Wired:

Nintendo was caught unawares by surprisingly slow sales of the 3DS, the company said Tuesday.

“Nintendo 3DS has not been selling as expected since the second week [of availability in the United States and Europe], and this is not just in the Japanese market but also in the United States and Europe,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said during an investor briefing in Tokyo. “Therefore, we recognize that we are in a situation where we need to step up our efforts to further promote the spread of Nintendo 3DS.”

I used to swear by Nintendo handhelds. In the particularly bleak period of gaming from the late 1990s and into the early 2000s (when the Dreamcast died, taking fun with it), everything had to be 3D with as many polygons as you could fit in. Too many games had to conform to pre-defined genres, and as budgets escalated, risk and innovation all but disappeared.

Nintendo’s handhelds were the last place where the kind of excitement and drive of early 1980s arcade and home gaming thrived. Lower budgets meant you got crazy little games like WarioWare that just weren’t—at the time—feasible on TV consoles. But Nintendo’s handhelds—like all its consoles—always suffered from the same problems:

• A launch line-up weaker than everyone was expecting;
• A surprisingly short period of A-list games—releases soon turn into churn garbage for children;
• Expensive cart-based systems, which make each purchase a risk.

It took a while, but iOS eventually obliterated these issues. Since the platform regularly evolves, there’s no launch line-up, but there is a constant stream of titles. Most of them are utter crap (much like on any other system, ever), but I find something new I’d be interested in playing every single day. And because the system uses digital distribution, prices are lower and risk for the consumer is reduced. This also knocks budgets, forcing developers to innovate and rely more on gameplay than gloss.

These are the things that got me hooked on iOS gaming, to the point that I’m now the guy who deals with Tap! magazine’s games section, but anecdotal evidence beyond my own experiences made me wonder if a wider pattern was emerging regarding a transition away from Nintendo and towards Apple in the handheld space. I first became aware of a shift on interviewing an ex-Atari developer a couple of years ago. He told me his home was full of gaming kit—his children had access to every console available; but since iOS arrived, his daughters and their friends pretty much only ever played with Apple kit. “The DS,” he told me, “is dead”. The reason was that an iPod touch provided access to similar quickfire games to those they’d played on Nintendo consoles, a few titles with depth, but also offered internet access, enabling kids to mess around on Facebook.

As time moved on, more people told me that their kids were becoming fascinated by iOS, playing games on iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, all but ignoring handheld Nintendo kit from that point on. With youngsters, the intuitive nature of a touchscreen beat the relatively complex buttons of a traditional handheld; for older kids, the range of cheap games made some of their parents keen to embrace iOS, rather than paying 30 quid for a piece of plastic that could get discarded within minutes; and for teens, the importance of access to content other than games was increasingly of paramount importance. And with an entry-level iPod touch being anything up to 30 quid cheaper than the 3DS and having games that cost a fraction of the price, I wondered how Nintendo would fare this time round.

Perhaps things will change for the 3DS in the same way that they did for iOS. According to Wired, Iwata argues that it’s a

challenge to get users to understand the appeal of the [3D] screen even when they get their hands on a unit.

This was certainly the case with iOS. Many gamers I know considered iOS devices useless for gaming, right up until they experienced them. (Hell, back in 2008, I wrote—with an amusing lack of prescience—Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac, an article I subsequently countered when I had a year’s experience of the platform.)

That said, some people I know with a 3DS rarely use the 3D component, because they find it painful. And it’s also interesting to note that the majority of 3DS owners I know are also so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers. During the last-generation handheld scrap, Nintendo’s presence went across the board, from pensioners to children, from gaming newbies to dedicated fanatics. Sony fans would yell from the sidelines about Nintendo kit not being for ‘proper’ games, but Nintendo fans would smugly note that they actually had a range of titles and the best of everything. Right now, Sony’s almost irrelevant in the handheld space, and Nintendo appears to have taken its slot. Whenever I question Apple’s surprising rise in gaming and suggest it’s at the expense of Nintendo, the response is identical to the one Sony fans argued years ago. Nintendo, they say, is now the preserve of ‘proper’ games, unlike those ‘throwaway’ and ‘casual’ titles on iOS—the ones Nintendo in part used to thrive on, and that attracted the audience outside of core gamers that gave Nintendo so many DS and GBA sales.

