I'm waiting for someone to post a photo of Iwata-san holding a Nintendo DS and Wii and boasting, "Who's laughing now, losers?"
All of these issues were raised 20 years ago by Nintendo: endlessly rising software budgets, endless obsession over hardware power, stagnating customer base, and a lack of new customers brought into the fold. Their resulting innovations were enormously successful, yet also highly controversial and turbulent among software publishers and traditional "hardcore" gamers. Many of those gamers are still grouchy about the Wii Remote and all those dreaded "casuals" crowding around the television set.
Meanwhile, the children who grew up playing Wii became the young adults who play Switch.
I honestly don't know where Microsoft goes forward with their Xbox. I feel that its original aim--to become the hub for the digital convergence in the living room, the fabled "set-top box" that was the computer industry's dream for decades--was thrown awry for several reasons, including not only Sony (who, frankly, invented the PlayStation so they could sell DVD & Blu-Ray), but especially Apple, who stole the set-top box away from the television, and instead attached it to a mobile telephone. The iPhone was Steve Jobs' revenge for Macworld '97.
Anyway, that's my crazy conspiracy of the day. Knock it around and kick the tires if you wish.
I always felt that Microsoft lost the wind in their sales when they killed the Kinect. That was their giant gamble for conquering the living room, and had the technology fully worked properly, history might have turned out differently. But it was too ambitious and too buggy for its own good, and there was also a host of problems that consumers would have loathed (you just know the Kinect would have been used to scan your living room and shut down your DVD player if too many "unauthorized" people were watching).
A decade ago, I would have believed that videogames would evolve away from the idea of a dedicated console, a special box that plugs into your TV and only plays games. The rise of mobile games and online services pointed in that direction. Today, things feel very different, and we see that those innovations came with their own problems, particularly Apple's iOS wide-open policy towards publishing software apps and the resulting collapse in pricing (games purchased for as little as 99 cents) and the rise of microtransactions and "pay-to-play." Meanwhile, we have online services like Steam and GOG that seem to occupy their own unique space without crashing Sony/MS/Nintendo's turf.
I hold that there are three ironclad rules for the videogame industry, three Prime Directives. These are the following: The Bushnell Rule ("A videogame should be easy to learn, hard to master"), The Yamauchi Rule ("A videogame console is nothing more than a box," aka "software is everything"), and The Kalinske Rule ("That box must sell at the mass-market price to survive").
Microsoft's move towards publishing on rival platforms should sound an alarm to anyone who lived through the Atari era of the 1980s, and to a lesser extent, Sega's struggles in the 1990s. If your games are available everywhere, you might earn more revenue in the short run, but in the long run you've diluted your brand. Consumers don't need to buy your box to play the games. If you want to play Mario, you need Nintendo's box, full stop. You have no choice, which results in greater hardware sales, which leads to stronger software support, which leads to more customers, yadda yadda. That has been the successful business model for the past 40 years, and despite the rise of digital distribution and online play, that model still stands.
Of course, we shall see this theory put to the test when Switch 2 comes out. Videogame history is not kind to returning champions, as Atari, Sega, Sony and even Nintendo found out.
Does this mean it will soon be Microsoft's turn to "exit the hardware business, go software?" Sega was hit with that all through the mid-90s, and Nintendo even faced those catcalls by the end of the Gamecube era. If Xbox is going to survive as a hardware platform, and not just a software brand, then some innovative thinking is required.
Of course, we should also point out for the record that Microsoft will probably hold a total monopoly on every business computer on the planet until the end of time. Nothing is ever going to touch Windows and Office, and that basically gives the company more money than God. Their market capitalization is currently just over $3 trillion dollars. They could keep Xbox chugging along and collecting revenue and writing off the losses until the sun explodes. Or they could just decide to buy half the videogame industry. Heck, they're big enough to swallow up Sony if they were really serious, although that would be a challenge, to put it mildly. That's the sort of thing that leads to a shooting war.
Sooo...is there a point to this? I think the important thing is that I drank too much soda earlier this evening, and that I was wearing an onion on my belt, which is the style of the time. And I'd much rather be playing Atari 5200 (with that super-cool custom-built dual joystick) than whatever the hell Xbox 4 is called.
