Nintendo DSi

Nintendo launched a new hand-held this afternoon.  Some have called it underwhelming, I call it fail.

Physically the DSi is slightly thinner than the DS Lite, and boasts a slightly larger screen.  New additions also include a 3 megapixel camera on the back, because you don’t already have one on your cell phone, and a low res version on the front, which will presumably be used for some kind of chatting or facial detection gaming.  The DSi also features an SD Card slot, providing storage options for a range of new features.  So lets talk about those features.

The DSi now has a browser built-in, instead of having to put Opera into the slot, which I think is cool, but not exactly revolutionary.  There’s a built in music player as well, which is quickly becoming a standard feature on every single electronic device that could potentially be put into your pocket.  Not really impressed there either.  What I do find cool is that there is an online DSi Shop where you can buy DSiWare, which I guess is similar to WiiWare, to be stored on the DSi.  To my knowledge this is the first time a full blown handheld has implemented an end-to-end digital distribution retail channel.

In my mind, however, other than the new online retail channel, none of that is very exciting.  All of those features are implemented, and better, in any cell phone you would care to choose, and for most the cell is a device you carry around constantly, where your portable gaming system is probably not (although if it was also a phone, I would consider it).  Which brings me to another point: Battery Life.  The new DSi has 50% less battery life than the DS Lite.  Apparently the WiFi is faster as well, which to me means either higher processing speeds or wider bandwidth, both of which mean more power consumption, so don’t even get me started on what having the WiFi on will do to your battery.  Additionally, the GBA slot is gone, ending the backwards compatibility of the DS with the slew of highly excellent GBA games that were still being released a year ago. 

On the other hand, maybe the new DSi won’t have shoulder buttons that stop working after a year and a half, and hinges that break for no appearant reason.  One can hope.  Also, Club Nintendo will be available in North America by the end of the year, so that’s a plus too.

Super Mario RPG Released

God damn you nintendo, I’m an old man, and I can’t take suprises like this anymore.

FINALLY, with no prior warning, Nintendo has re-released Super Mario RPG - in my opinion the second best RPG ever made for the SNES - for the Virtual Console.  With the upcoming re-release of Chrono Trigger for the DS, if Nintendo would see fit to release the Mother games in North America, and perhaps the Secret of Evermore, my SNES revival list would be complete.

Time to dust off that Wii and get playing.

On Console Commoditization

Denis Dyack is an interesting character. While you have to respect someone who’s that vocal and passionately committed to his craft, I do have to disagree with his point of view on a regular basis. Electronic Arts and Dyack have both been quoted in popular press advocating for a single console that all developers can target without having to port their code.

Gamasutra published a summary of a talk Dyack gave at GDC Lyon 2007 this morning where he stated that not only was it desirable, it was inevitable. I have some major problems with most of the points he brings up. He implies that all technology will inherently become commoditized in the long run, distinguishable only by brand, and cites automobiles, cameras, and cell phones as examples of this.

Here’s a fun experiment you should try at home. Go to your nearest auto shop, tell them your indicator lights are burnt out, and you need new ones. Surely if automobiles are commodities, and are standardized, you should be able to do this. Except you can’t, in fact it doesn’t even help if you tell them the manufacturer of the car in question. You need to know the manufacturer, model, and year of manufacture to be able to nail down something as simple as indicator lights. This is true for nearly every component in your car.

Try buying a new lens for your DSLR camera. If you walk into a camera store and say you want a new 120 mm lens, but you don’t know the manufacturer and mount of your camera, you’re going to get some strange looks.

The entire industry of companies who’s sole purpose is to wrap existing software in their Java-based framework, and port it to every cell-phone known to man. This is not trivial, they need to maintain databases of all cell-phones they support, and adjust display sizes, input mappings, color depth, etc. to support this supposedly ‘open framework’. If you ever wondered why cell-phone games are such shit, this is a major contributing factor.

Nevertheless, all of these industries do have certain standards. These standards exist because it is beneficial to all of the manufacturers of these devices that they are inter-operable with each other. This is why cameras will all save in JPEG format, cars all run on relatively similar gasoline, and cellphones all connect to networks using a very small scope of protocols. There are infrastructural costs that are prohibitive for manufacturers to independently build on their own, so it behooves them to adopt standards for individual benefit. The fact that this happens to benefit the public is incidental.

