the toilet for it. These new commercials on Nintendo's YouTube channel are so unfocused and bland, I just don't know what they're thinking.

The quickest solution to all of this is releasing three big games this summer and then keep actual games coming out instead of ports of year-plus-old games.

UPDATE: John Gholson sums up exactly how I missed this one. It's actually a commercial for a church, right?