Nintendo’s Wii U and the Second Mover Interaction Problem

Like many gamers, I grew up with Nintendo.

Today I play almost exclusively the Sony PlayStation or Xbox One (depending on the exclusive titles that both systems boast) but my video game experience and life began with the Super Nintendo. While I’ve had the adrenalin rush of opening a new console or game for the first time, nothing will beat the day I could play Super Mario Bros. at home in the comfort of my own living room.

One area where Nintendo doesn’t get nearly enough credit is their desire to continually push the boundaries of what it means to interact and play with a game. Nintendo’s push into the handheld market with the Game Boy remains the spiritual precursor to mobile gaming, and if Nintendo ever provided Excite Bike to the Apple App Store it would sell like hotcakes.

Not all of their attempts at innovation went well though; most don’t remember the strange Power Glove and Power Pad peripherals… both attempts to take gaming beyond the simple TV and controller into a new world of interactivity that never really went anywhere. Watching my friends give themselves micro-strokes trying to run in place on the slick plastic Power Pad before finally realizing that they could simply sit on the floor and pound on it with their fists (and then realizing that World Class Track Meet was a boring game) remains one of my earliest memories of connected technology.

In the last two decades video gaming has largely belonged to Microsoft and Sony. The two companies grew with their audience to provide more mature titles that Nintendo shied away from and built their empires on online, multiplayer gaming. The Nintendo Wii was the big exception to the overall trend; taking the market by surprise the Wii introduced motion-based gameplay and captured massive market share from a completely new audience of gamers. The Wii appealed to casual gamers, older gamers and a new generation of children. There were certainly challenges in getting their core titles to catch on with the new system… platformers like Mario and Metroid didn’t translate perfectly to the Wii’s controls, but it’s hard to argue that the system wasn’t a big success.

One could make the argument that Nintendo holds claim to being the leader in transforming game interactions. Sega, Sony and Microsoft in many ways copied their controller style for their consoles, and the Kinect’s roots in physical interaction were all about taking the motion controller to the next level. While other companies pushed the boundaries of graphical capabilities and online play, Nintendo was usually the pioneer of finding new ways of physically interact with the game.

But the success of the new interaction model led to increased expectations for the Wii U, which underperformed nearly from the first announcement of the system at E3. Many blamed the tablet-style controller as the core problem, claiming that it would continue the problem of bringing the fan favorite titles to the market. This proved not to be the case; at least in the case of the Mario franchise the titles that followed for the Wii U were as strong as ever, if not slightly derivative.

Without a doubt, the lack of first-party core titles have hurt the Wii U’s sales as the demand for Nintendo’s content just isn’t met by a very infrequent shipping schedule of the content people want the most. But another problem, and perhaps the biggest problem, is the fact that for the first time the interaction shift came from a different company… or rather, a different medium.

The problem with the Wii U’s tablet-style controller is that two years earlier Apple introduced the iPad. At that moment Nintendo had already committed to the Wii U’s design and interaction model, so one can imagine that the company watched the beginnings of the tablet market not knowing if this was good or bad for their console. Certainly the rapid adoption of the tablet was a good sign, but the fact that Nintendo wasn’t going to be coming out with a new and innovative approach to gameplay had to be disconcerting. Worse, by the time the Wii U launched Apple was already on the iPad3 and boasted hundreds of thousands of specially made apps and games for it. Not only Nintendo not first, it was old news.

In an interview with NPR, Mario creator and game designer and arguably the face of Nintendo for many, Shigeru Miyamoto, had much the same thought. In describing the challenges with the Wii U and poor sales, he pointed to the tablet as the core problem and not, as many others have said, because of lack of content:

So I don’t think it’s just price, because if the system is appealing enough, people will buy it even if the price is a little bit high. I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn’t understand the system. But also I think that we had a system that’s very unique- and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up. And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you’re playing on a device that’s connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play.

 

I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them. So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we’re constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they’re not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we’re hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.

Playing the Wii U is a good experience; the titles that have come out for it are often innovative, well programmed and enjoyable. Watching my children play the console as comfortably and easily as if they had been gaming for years is both heartwarming and striking and it speaks to the power of the platform.

But the challenge that Miyamoto describes is exactly right; failing to be a first mover in the technology meant that Nintendo lost the ability to define the expectations around how the interactions would happen. They became a taker of a model that they had no hope of keeping up with; Nintendo as a closed system could neither compete nor keep pace with millions of developers who had a much faster time to market and built-in expectation of a lower quality bar. What was a new and innovative controller and interaction model became a has-been product in the space of two years… and once again Nintendo had only their content to rely on as a differentiator in a crowded and shrinking market.

Nintendo fighting on content alone is still a pretty tough battle for their competitors; nobody in their right mind would sign up for a direct fight against 30-year IP that have sold billions of copies worldwide. But once again time is not Nintendo’s friend; the expectation of gamers are slowly changing to a more mobile-centric world. Titles are expected to ship more rapidly, quality (while still important) is lessened by speed and the attachment to Nintendo’s core characters is something that’s not catching on with new gamers as much as their did previous generations.

The market is changing, and Nintendo is trying to keep up… it’s a clear example of a process that happens in many areas of technology every day. The biggest competition is often not the players you expect; Nintendo held their own quite well against Sony and Microsoft when it had the ability to carve out a unique place for itself. But in a new world where Apple, Google and a million developers around the world are also part of the competition… things are quite a bit tougher.
Disruptors usually come down to changing the way a perhaps thinks and behaves around something. For Nintendo and the Wii U, the disruptor was ultimately one of being just too late to define the experience. As Nintendo unveils their next console in 2017 or 2018 (codenamed the Nintendo NX) they once again are calling for a new concept, new interaction and new style of gameplay… the question will be how quickly they can bring it to market once the curtain rises and if anyone will get there first.