I would argue that there already exists an ‘open-platform’ for game development. It’s called Microsoft Windows, and it runs on a PC. Using DirectX, you don’t need to care specifically what hardware a user has, you just write it such that it can handle a certain spectrum you’re willing to tolerate. Dyack dismisses the PC as a standardized platform, I assume he means that all PCs do not have the same hardware, and thus are not standard. This seems to be at odds with his previous statements regarding the standardization of cars, digital cameras, and cell phones, as none of the above have the same hardware either.

He’s right about one thing though. In a one console future, the publishers, the developers would win big time. This is probably why you only hear about this kind of thing from developers like Dyack who are feeling the portability pain, and publishers like EA that have to pay for it. While consumers would theoretically win, I would argue that they largely don’t give a shit at the moment. Most people are not going to buy more than one console, and certainly not all three. Fortunately for them, most games are available on multiple consoles, so it doesn’t affect them (and Dyack argues that exclusive content is becoming more rare anyway, thus making this a moot point).

Unfortunately, the people who don’t win in this scenario are the manufacturers. Nintendo’s entire business strategy is built around differentiating their hardware in unique ways to spawn entire genres of games that only work on their systems. A one console world is not a good place for Nintendo to be in, and they will fold up shop before they agree to that deal. The ‘economic realities’ don’t snuff up against real innovation, and Nintendo has been taking innovation to the bank since the release of the Wii.

If you believe the reports on hardware pricing, Microsoft and Sony both lose money on hardware. The method by which they regain profits is then by issuing licensing fees against developers who want to make games for their console. Selling commodity consoles completely undermines this business model. Game by their very nature push the boundaries of what is possible with hardware, so unless studios stop being interesting in creating beautiful photo-realistic graphics, this medium is going to require some expensive hardware, and that means licensing costs.

Unlike in the car industry, the cell phone industry, and the camera industry, console manufacturers have nothing to gain by adopting an open standard against which all game will run, and certainly have no interest in becoming a commodity - trust me. Nokia doesn’t want to be a commodity either, it’s just an unfortunate artifact of adopting standards due to prohibitive capital costs of not doing so. The console industry does not suffer this problem, and thus I wouldn’t be advising Silicon Knights or Electronic Arts to be holding their breath for the arrival of the one true platform. I know it sucks gentlemen, but unless you have a way to force the market conditions in a different direction, I would suggest focusing on making great game experiences and leave the economic talk alone.

As a disclaimer, I was not at Lyon GDC 2007, and so I may be misinterpreting the reports of what Dyack actually said. If by some bizarre artifact Denis ends up reading this, I would encourage him or anyone else who was at the talk to set me straight.

On WiiWare

Nintendo on Wednesday announced that they have joined Microsoft in offering a solution for independent developers to create content for their system. Full details have yet to emerge, but it would seem that WiiWare is designed to allow developers to produce games which can then be sold through the WiiShop Channel, Similar to the mechanism Microsoft is using to deploy XNA games through XBLA.

Level Up has an exclusive interview with NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime, where some interesting details were disclosed. Firstly, the pricing for a given game is determined exclusively by Nintendo. I’m not sure how this compares to the Microsoft method, as the entire “Getting my game on XBLA” process is somewhat opaque at this point (and I might add, Microsoft would do well to make it more transparent).

Secondly, WiiWare seems to not encompass libraries or tools that make to development process easier (a la XNA), but rather the simplification of the delivery channel. The argument for this is that development kits for the Wii are extremely inexpensive. While this is a valid point (They cost between $2,500 to $10,000), it’s certainly not on par with the concept behind XNA. Additionally, actually becoming an authorized developer so that you can get your hands on the kits is more complex, and as a result it is unlikely to target the homebrew community emerging around the Xbox 360. That would also not appear to be the intent, rather it would seem Nintendo is trying to simplify the process for small (but professional) development shops.

Thirdly the developer must seek its own ESRB Rating. As I don’t have a development company, I don’t even have access to the information regarding getting a game rated. There seems to be similar restrictions to getting a game rated that exist to get your hands on Wii DevKits. I would not be suprised if there was also a fee associated with getting a rating, but again this seems to tune WiiWare towards small independent developers rather than just anyone.

Reggie also states in the interview that Nintendo will not be overseeing the games, suggesting that any game that gets through this process and passes some basic requirements from Nintendo will be made available for purchase on the WiiChannel. Note that this is strictly different than the attitude Microsoft has developed. XBox Live Arcade is a carefully crafted entity into which new games are eligible only with the good graces of the managers who maintain the portfolio. In other words, XBLA will never be filled with 800 solitaire games, because Microsoft gets the final say on whether they’ll sell your game or not. The fact that Nintendo is not doing this is both good and bad. On one hand, it could conceivably encourage games that might not make it to XBLA, however possibilities exist for the marketing of a lot of crap that nobody is interested in buying.

