All you want to know on Nintendo Revolution

The Revolution Philosophy

The Revolution Philosophy

Introduction

The video game market has gained considerable expansion since it appeared to the public (early eighteen). In order to offer a better game experience, video game systems offer smarter graphics, optimized sound effects and so on at each generation. These improvements are also developed, of course, to appeal the consumer. However, the basis of each video game that is released today lies on concepts from very old games. At this time, do we often see the emergence of new concepts? The answer is: no. When it is the case, the game is usually seen as a masterpiece, as it innovates and allows a new gaming experience. With these things in mind, we could predict that the future of gaming is using concepts previously developed in games with better graphics and a more complex gameplay. So evolution of hardware would only be a succession of machines, always more powerful. But would a player with this point of view would be a long-term player? Certainly not. In this article, we'll try to explain why Nintendo Revolution will be a real revolution in gaming and why its development strategy is so relevant to the situation in which the market is.

Why and how innovate?

Innovation is a very dangerous thing because of its randomness: it costs much to the company, and this makes unsure the success of the product. Cost reasons are obvious as innovation needs research & development, a very expansive domain with uncertain results. Furthermore, even if players always ask for something new, they're very attached to well-known concepts and are refractory when you present them a new concept. You can find this paradox in the domain of 2D fighting games for example. However, if innovation is thought in a ingenious way, then it will be a success: just look how many Nintendogs games have been sold in the world.

The risks of innovation explain why editors prefer improving concepts, or rather proposing a simple upgrade each year (FIFA 2056...). It's easy too to release a game related to a very popular movie that has just came out. The paradox is that big companies like EA prefer to follow this point of view, whereas little companies tend to have few bucks but much ideas, and finally innovation comes quite often from them. So the key of innovation is to propose universal concepts that will be understandable in 10 seconds, or original concepts including a part of existing elements the player will be familiar with. This fragile alchemy is the key of innovation's success. You'll notice that nowadays soul of innovation lies anyway on software, and not on hardware. Controllers are basically the same since the NES : sticks and buttons. Hardware is becoming more and more powerful, but can we call it "innovation"? Basics of video games hardware have not changed much in 20 years. So a real and huge innovation would be a system offering a new kind of hardware and original software. Nintendo Revolution is on that way as we'll see in the next part.

Hardware of Revolution : designed to « expand gaming », but not only

In this part, I’ll try to extract the key points that characterize Nintendo Revolution's philosophy. We'll see how each of these points agrees with the concept of innovation and expansion of the gaming market.

Innovation allows to have long-term players, but it can appeal new players too. That's what Nintendo likes to call "Expand the market of gaming". Video game players are typically between 10 and 30 years old. Older people are afraid by complexity of video games: who hasn't heard his parents say, trying to make them play "Oh my god, all these buttons! So complicated...". A system which can be played easily even by older people would be massively more played, this is an evidence. It could make a whole family play together to video games. This aspect of simplicity is one of the keys of Revolution. Furthermore, by directly playing by moving the controller, which can represent a sword, a tennis racket, a golf club and so on, everyone can have fun immediately. These reasons explain why the Revolution will be without any doubt the console with maximal accessibility for people of various ages.

Now let's talk about the immersive side. Existing video games systems can be very immersive: if the story is fascinating enough, or if it requires much concentration, you'll make an abstraction of your whole real environment. But this is only one of the immersion aspects. A few years ago, Nintendo tried to develop immersive hardware with few success: the Virtual Boy for example. Not really a home system, not really a handled console, this system allowed not much innovation, but much headaches for sure! Poor graphics and sounds, very few games, this system did not have many reasons to convince a gamer to buy it. Nintendo worked on a virtual glove too, which has been released for the NES. This one was impressive, but not really immersive. However, this was a good attempt to make the player directly interacting with the game using moves. The Nintendo Revolution controller is a modern version of this virtual glove, much more efficient and wireless but basically this is the same thing. This controller is a very ingenious idea, because it is very similar with virtual reality or motion sensing technologies, but much cheaper, let me explain. Nowadays engineers can manipulate virtual molecules, virtual pieces of a car prototype and others with expansive and advanced systems of virtual reality (VR). Nintendo found the way to develop a controller which has the same functions as these advanced systems of VR, but much cheaper using mass production and simplification. With this new controller, your acts will be directly included in the game, there is a real fusion between the player and the game: immersion is very high.

Finally, let's talk about nostalgia. Many players who began video games with Mario Bros around 1985 have stopped to play with the age of 3D gaming. Since 1995, and the arrival of Playstation and Nintendo 64, a huge number of players did not recognize themselves in what video games were becoming. Graphics progressively took a more and more important place in gaming, and sweet concepts started to disappear. A part of these players is coming back to gaming with the Nintendo DS, which offers many 2D gaming and innovative concepts of games. One of the reasons of Nintendo DS's success is this feeling of nostalgia that this kind of players have in their heart: the good times of 2D, with NES, Super NES, Master System, Genesis... Nintendo Revolution will use player's nostalgia in a better way that Nintendo DS does: it will allow to download games from NES, Super NES and Nintendo 64, and Nintendo Revolution will be able to run every Nintendo game ever made. If you belong to the category of players I described before, you'll want a Nintendo Revolution at home for sure: you won't resist to this alchemy of retro gaming and innovation.

Well, it's a nice thing to propose new hardware and new games concepts. But innovation has a price! Just look at the price of next-gen consoles: Xbox 360 is $300-400, PS3 is announced around $400. Price is a major problem for most gamers, and this point can influence what system they'll buy. By proposing a relative low-price (less than $300), Nintendo will make Revolution available for a large part of the population. It has always been Nintendo's strategy to offer consoles at low prices, and it perfectly works: the perfect example is DS versus PSP. One of the reasons which explains why DS is a success is its price, Sony PSP does not sell so much because of its very high price ($250). Using mass production and technological tricks, Nintendo is able to offer these low prices.

Conclusion

Accessibility, immersion, nostalgia and a low price are the four key-concepts which summarize the philosophy of Nintendo Revolution. Each of these concepts brings one or several categories of players : accessibility will appeal older people, immersion will appeal people from various ages, nostalgia will bring back "old" players, and the low price will be an argument for everyone. But Nintendo Revolution does more than expanding the market of gaming: it will probably be a new basis for future generations of consoles, even if Revolution's direction is radically different from Sony and Microsoft. It's a high risk, but Nintendo saw with DS that people had a very positive feeling with the DS. Finally, the Nintendo Revolution definitely seems to be the perfect answer to the question: "How can we expand and revolutionize the market of gaming?".

posted by n5_dev @ 12:33 PM