Quote Originally Posted by Vyk
I appreciate that they saved the industry, but that was 20 years ago. It hardly matters any more.
Of course it matters now. Columbus didn't do a whole heck of a lot after he discovered the Americas, but that event impacts the world in major ways to this very day. Likewise, Nintendo's acts in the mid-80s are reponsible for the entire industry as it exists right now.
They're not doing anything with it now. They're sitting in the corner doing their own thing putting on a show for their cult-followers, and not really much more.
They're the biggest innovators in the industry by far. Heck, they're practically the only innovators in the industry.
Yes, the DS is innovative, but it's not taking over the market by storm.
How is selling hundreds of thousands of units every week not taking the market by storm?
They're just playing it normal and safe like. They don't take real risks, they take risks when they can afford the loss.
The DS was a huge risk. The handheld market is Nintendo's biggest money-earner, so if their new handheld had flopped and forced them to recede to the GBA while Sony overtook the market with the PSP, they'd have been in quite a tight spot. The Revolution is another huge risk, as it favors an innovative yet highly unorthodox and unfamiliar method of control over sheer processing or graphics-producing power, which is what mainstream consumers are looking for.
Analog control was inevitable.
You may as well discredit every inventor and innovator who ever created everything, since, after all, somebody would have come up with their ideas eventually.
And the GC doesn't really have a kiddy image, per se. It really is kiddy. The only mature games available on it are multi-platform. And even those are dreadfully few and far between.
Some mature games that are exclusive to the GC are Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and Geist. Those are just off the top of my head, and I'm not even into mature games.
And its big name franchises are pretty paint-by-number any more.
The same can be said for every single game company that has a franchise to its name. Huge upheavals of the status quo are for entirely new games, not installments in a series.