It remains to be seen if the 3DS sales slump is a temporary glitch, and even if the console isn’t a massive hit, that certainly doesn’t mean Nintendo is in any way doomed. Like Apple, it’s managed to be profitable at almost every point during its history, even when one of its consoles only had a minority share of the market. But Nintendo could for the first time find itself ousted as the default company synonymous with handheld gaming—and that would be a pretty major shake-up for the entire industry.

Oh, stunning. Over on Develop, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has spewed shit from his mouth in the form of words, splattering them all over the internet. He says Nintendo will embrace the independent developer, but “draws the line” with less-established garage outfits:

[Nintendo will] separate out the true independent developer versus the hobbyist.

Where we’ve drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue.

Fuck you, Reggie. If ever I needed proof that Nintendo had utterly lost it regarding gaming, this is it. ‘Garage’ indies are the lifeblood of the industry—they always were. Hell, when the industry first started, tiny indies were pretty much it—those single coders who created innovative, exciting new product again and again.

In the modern age, there is a hell of a lot of crap on iOS, but to tar all hobbyists with the same brush is pretty much like saying “but we want to continue sucking up to majors, because they all do wonderful games, every time”. In other words, it’s bullshit.

Some home coders create the most wonderful games imaginable, free from the fury of focus groups. They are one person’s vision, not one person’s vision smashed to pieces by the so-called realities of modern videogame production, which forces games into neat little pre-packaged boxes. On iOS, many of the very best games have been created by home coders—hobbyists—holding down other jobs. Some of these guys have then gone on to become what our chum Reggie would call a “true independent developer”, but they’ve only been able to do so due to the App Store not drawing arbitrary lines in the sand of the kind Nintendo’s enforcing.

Still, you keep on going, Nintendo. Keep on releasing a new console every few years, supporting it with loads of great games for a few months, then reverting to getting people to buy new hardware (Look! This one’s ORANGE! And this one vaguely resembles the packaging of a game we put out in 1987!) rather than concentrating on games. You eschew the smaller indies that could make your hardware great. You continue on your downward slope, because, despite being a huge Nintendo fan for years, your attitude towards ‘garage’ developers makes me sick.

TouchArcade has some nice quotes from Nintendo’s el-presidenté (of North America) regarding cheapo mobile games (reacting to Nintendo 3DS games likely costing 30-to-45 dollars):

I actually think that one of the biggest risks today in our industry are these inexpensive games that are candidly disposable from a consumer standpoint.

Mm. Far better to continue ripping off consumers*. Because that isn’t a risk at all. Also, it really is terrible that plenty of iOS gamers are out there buying games every single day, due to their low cost, rather than one game a month.

Angry Birds is a great piece of experience but that is one compared to thousands of other pieces of content that, for one or two dollars, I think actually create a mentality for the consumer that a piece of gaming content should only be two dollars.

And why exactly shouldn’t a great piece of gaming content only be two dollars? Or, more precisely, why should a great piece of gaming content cost 30 dollars, or 45, or more? (Infinity Blade is six bucks, so is that OK, or is that still too cheap?)

I actually think some of those games are overpriced at one or two dollars but that’s a whole different story.

Oh gawsh! Chuckle! AHO! And so on. You go, el pres, dismissing iOS and its kin with a quip. But here’s the thing: your problem today isn’t myriad games that aren’t worth two bucks—it’s the thousands available that are.

* Incidentally, my all-time favourite Nintendo WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? moment came with Pac-Man (NES Classics) for the GBA. Currently ambitiously priced at 30 quid on Amazon, the game was originally priced at ‘only’ 15 when first released in the UK—for a dodgy port of the NES version of Pac-Man. BARGAIN! Kind of puts iOS gaming into perspective. Hell, it even makes Namco’s crazy iOS Pac-Man pricing almost look sane. (Almost.)

