General Nintendo thread

There are some games that benefit from a trailer coming out of nowhere two months in advance of a release date. There are some games where being announced that way will actively hurt them.

There's room for both Directs and shadowdropped trailers.

I'd say Directs also provide a distinct sense of identity to Nintendo announcements. It's good PR.

Part of what makes Directs good is that they give updates and spotlight smaller titles. Sure, an announcement trailer for a new installment of a beloved dormant series will get attention outside of a Direct, but will new DLC for Xenoblade or a new Chibi Robo announcement get that exposure without some help?

Additionally, there's something to be said about letting something gain traction over time rather than just throwing it out there to an unprepared audience.

I'm having the feeling that, even after the whole COVID trauma winds down, Directs will be far less frequent, and possibly abandoned. I mean, even before the pandemic, Directs have been less and less frequent. How Nintendo is actually planning to counter the hype for PS 5 and Xbox Series is beyond me.

Nintendo has been showing for the last 15 years or so that they don't really care what's going on with the Playstation and Xbox, so...

I like it when the Direct has a topic to focus on but whenever it's the standard Direct it's usually bunch of news & that's about it.

I still would totally kill for a 4K capability dock on the Switch.

And that's why they lost three generations, including this one (and the Switch won't change that no matter how well it's selling).

They should at least confirm that they have no planned Directs. Their silence is infuriating.

We got a mini Direct dropped out of the blue and a game as big as a new Paper Mario unveiled on Twitter.

Safe to say they're asleep for now.

The concept of "losing" a generation is absurd.

Tell that to WWI Europe.

Given that Nintendo typically sells their systems for a profit and gets significant sales from their exclusives, I can't really say that Nintendo's really lost in its recent outings outside the Wii-U. Given that the Switch already outsold the most recent X Box console, at worst you can say they've carved out a very comfortable number 2 position.

Nintendo hasn't won a traditional console war since the SNES.

They're doing their own thing and serving their own niche, and that's for the best.

That's incorrect, or at least subjective. The Nintendo Wii outsold its competitors by a very wide margin.

I meant "going up against a nominally powerfully console with your own" but fair enough. Nothing says the only way to make a console these days is to make a PC shaped like a George Foreman grill.

Nintendo's library is so different from the competition that it barely resembles a competition. This applies even to the 16-bit era.

Nintendo doesn't really brag about power the way Sony and Microsoft do.

Nintendo realized after the Game Cube that going their own way instead of competing directly was for the best.

Nintendo is not concerned about the competition. Nintendo functions very differently from the others.

They win in my eyes as Nintendo has the better first party titles than either Sony or Microsoft. I only have Play Station or Xbox for the third party games Nintendo doesn't have, the occasional first party release I'm interested in, or the backwards compatibility on the Xbox One.

Finaledits: Err... Switch is on track to outsell the Wii.

Edit: oh hell that's what I get for stepping away

Edited by Watashiwa on May 19th 2020 at 12:18:21 PM

Well, the reason for the major shift was almost certainly due to Iwata becoming President.

Shift, in terms of what?

Marketing ideas?

Considering the technological through-line from the NES to the Gamecube; generally a pretty large jump in power.

The Wii, however, isn't much more powerful than the Gamecube, and shows a relative C-change in the company's hardware design.

I've heard the Wii be described as two GameCubes taped together.

It kinda is.

However, I still consider the Wii to be a 7th Generation system as I do not believe a console can be considered "current gen" or "next gen" based on its hardware alone.

What the heck is a C-change?

Also, yes, the Wii is essentially an upgraded GameCube. It has an internal hard disk and modem, a real operating system, motion controls, and more RAM. It also has a more powerful CPU and GPU but based on the same architecture as the GameCube chips.

Buuut, those people who say it's a 6th-gen console are wrong. The GameCube is 6th-gen. The Wii is a new console the succeeded the GameCube and competed with the PS3 and X360, which makes it 7th-gen.