It’s a sign of the peculiar gap that exists between culture and commerce when a legendary video game company produces some of the best work seen in recent memory and still ends up in the red. That’s been Nintendo’s sorry lot for much of the past three years. And as the company revealed last night in its third quarter earnings report, it doesn’t look like things are going to get better any time soon.
The main problem Nintendo has been facing is that nobody wants to buy its Wii U console. Well, not nobody. But not enough people to keep its investors happy. The company revealed last night that it has sold 5.86 million Wii U units since the console first came out in November 2012. This came little more than a week after the company announced that it had made a massive cut in its Wii U sales forecast from 9 million to 2.8 million by the end of March, leading it to shift its overall projections from a net profit for the fiscal year to a net loss.
This places the company in a dire position relative to its closest competitors, Microsoft and Sony, which both released competing consoles in time for the 2013 holiday season. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are, objectively speaking, more powerful pieces of hardware than the Wii U. Gamers, gearheads that they so often are, have therefore taken to the two new machines with an enthusiasm unseen during the Wii U’s launch period: Sony announced earlier this month that the PS4 had sold 4.2 million units as of December 28, 2013. Microsoft, meanwhile, revealed that the Xbox One had sold 3.9 million units as of the end of 2013.
Both of these consoles first came out late last November, so even if they don’t maintain this level of momentum, they’re off to a better start than Nintendo was with the Wii U. And regardless of PS4 and Xbox One sales, Microsoft and Sony both have another advantage by virtue of being large, diverse businesses that can plunge a wealth of capital into their gaming divisions and not expect an immediate return. Nintendo doesn’t have something like Microsoft Office; all it has are its games and the systems on which to play them.
All of this strikes fans of Nintendo’s many beloved gaming properties as unfair because it’s not immediately clear what, if anything, the company is doing wrong. In 2013, it released a number of games that everybody seemed to agree weren’t just good, but phenomenal. Super Mario 3D World, Pikmin 3, and the new 3DS game Animal Crossing topped many year-end lists. Seasoned game critics at major sites like GameSpot, IGN, and Polygon all agreed that the new 3DS Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds, was one of the best games ever to grace the franchise. Kotaku’s Mike Fahey started his review of it by saying he hasn’t “enjoyed a game in The Legend of Zelda franchise this much in more than 20 years.”
This is all the more impressive when you consider how old these franchises are. I mean, Mario has been around since 1981. He’s got a decade on Sonic the Hedgehog, and Nintendo is still finding fresh ways to bring the guy back over and over again while his speedy rival has faded into obscurity. The same goes for Pac-Man, who first appeared in arcades a little more than a year before Mario but was never able to evolve with the same agility as the portly Italian plumber.
The pressing question Nintendo therefore faces is: can characters like Mario keep evolving to suit a modern audience? From a quality perspective, I’d say the answer is yes—Super Mario 3D World really is an incredibly piece of work. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Many critics (myself included) have therefore begun to suggest a sort of Hail Mary pass by pleading with Nintendo to make its games available on smartphones and tablets.
At a recent press conference covered by The Wall Street Journal, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata made a moving defense against this kind of radical change.
“When you adapt too much, you lose what’s unique about you,” he said.
I don’t want Nintendo to lose the unique brand of energy it brings to modern video games. But I also don’t want the company lose its very ability to do so either.
From motherboard.vice.com