People rattle on about the Steve Jobs/Apple ‘reality distortion field’, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that companies battling Apple in the handheld gaming space are also living inside their own little bubbles and firing out distortion of their own. Sony last year cunningly decided to take on iOS by saying all iPhone/iPod touch games were rubbish, using an irritating little shit as their advertising campaign’s figurehead (nice one, Sony—I’m sure you can tell from marketshare figures how that idea worked out for you). Nintendo has fared better, but is losing serious ground to iOS across all age groups, especially in the USA.

But now, Nintendo’s going to fight back, and Gamespot has revealed the launch of the Nintendo 3DS will take place in Japan on February 26. The line-up for games is the usual mix of remakes, remakes and remakes, and as someone fully immersed in iOS gaming’s diversity, the 3DS offerings don’t look terribly exciting to me, especially since I own the previous versions of many of the launch games on the DS. (“Oooh, prettier graphics” is no longer a selling point, as Nintendo itself largely proved with the Wii.)

The biggest problem though is the crazy price-points. The console’s expected to come in at over $300, which in Brit-land will no doubt mean at least £200 being stamped on the box—in other words, more than an iPod touch. Even better, the games are expected to sell between 4800 yen ($57/£38) and 6090 yen ($73/£50). Even with some serious discounting (and Japanese games often being more expensive than in the US and Europe), these prices are obliterated by the App Store, which usually ranges from $1 (59p) to $9.99 (£5.99) per item.

I’m sure Nintendo fans will lap up the new console, but I fear it’ll—like its predecessor—eventually (and all too rapidly) find itself largely bereft of decent games, relying on shovelware to keep it going. More importantly, the core market of kids is rapidly vanishing. Time was that market at least was Nintendo’s, but kids increasingly want iThings rather than expensive Nintendo kit (and Nintendo itself has warned that the main USP of its new handheld may not be safe for kids). Perhaps Nintendo’s aiming to seriously ramp up its download offerings, or tempt buyers with pack-ins. If not, it’s going to have even more of a fight on its hands than over the past couple of years, and Apple has a real chance to take the lead in the handheld gaming space.

Update: As Lukas points out in the comments, some of the launch line-up comprises new titles in existing series, with “exactly zero to do with” earlier titles. However, having been a Nintendo fan since the NES, and having owned quite a few Nintendo consoles, it’s clear that many titles will involve more than a little recycling, unless the company really has changed its ways.

Game turns child into evil swearing little shitbag

As part of its long-standing quest to vilify every videogame ever produced (in fact, everything fun ever created), righteous hatemonger ‘newspaper’ the Daily Mail earlier this week published a story about a mother’s fury over a Nintendo DS Scrabble game that taught her son “vile swear words”. (And in the Daily Mail’s usual sterling reporting, it’s amusing to note that the game in question is Scrabble 2007—there’s nothing like getting the scoop on a new product, and this article is nothing like getting a scoop on a new product.)

Of course, it’s implausible that Mrs Carrington’s eight-year-old could have discovered these words by any other means. Although it’s not mentioned in the article, it’s safe to assume that he’ll now need life-long counselling having been exposed to ‘toke’, ‘tits’ and ‘shit’. (Choice quote: “Shit had come up as well. I was absolutely mortified.” I’ll bet. You don’t want shit coming up when you’re playing a videogame—it can really knock you off your stride.)

Following Britain’s typical dive into knee-jerk reactionism, the mother has now banned her son from playing the virtual wordgame, which has been linked to people becoming slightly more educated, and is therefore reprehensible and evil. Publisher Ubisoft’s response about the ‘junior’ option that removes naughty words was met by a typically Daily Mail-style retort from Carrington: “I read the booklet that came with it, and there was no mention of a junior version. It should be made much clearer.” This is fair enough—after all, it’s really hard to spot the ‘Junior mode’ checkbox that’s directly under the player’s name when you’re picking a profile on first launching the game.

Translation: “I can’t be arsed to play real Scrabble with my son, so I threw this game at him, without actually bothering to in any way check it first. And now my little baby is surrounded by tits and shit, and the only way to deal with this is to get those true bastions of public decency and morality involved—the Daily Mail”.

My opinion: it’s a fucking disgrace. (Now, had she moaned at length about Scrabble 2007’s lack of single-console multiplayer support, I’d have been right behind her. IN A NON-OFFENSIVE MANNER.)