[Goudaquisition] Nintendo and their Hubris
Jan 11, 2014 6:35:12 GMT -8
Lightning, ┌༼ຈل͜ຈ༽┘, and 1 more like this
Post by Deleted on Jan 11, 2014 6:35:12 GMT -8
hu·bris
noun \ˈhyü-brəs\
: a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence
Well hello there, lovelies - okay, I won't ever use that again. So, it's been a while. I've been reading up on some interesting news regarding Nintendo. Extraordinary, amazing, painful, loathsome news. Now, this... this is more of a rant based Goudaquisition, yet I will keep it as objectified as possible based on the facts there have been showcased within.
Now, I love Nintendo. I think they're one of the greatest game companies out there and I love their stuff. However, their consoles, in more recent times, have been hit and misses. The N64 sold well against the Sega Saturn, but lost tremendously to the Playstation. The Nintendo Gamecube sold a measly 21.74 million copies compared to the 155 million of the PS2 and 24 million of the Xbox. Yet, the Wii sold nearly 100 million compared to PS3 and Xbox close to 90 million mark. However, the Wii lacked the many titles that the HD Twins had.
Now, the Wii U? Hah! 3.4 million units as of now. The PS4? 4.2 million as of December 28th (and the console just came out). The Xbox One is at a close 3 million, again just coming out. How does this bode for Nintendo? Not so well.
It's even worse when regarding the status that is the Wii U: no third-party support, abysmal sales each week, an OS that's plagued with issues, and weak hardware compared to the new twins. Is it the third party that is at fault? Is it Nintendo? Well, it should be obvious, if you have a brain and can read the title, that it is Nintendo's fault - 100% of it all.
Let's see why.
According to "The Secret Developers" on Digital Foundry, home to some trustworthy reports, Nintendo has completely dropped the ball before the console even came out.
Nintendo, when unveiling the prototype of the Wii U, were told that while they [the developers] loved the controller, the CPU was weak. They said it was slower than Xbox 360 CPU. According to the article Nintendo representatives "dismissed it saying that the 'low power consumption was more important to the overall design goals' and that 'other CPU features would improve the performance over the raw numbers'."
Now, here are some quotes that DF put up that were incredibly fascinating.
In regards to debugs:
It was said that Nintendo integrated their development tools into Visual Studio, the "de facto" standard of development. However that made things difficult and they had to consult other companies who faced the same issues. When they were able to fix these issues, the compiling of each code took up to four minutes - keep in mind that other development kits took up to a minute.
In regards to contact with Nintendo:
Getting games to run:
Since the CPU isn't the strongest, they had to cut down a lot of features and the results are still not pleasant. However, the GPU was a different story. It was better than the Xbox 360's and it was able to do far more. They wanted to offload some of the hurdles of the CPU to the GPGPU, but due to timeframes and the fact they were a smaller team; they couldn't. Oh and the GPGPU is a Radeon HD4850, which was speculated a lot on NeoGAF.
Alas, the GPU is leagues away from being just as good as the ones in the PS4 and Xbone.
Online:
I will just leave these two here... see for yourself.
... Yeah...
So overall, here are the issues from launch:
Oh, Nintendo. I love you, but goddamn - you all need a reality check. There is more said than I can possibly quote, so check out the article for more than shown here. Now let me have my rant.
Okay, Nintendo, you're no longer in any place to start getting arrogant. You were arrogant during the N64 and Gamecube era. You were arrogant and ignorant of the 3DS issues. You were ignorant to the Wii U issues and you still are! You have done nothing to placate these issues. These issues are still out there. The OS is far from complete, as you have said so yourselves. The online is nowhere near as capable as the rivals you've tried to outdo with little to no experience.
Your staff wasn't properly trained for HD and while Super Mario 3D World is gorgeous, the issue still stands as how you can survive these issues. You ignored the 3DS launch failures and repeated them with the Wii U. The 3rd party dropped like shit all because of you all choosing to ignore them in favor for yourselves.
