By Nelson Schneider - 07/23/17 at 03:39 PM CT
For years, we heard the cries of those in the know: “PC gaming is dead! Rampant piracy, nobody is buying new PCs, and the market is stagnant! DOOOOOOOOOOM!” But now the tables have turned, leaving the future of console gaming a big, empty void filled with more questions and uncertainty than hope and excitement.
It all started when Microsoft tried to do a console and couldn’t get their heads truly into the console space. They ended up creating a horrific chimera that bolted a lot of negative PC gaming aspects from the 90s and 00s onto a unified, console-style hardware target.
Sony followed suit with their disastrous PlayStation 3, and transformed the appliance-like simplicity of the PlayStation brand into a knock-off PC that could even run Linux at one point in time. I have called this elision of PC gaming and console gaming a “singularity” moment, but it has ultimately proven to be better for one side than the other.
Nintendo, however, has proven that there is still a market for dedicated, appliance-like game consoles… or at least, they’ve proven that there’s still a market for old NES games. Right before the company launched their new Switch handheld/console hybrid, they also released a limited run of a microconsole called the NES Classic, which contained 30 pre-installed ROMs. The NES Classic sold out in record time, and despite the visible, overwhelming demand, Nintendo has refused to make any more of them, instead moving on to the next stop on their trip down Memory Lane, the SNES Classic, which will likely suffer from the same supply problems and become an even more tantalizing piece of bait for scalpers this Fall.
Nintendo’s problem here is that they are being profoundly stupid. The company has always had difficulty determining the value of its old games, selling heavily DRMed ROMs of NES games for $5 a piece on the Wii’s Virtual Console, while also charging Wii owners who purchased a WiiU an extra dollar per game they wished to transfer to their new device. The NES Classic, with its $60 MSRP for the hardware, a retro controller, and 30 games was just too good of a deal for the consumer, it seems.
Nintendo’s cleaving to true console-like simplicity didn’t win them any love from gamers at large, and it won them even less love from Western third-party developers who incessantly complain about patch limits and approval processes that are more stringent than on other platforms. Nintendo, as a former toy company, has been trying to hang onto the simplicity of true consoles in a market that simply has no more room for it. The company’s president has even gone on record claiming that the integrated hardware/software business is where the company can provide the best experience for gamers, while simultaneously dallying in micromacrotransaction-laden mobile games like “Super Mario Run,” “Fire Emblem Heroes,” and “Pokemon GO.” Nintendo seems somewhat more willing to address the mobile issue due to the overwhelming presence of the platform in Japan than they do to address the biggest, hairiest, mammoth-like elephant in the room.
I have said before that Nintendo shouldn’t do like Sega. The changing gaming ecosystem since I wrote that has caused me to change my mind somewhat. Sega, you see, sells a big bundle of DRM-free ROMs with an emulator on Steam (so does Atari (delenda est) for that matter). This is the type of classic game distribution system I’ve been advocating for years (and I would have bought Sega’s bundle during the last Summer Sale if I didn’t already own all of those games in “Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection”). But Nintendo lives in a world of 20 years ago where artificial scarcity can be controlled by a rightsholder (like Disney, with the Disney Vault), driving-up demand and, therefore, simultaneously driving-up the prices the market will bear.
Nintendo shouldn’t bow-out of creating consoles or handhelds immediately or all at once. Instead, Nintendo should take this golden opportunity to perform an honest to goodness scientific study. Sell classic games on Steam. Sell classic games on the Nintendo Network. See which brings in more revenue. Build a Nintendo Network runtime emulator for Windows. Provide it, and official JoyCon drivers, for free. Compare game sales between the Nintendo Network running on Nintendo hardware vs. anyone’s hardware. The investment required to add PC as a platform nowadays is minimal, hence why all of the third-parties are rolling their own clients. Nintendo wouldn’t be giving up any significant control by rolling their own client as well, and they would even be able to provide the same great “surprises and gameplay experiences” of integrated hardware/software by simply providing the user interface device (read: controller) instead of the entire box. The amount of money to be saved by eliminating the hardware production pipeline would be tremendous, and the experience ultimately wouldn’t change. Hell, Nintendo could (read: should) port this theoretical software platform to mobile devices that run iOS and Android. Nintendo fans could take their official Nintendo controllers to any platform and have an authentic Nintendo gaming experience.
Mayflash, a Chinese peripheral company, has already plotted-out a roadmap for Nintendo to follow with their future hardware endeavors. Mayflash sells adapters for all sorts of videogame controllers – with a significant portion of their catalog devoted to Nintendo products – that allow them to be used on other devices. Even if Nintendo holds an uncontrollable paranoia about what customers might do with unfettered access to the operating system underlying their hardware peripherals, they need only look at the hacking of the original Wii to see the results. A tiny portion of the Wii’s ownership ever bothered to hack the thing. Hardware still sold well, because it’s impossible to download a Wiimote, while (first-party) software still sold well to the overwhelming majority of the userbase that didn’t bother with hacking or piracy. That’s the way it works on PC, too.
The console space is now dominated by mid-generation hardware refreshes, selling at a loss, mandatory subscriptions, and rampant multi-platforming that makes every device’s library look the same as every other device’s. Microsoft is wavering, and the future of Xbox seems like it will be synonymous with the future of Windows. Sony is riding high right now, but as we saw last-gen, their hubris will bring them crashing back down before too long. Who knows what they will do? Nintendo, being the last-place, last bastion of true console-style simplicity, needs to realize that the writing is on the wall, and that the type of experience they want to offer would be best done in new ways.
