Dan Adelman speaks the truth about Nintendo's decision making

[JCnator]

This morning, I came across an interview of Dan Adelman talking about how Nintendo makes decisions. Before delving into the very topic, I'd like give some background behind this guy. He was formerly known as the Nintendo Indie Champion, because he did gave thorough advice to Nintendo on how to capitalize the indie scene and helped a lot of indie games to get into Nintendo's Digital Stores, including the now famous Shovel Knight. With that out, let's delve a bit deeper about the Japanese giant's decision-making via this interview. This shouldn't surprise too much to anyone who's been staunch follower of Nintendo's antics, but I'd still recommend reading the whole interview. I will quote on two of the most important problematics that I believe that an average TBT member would be interested to read. The interview also includes how they handle the Virtual Console service, eShop's quality control, getting games to be easily found on eShop, demos and whatnot.


On what he believes caused the collapse of third-party support on Wii U…

It really comes down to the business case for these publishers. Nintendo consumers buy Nintendo systems primarily for the first party content. There’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy in that publishers feel that they can’t compete with Nintendo first party, so they choose not to invest in making high quality products for the platform. There are some notable exceptions to this over the years like Rayman Legends but many times third party publishers set low sales projections for their games, and then decide a development budget based on that. I can’t say outright that they’re wrong either.
There have been cases where companies decided to pull out the stops and make a great game for Nintendo platforms only to find that consumers weren’t interested. And it could be because consumers have been burnt by third party games on Nintendo platforms before.
For Nintendo to break this cycle, I think they need to invest and absorb some of the risk for third parties who try to embrace the features of Nintendo platforms and help communicate to consumers which games are on par with Nintendo first party games in terms of quality. Sony and Microsoft spend a lot of money securing exclusives – or at least exclusive features – on the top games and since Nintendo doesn’t really do that, third parties focus on the other systems. I’m not sure about Sony, but I know Microsoft also has a team of technical people that will go work with a studio for a few weeks or even months to help them make their games as good as they can be on those platforms.
If Nintendo doesn’t want to be a first-party-only system, they may need to be more aggressive in securing those games and making sure that they’re high quality.

Turns out that Nintendo is still not doing enough effort to promote 3rd party developers to make games for Nintendo consoles. Considering on the learning curve to make games as great as Nintendo would do, one can definitely see this coming. There's another article released a year ago that explains a lot on why the Wii U was difficult to develop games for it before the "Nintendo vs. online gaming" section. Therefore, Nintendo is still stuck on the lack of AAA third party games stigma and that most of the third party Wii U games won't have as many DLCs as their PS4 and Xbox One cousins do. Why is Nintendo still have hard time with that despite having a lot of experience on video games? Well...


On the difficulty in getting certain things done at Nintendo, such as the online functionalities...

Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren’t familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They’re very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.
Even Mr. Iwata is often loathe to make a decision that will alienate one of the executives in Japan, so to get anything done, it requires laying a lot of groundwork: talking to the different groups, securing their buy-in, and using that buy-in to get others on board. At the subsidiary level, this is even more pronounced, since people have to go through this process first at NOA or NOE (or sometimes both) and then all over again with headquarters. All of this is not necessarily a bad thing, though it can be very inefficient and time consuming. The biggest risk is that at any step in that process, if someone flat out says no, the proposal is as good as dead. So in general, bolder ideas don’t get through the process unless they originate at the top.
There are two other problems that come to mind. First, at the risk of sounding ageist, because of the hierarchical nature of Japanese companies, it winds up being that the most senior executives at the company cut their teeth during NES and Super NES days and do not really understand modern gaming, so adopting things like online gaming, account systems, friends lists, as well as understanding the rise of PC gaming has been very slow. Ideas often get shut down prematurely just because some people with the power to veto an idea simply don’t understand it.
The last problem is that there is very little reason to try and push these ideas. Risk taking is generally not really rewarded. Long-term loyalty is ultimately what gets rewarded, so the easiest path is simply to stay the course. I’d love to see Nintendo make a more concerted effort to encourage people at all levels of the company to feel empowered to push through ambitious proposals, and then get rewarded for doing so.

These points are exactly why bolder ideas are hard to come nowadays. Nintendo is effectively relying on a outdated business model with the most senior executives that hardly understand the modern gaming cultures and don't value very much on risk-taking, which are the reasons why Nintendo is very slow to adapt to the current generation.



There you have it. These are the challenges that Nintendo is currently facing, some of which are admittedly surprising to some considering on how well Nintendo is performing these days. So, what do you think about that? Are you shocked hearing how Nintendo makes decisions? How can they resolve these issues? And will they survive in the decades to come?

 

[Reindeer]

Nintendo's shareholders are already putting pressure on the company to reach out more to third-party developers and western fans, since they're kinda failing in the market there. The company does need some reforms, but that has been a known fact for years, so it's not like this guy is saying anything new.

On the other hand, you have to look at what the guy says. Especially the last statement stands out to me as somewhat contradictory. He says risk taking is not rewarded, yet this generation of systems basically revolves around taking risks. Implementing stereoscopic 3D and gyro controls into their new handheld device, a tablet-like controller for the new console, DLC packs that are super cheap for the amount of content they give - look at other companies and these are decisions that would be shot down. Instead, you're stuck with the same old consoles, just with slightly better graphics (and looking a lot worse than modern PC games do). The risk Nintendo took with the Wii's motion controls was followed by other companies, because it turned out to be successful for them, yet the PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect were received negatively.

The guy has a lot more knowledge on the inner workings of the company, but that just seemed a bit of an odd statement to me.

As for third-party developers not wanting to work on games for the Wii U, I think there's at least some stigma attached to it in the world of developers. A bunch more work has to go into it, because there's the gamepad to think about, as well as the consideration that they might not get as many sales as they would on the PS4 or XBone. The same is happening with the PlayStation Vita, yet that isn't even receiving much first party support. Instead a fairly powerful system is being ditched as an optional PS4 controller/peripheral, or being used to publish indie games on. There's very few developers of great games that have any interest in developing for the Vita, like how very few developers are interested in developing for the Wii U.

You can fault Nintendo for these decisions, but of the big three, would you say any one of them is perfect? Sony and Microsoft both force you to pay to play online, deliver systems with a crap infrastructure and internals that are below even just standard gaming PCs, and Microsoft even had the bright idea of making the XBone one of the most inconvenient systems in the history of video games.

It's a young industry, and a lot of mistakes are being made on all sides. I do think Nintendo needs to change its policies... but so do Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Valve, and the list goes on. They all are making **** decisions.

 

[Izzy Reincarnated]

Nintendo is dumb.

 

[CR33P]

tl;dr

can i have ur tbt bells

 

[Rasha]

they need to change their ways if they want to stay in business, they won't last long without third party support

 

[Sheamus]

This is extremely pleasant and conventional post....you shook posting it...thanks a considerable measure for posting it....!!