On March 25th, 2011 Nintendo officially launched the 3DS in Europe at a price point of £229. It was launched at midnight and after spending the run-up thinking I’d buy one within the first couple of weeks, at around 11.30pm the night before I decided to drive down to ASDA in St. Helens to pick one up at launch.
I got there at 11.55pm and was the only person there waiting to buy one. Odd, I thought, but nevertheless great news as a) I wouldn’t have to wait for long and b) I’d be guaranteed to get one. I picked up the graphite version with 6 games – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, PES 2011, Super Monkey Ball 3D, Super Street Fighter IV, Ridge Racer 3D and Rayman 3D. Only Street Fighter stood out as a must-have game with the others all being a bit average, but with nothing else available for the console beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Around midnight just as I was paying for my items another guy turned up to buy one, followed by a couple of teenagers who also picked up a unit. It was hardly the rush that the gaming press had been predicting.
Six months on and the games haven’t really picked up. Apart from Zelda and maybe Resident Evil there hasn’t really been anything worth buying, which is crazy considering this is the follow-up to the DS – the most successful console in recent history.
The woeful supply of games and the steep price point of the console were obviously having an impact on sales because on July 28th Nintendo announced a global price drop of around 30%. Acknowledging the console’s performance as a relative failure (though it has still sold a significant number in its own right), Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and other senior management also handed themselves significant pay cuts – an example that we can only wish many a banker would follow.
Such a drop in price so soon after launch is unprecedented and was a sign that Nintendo officially recognised that things were not going according to plan. In an attempt to make up for the ~£100 extra that early adopters had paid for the console Nintendo came up with the Ambassador Programme which entitled users to 20 free game downloads on the Virtual Console. Although better than nothing, many 3DS early adopters – myself included – would have preferred a refund in all honesty.
As if the 3DS’ first six months on the market haven’t been disastrous enough, Nintendo has today announced a new peripheral that adds a second analogue stick to the console. It requires its own AAA battery and will be released on the 10th of December in Japan for around £12.
Home consoles have made use of dual analogue sticks for some years now. The idea first appeared on the N64 in 1996 but was refined to the more familiar design that we have today with the original PlayStation’s Dual-Shock controllers in 1997. Since then pretty much every home console has had them – even the Wii on its classic controllers.
In 2004 Sony released the original PlayStation Portable (PSP), and since then every time rumours have circulated of a redesign or a revamp the gaming community has pretty much begged for a second analogue stick as it makes FPS games in particular a lot easier to play. Sony resisted such calls throughout the lifetime of the PSP but has thankfully implemented the feature in their follow-up, the PlayStation Vita.
So, since the games industry has been asking Sony for dual analogue sticks on its PSP for seven years, one would have thought that any competing company who had a hand-held console in development would have made sure to include such a feature on their new hardware. A company that has led an industry worth billions both with its home console and hand-held would surely have its finger on the pulse and any widely-requested feature like this was bound to make it into the new hardware.
In a move that was either stupidly incompetent or cleverly deliberate, Nintendo chose to ignore seven years of such requests and include just one analogue stick on its 3DS. Spectators were forced to conclude that Nintendo’s intention all along was to use the bottom, touch-sensitive screen as a second analogue as some games had done on the original DS. However, the launch of this new peripheral demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the lack of a second analogue stick on the 3DS was in fact an act of stupid incompetence after all, because Nintendo has now decided that a second physical stick is so important that it justifies an add-on that not only has no elegant way of communicating with the console (there are no expansion ports on the 3DS so it will probably use the infra red port which would also explain why it needs its own battery), but when held symmetrically will shift the screen over to the left of the user’s field of view.
Shifting the console over to the left like this could be a problem because the 3D effect on the 3DS only works in a very narrow viewing angle and games that require motion controls can already push the user outside of it with enthusiastic use. By shifting the screen over by an inch or so the angle will be even tighter on one side.
The botched, home-made look of the console with the expansion attached is a far cry from the simple elegance of the DS Lite (though the original DS of course was no looker) and would suggest that a 3DS redesign is on its way; one that includes the second analogue stick in a more elegant fashion as should have been the case the first time round. This will probably be announced just after Christmas after Nintendo has cleared as much original 3DS stock as possible beforehand.
With that in mind it seems even more foolish for Nintendo to reveal the expansion now as it can only serve to dampen the sales figures that the console is getting since the price drop. It would have made much more sense to keep it under wraps until after Christmas when the redesign is unveiled, maximising sales of the current design for the holiday and providing Nintendo with an elegant new design to market while offering early adopters a way to play the games that will obviously take full advantage of the second stick. As it is, Nintendo is left with an ugly contraption to promote as its primary offering for three months to an audience that would surely rather wait for the inevitable redesign – while Sony will no doubt start marketing its drop-dead gorgeous PS Vita to stick the boot in.
Nintendo again only has itself to blame for the market so confidently predicting a redesign. For years they have capitalised on selling multiple revisions of their previous hand-helds as a means of generating new money for old rope. The DS gave way to the DS Lite which gave way to the DSi which shared the market with the DSi XL. Each version has also shipped in numerous colours and special editions, and even before the DS we had exactly the same scenario with the Game Boy. But never before has a redesign come so quickly after the original machine’s launch.
With such a long list of mistakes and poor decisions relating to the 3DS coupled with the poor response to the Wii’s follow-up the Wii-U, it seems that Nintendo has been riding high on a wave of success for the last five years through happy accidents and good fortune rather than any kind of deliberate strategy. I just don’t see how one company could have got things so right with one console and so wrong with another if the decisions behind them both were all deliberate calculations and part of the same overall vision. Rather than outwitting their competitors with genius decisions it seems Nintendo simply stumbled upon an open goal by accident and happily took advantage of it. With that once-open goal now packed full of other players and Nintendo left relying on outplaying the rest of the field for victory, it seems they’re not quite the gaming gurus they’ve made themselves out to be.
So, where does this leave the current 3DS? With several companies delaying software releases due to the poor console sales which are themselves a result of a lack of quality games (and its previous high price point), the console now faces an up-hill struggle to secure critical mass in the run-up to Christmas. It’s unlikely that the 3DS could completely fail with the vast reserves of cash that Nintendo has amassed over the last 5 years, but I’d say it’s highly unlikely to replicate the success of its predecessor because as lucky as Nintendo seems to have been over the last 5 years – and in light of their recent form it does appear that luck factored significantly in their success – everyone’s luck runs out eventually.
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