In a financial briefing re: the future of Nintendo, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata confirmed suspicions that Café (the project name for the development of their next console) will focus on social gaming, but not in the way we currently think about social gaming.
Pointing out that Nintendo invented social gaming when they allowed for a second control pad to connect to the NES, (Editor note: Atari 2600? Pong?) Iwata claimed that Nintendo will be reinventing the wheel where it comes to social games. They will not be allowing Nintendo to connect to current social networks, or engage in any already existing social networking activities. Instead, Nintendo’s next system will still be an insular device, allowing people to connect and interact only through other Nintendo systems.
I believe that this is not a good thing. It’s a terrible thing, and it will stifle Nintendo’s progress.
I know they want to be innovative, and I respect the innovation that they’ve already brought to the gaming world with the myriad of firsts they’ve achieved, but it would be wiser in this case to admit that they were not the first with online games, and that maybe they can learn something from other online gaming systems. Perhaps there would be something to be gained from allowing the Nintendo network to connect to the broader internet.
The Wii was a dismal failure for networking and matchmaking. It was such a gigantic pain in the ass to get connected to one’s friends over the Wii network that most people I know gave up on it after the first three or four friends. Iwata even admitted in the meeting that the Wii failed to revolutionize online gaming, or even to allow it, but still insisted that Nintendo would create a new social gaming network from the ground up. “We do not have any intention to simply enter into the present social-gaming structure. Our fundamental policy is to provide Nintendo software only on Nintendo hardware,” Iwata said.
Now, I’m not saying that I want to access my farmcitytownvilles on my Café, but if I could tie my Nintendo account to my Facebook account for easier login, or even just to help find friends with Café consoles, that would be nice. Specifically having a policy which denies such simple and useful connectivity to other parts of the internet makes me weary.
There was no specific word about whether friend-codes will still be a part of Nintendo life, but I can tell you that if people still have to call their friends or post on message boards with their 16-digit codes before they can be friends, it’s not going to fly with American console owners. We’re used to social gaming networks that simply allow us to search for our friends. When we see them on the list, we select them, and add them to our list. Making that more complicated or less intuitive is not revolutionary—it’s dumb.
It’s as if the people in charge of figuring out how Nintendos should connect to one another and the internet at large are not the same people as the ones figuring out how the player will be interacting with the system. One group is a skylit room full of bright, clean-shaved innovators with their fingers on the pulse of tomorrow’s gaming industry, while the other is a cave of curmudgeonly old men, whose beard length is rivaled only by their distance from the world of gaming.
Articles RSS