IGN-GameCube: Nintendo Going Back to the Basics

"Early Thursday morning Nintendo confirmed that it had posted a loss for the beginning half of the fiscal year, the first time ever in the company's history..."

"In a meeting with investors and analysts, Nintendo detailed more of its philosophies and business plans in regard to its future in the game industry. And it appears that, despite the growing popularity of complex adult-geared software and rapidly growing numbers in the online arena, the company will "go back to the basics."

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This is so the wrong philosophy, and I feel bad for Nintendo. The gaming industry and the fans have just passed the company buy and it seems like they are falling into a typical trap that their failure to evolve and lead there market means that there is something wrong with the Market and not the way that they are doing business. Nintendo deserves much credit, they have created some awesome fantastically fun games in their time, but they are done. What made Nintendo was their ability to be scrappy and push a new market not dodgy and old fartish about making "back to basic games".

I mean how do you take a cutting edge industry and believe that" back to basics is the answer? It is such a defeatist attitude. They are saying that they cannot compete in todays market so they need to somehow recapture the glory days of old, but they are doing that by looking at nostalgia, not the sound and swift business practices that made them great. For it was not some great polished software designer that brought them to greatness, it was a man who wanted to manufacture coat hangers for kids. Miyamoto-san used the crappy 8bit tools he was given to innovate with and created interesting, and ground-breaking games. It's like saying that the company should go back to making playing cards because thats what where gaming really is, "that was fun", "thats when we made money".

They need to capture adult disposable income, like Sony, and they need to innovate, like dare I say M$. I was always taken back by the glut of thousands of crappy PS1 games on the market for 5$ while the 64 could barely scrape together 100 titles all over 50$. I don;t always want to play great games. Some times I want to play fun games, sometimes I want to pick it up and play it for 10 mins and put it down. I have no personally connection to Mario or any of the brand characters that N wants to hang its hat on, beyond the fact that Mario 64 revolutionized gaming. We live in the Mario 64 era, few games have been made since that break that mold. That game was innovative, it took a classic idea, and took it to the next level, the last thing 64 did was go back to basics.

Basics killed Sunshine, basics will kill Double Dash. To hell with the basics Nintendo, don't fall for it, you have been back to the basics for too long already.