This isn't the 80s where you had a monopoly in the industry. As of right now, the Wii U is dying and you're letting it die before it even began to shine. The console is great; weak, but great. It has the potential, but you and your arrogance decided to send it out incomplete. I knew it was incomplete, but I thought that you all needed to polish it up and it'll be a swift sail to a glorious HD year for you. Alas, that is not to be. The OS is still slow, there is still a drought going in terms of software, and you're doing nothing at all.
Your games are doing okay, but they're not doing as well as you'd think. Super Mario 3D World didn't hit a high note as you all wanted, Wind Waker HD is the worst selling Zelda game in Japan, Pikmin 3 and Wonderful 101 died out, and your future titles may share the same fate.
As a company, you're all in the green. However, your console... not so much.
If the Wii U fails, you all better learn from these mistakes. You should have planned ahead. You should have started programming in HD the moment the Wii U was in a sort of testing phase for you all. You should have worked on the infrastructure at the moment the 3DS was being made or at least out. You should have dropped your arrogance and accept critiques from other companies about the hindering hardware.
Sony was the same way and look at them, they're in the toilet regarding their own electronics. They're trying to bring themselves back up. Don't suffer that fate, Nintendo.
You need to get out of your bubble, before it's too late and the Wii U becomes unsalvageable. I love the console, but your hubris is sending it to an early grave.
Let me know what you all think.
noun \ˈhyü-brəs\
: a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence
Just a rant. Shaken, not stirred.
Well hello there, lovelies - okay, I won't ever use that again. So, it's been a while. I've been reading up on some interesting news regarding Nintendo. Extraordinary, amazing, painful, loathsome news. Now, this... this is more of a rant based Goudaquisition, yet I will keep it as objectified as possible based on the facts there have been showcased within.
Now, I love Nintendo. I think they're one of the greatest game companies out there and I love their stuff. However, their consoles, in more recent times, have been hit and misses. The N64 sold well against the Sega Saturn, but lost tremendously to the Playstation. The Nintendo Gamecube sold a measly 21.74 million copies compared to the 155 million of the PS2 and 24 million of the Xbox. Yet, the Wii sold nearly 100 million compared to PS3 and Xbox close to 90 million mark. However, the Wii lacked the many titles that the HD Twins had.
Now, the Wii U? Hah! 3.4 million units as of now. The PS4? 4.2 million as of December 28th (and the console just came out). The Xbox One is at a close 3 million, again just coming out. How does this bode for Nintendo? Not so well.
It's even worse when regarding the status that is the Wii U: no third-party support, abysmal sales each week, an OS that's plagued with issues, and weak hardware compared to the new twins. Is it the third party that is at fault? Is it Nintendo? Well, it should be obvious, if you have a brain and can read the title, that it is Nintendo's fault - 100% of it all.
Let's see why.
According to "The Secret Developers" on Digital Foundry, home to some trustworthy reports, Nintendo has completely dropped the ball before the console even came out.
Nintendo, when unveiling the prototype of the Wii U, were told that while they [the developers] loved the controller, the CPU was weak. They said it was slower than Xbox 360 CPU. According to the article Nintendo representatives "dismissed it saying that the 'low power consumption was more important to the overall design goals' and that 'other CPU features would improve the performance over the raw numbers'."
Over the coming weeks people started doing other calculations trying to guess the performance of the machine - don't forget that this is a long time before development kits were available to do actual tests. Some people even built custom PC rigs with under-clocked CPUs to try and gauge performance of their code on these machine. Again, the almost universal answer was that it wasn't going to be powerful enough to run next-gen engines and it might even struggle to do current-gen (PS3 and X360) titles. But in spite of these tests the management made the decision, for various business reasons, to release a game on the Wii U. So now we had to get stuck in and try to make a game.
Now, here are some quotes that DF put up that were incredibly fascinating.
In regards to debugs:
It was said that Nintendo integrated their development tools into Visual Studio, the "de facto" standard of development. However that made things difficult and they had to consult other companies who faced the same issues. When they were able to fix these issues, the compiling of each code took up to four minutes - keep in mind that other development kits took up to a minute.