All in all, I’m excited to see Nintendo is getting in on the independent developer market, and digital delivery, but WiiWare isn’t strictly comparable to XBLA, the two seem to be marketed at different audiences.  While many are quick to herald WiiWare as “Nintendo’s XBLA”, WiiWare does not in any way make it easy for “Anyone to create a Wii Game”.  WiiWare simplifies delivery mechanisms, not development mechanisms, so all those hopeful hobbyists will still have to remain weeping in the corner.

Now we just need to see when Sony is going to get on board.

Wii Shortages

In an interview with Home Media Magazine, Video Game Analyst Billy Pidgeon had some fairly interesting numbers (and, er, theories) to share.  Nintendo moved 259,000 Wiis last month, not a suprising development considering overall hardware sales for the industry have doubled from $659 million to $1.3 billion between Q4 2006 and Q1 2007.  According to Pidgeon, the sales on 360 and PS3 are stagnating, largely due to a lack of system-selling games.  This is due to pick up in Q3 when a number of highly anticipated titles are scheduled for release.  In the meantime during Q2 though, Nintendo has an opportunity to sweep with the Wii, that is, if they could keep them in stock.

And herein we see a problem.  Why are Wiis so hard to come by?  Pidgeon believes supply won’t reach demand until 2009 (Personally, I find this difficult to believe).  So far this year, Nintendo has managed to sell more gaming systems than everyone else combined, along with a heft chunk of peripherals to boot.  Since its release in November 2006, the Wii has sold over 2.1 Million units in the USA alone (Nevermind in Japan, where the Wii has consistently been the top selling next-gen system).  Sony can’t even close to match these numbers, and Microsoft, who’s had the 360 out for a year long than the Wii has only managed to sell 5.3 million units. 

So it’s possible that the appeal of the Wii to an audience outside of mainstream gamers has resulted in an insatiable demand for the system.  Certainly there’s been no mention of supply chain problems such as the ones Sony has suffered with its PS3, in fact, Nintendo reported in October that Wii production had exceeded expectations.  Even so, five months after the release of the system, one study showed that of 100 American game stores visited, only one had a single Wii in stock.  It’s basically impossible to order one from an online retailer, as all the major brands show the Wii being out of stock.

This is not a good scenario for Nintendo.  Despite rumors that Nintendo may be artificially constraining supply to ‘generate demand’, economics don’t tend to actually work like that.  They are in a position to take advantage of a low point in the year as far as game releases go to sell their system, but in order to do so, people need to be able to get their hands on one, and Nintendo will want them to do so before the fall line-up starts pressuring people to move towards PS3 and 360.

Even if Nintendo had not anticipated the rampant demand their system has created, one would think given five months they would be able to scale up production to accomodate it.  I suppose it takes some time for the reality of the situation to make it up to the decision makers.  Nintendo did announce recently it was going to increase production line capabilities, but no specifics were mentioned. 

I just want to play Zelda without having to wait in line all morning.  Please?

A little over the top

Chris Hecker has apologized for calling the Wii a piece of shit! If you missed out, Chris Hecker, one of the developers for Spore, attacked Nintendo during a session at GDC 2007 this week. Calling the Wii “…Two Gamecubes haphazardly stuck together with duct tape”, and saying that “Nintendo for not taking games as a serious art form”.

Chris has done a complete 180 today, apologizing and saying that he “was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun, and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top”.

You think?

Chris won an award at last year’s GDC for his very thought-provoking speech on how we, as a people, are privileged to be living at a time when the medium of video games is emerging, and how we need to be careful how we craft it. He’s not a stupid guy. I really do believe he was speaking out of personal frustration with the processing limitations of the Wii from the perspective of someone who’s trying to implement a very processor heavy game. That said, there’s a time and place to vent those frustrations, and blasting Nintendo up and down during a public talk is not exactly what we would refer to as Politico.

The Wii was never supposed to be a power-house. Nintendo decided to move in a risky and wildly different direction as one would expect they would, because that’s how Nintendo avoids playing in a three way tug of war for quality content. Criticize that if you like for being the wrong move, but don’t just upend them as if they have, in some way, completely taken a face-plant just because the platform isn’t appropriate for YOUR game.

I suspect that a lot of his friends and co-workers ripped him a new one after that talk. Lesson learned I hope. Go back to making Spore as good as it should be and leave Nintendo to do their thing.