This doesn't sound bad, but when you are debugging and making lots of changes, these additional times add up. If you made 10 changes to a file in a morning, you could be spending over 50 minutes waiting for the linker to complete, which is a lot of wasted time... As a team, we lost days of time to the compile/link/debug overheads and this negatively impacted the amount of features that we could put into our game before the release date.
In regards to contact with Nintendo:
But soon after starting this we ran into some issues that the (minimal) documentation didn't cover, so we asked questions of our local Nintendo support team. They didn't know the answers so they said they would check with the developers in Japan and we waited for a reply. And we waited. And we waited.
After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week !
After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week !
Getting games to run:
Getting the game to run at its target frame-rates... follows the standard pattern. Get the game running, optimise the code and if it still won't perform, cut back on features until it does fit.
Since the CPU isn't the strongest, they had to cut down a lot of features and the results are still not pleasant. However, the GPU was a different story. It was better than the Xbox 360's and it was able to do far more. They wanted to offload some of the hurdles of the CPU to the GPGPU, but due to timeframes and the fact they were a smaller team; they couldn't. Oh and the GPGPU is a Radeon HD4850, which was speculated a lot on NeoGAF.
Alas, the GPU is leagues away from being just as good as the ones in the PS4 and Xbone.
Online:
I will just leave these two here... see for yourself.
At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in [Nintendo's] development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?
We started to ask questions about how they could possibly launch the console, which was a matter of weeks away, with a partially developed OS... Launch day came around and the answer became clear: Nintendo was late - very late - with its network systems.
... Yeah...
So overall, here are the issues from launch:
- Dismissal of hardware issues
- Lack of complete documentation regarding coding
- Bottlenecks due to choice
- No online experience with other rival companies
- Half-assed OS
Oh, Nintendo. I love you, but goddamn - you all need a reality check. There is more said than I can possibly quote, so check out the article for more than shown here. Now let me have my rant.
Okay, Nintendo, you're no longer in any place to start getting arrogant. You were arrogant during the N64 and Gamecube era. You were arrogant and ignorant of the 3DS issues. You were ignorant to the Wii U issues and you still are! You have done nothing to placate these issues. These issues are still out there. The OS is far from complete, as you have said so yourselves. The online is nowhere near as capable as the rivals you've tried to outdo with little to no experience.
Your staff wasn't properly trained for HD and while Super Mario 3D World is gorgeous, the issue still stands as how you can survive these issues. You ignored the 3DS launch failures and repeated them with the Wii U. The 3rd party dropped like shit all because of you all choosing to ignore them in favor for yourselves.
This isn't the 80s where you had a monopoly in the industry. As of right now, the Wii U is dying and you're letting it die before it even began to shine. The console is great; weak, but great. It has the potential, but you and your arrogance decided to send it out incomplete. I knew it was incomplete, but I thought that you all needed to polish it up and it'll be a swift sail to a glorious HD year for you. Alas, that is not to be. The OS is still slow, there is still a drought going in terms of software, and you're doing nothing at all.
Your games are doing okay, but they're not doing as well as you'd think. Super Mario 3D World didn't hit a high note as you all wanted, Wind Waker HD is the worst selling Zelda game in Japan, Pikmin 3 and Wonderful 101 died out, and your future titles may share the same fate.
As a company, you're all in the green. However, your console... not so much.
If the Wii U fails, you all better learn from these mistakes. You should have planned ahead. You should have started programming in HD the moment the Wii U was in a sort of testing phase for you all. You should have worked on the infrastructure at the moment the 3DS was being made or at least out. You should have dropped your arrogance and accept critiques from other companies about the hindering hardware.
Sony was the same way and look at them, they're in the toilet regarding their own electronics. They're trying to bring themselves back up. Don't suffer that fate, Nintendo.
You need to get out of your bubble, before it's too late and the Wii U becomes unsalvageable. I love the console, but your hubris is sending it to an early grave.
Let me know what you all think.
