Let’s play a guessing game. I’m thinking of a console. It’s small, white, and not as powerful as the other consoles of its generation, but it has a lot of heart. Its mascot is very well known and kid friendly. When buying games for this console you might notice a shortage of third-party publishers, and its online capabilities are lacking. This has affected sales negatively but strong, home-team IPs and an interesting controller with a screen in the middle have made it a favorite among fans. Can you guess which console I’m thinking of? It’s the Sega Dreamcast.
If your first guess was the Nintendo Wii U, I’d understand why, and it’s worth comparing the two if you ask me. These are two consoles that I love to death. The Dreamcast is actually my favorite console of all time, and I can see it on a shelf as I type this. Sega made a great console that saw some incredible games, yet the Dreamcast was a failure; it took Sega out of the hardware game, and the company now develops software for companies against which it used to compete. The Dreamcast was doomed from the beginning because of two things, primarily: bad timing, and no future-proofing.
Now let’s talk about Nintendo’s next console. Even if the NX doesn’t come out next year as some analysts think it might, there’s no getting around the fact that it’ll hit shelves as we’re reaching a mature mid-point of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 lifecycle. Lacking hindsight I suppose I can’t call this bad timing, but it certainly is strange. There’s nothing that says that all competing companies have to release their consoles at the same time, but now that there’s been enough time for Microsoft and Sony both to offer price reductions for their respective consoles, most everyone has settled in with their console of choice and want to focus on games for a few years.
There’s a game changer on the way, though. There’s something coming in 2016 that will force everyone to reconsider their hardware and think about dishing out another 300-400 bucks, and that something is virtual reality. This is where future-proofing comes in, and this is another reason why I’m a little scared for Nintendo’s future. Shigeru Miyamoto wasn’t impressed with VR. Last year he mentioned that the image of people putting on headsets and standing in a corner somewhere to explore virtual worlds on their own was in direct contrast to what they were trying to achieve with the Wii U. Reggie Fils-Aime echoed these sentiments after E3 in an interview with Polygon saying, “I haven’t walked the floor, so I can’t say in terms of what’s on the floor today, but at least based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech.” I’m wondering how these two would react to RIGS , a multiplayer game that Ben Grubb called the “best five minutes of gaming I’ve ever experienced in my life” after trying a demo at Paris Games Week.
I’m calling it right now: if the NX is not designed in such a way as to accommodate some kind of virtual or augmented reality device by the beginning of 2017, it will fail. Years from now Nintendo fans will look back at the NX and think “if only they would have adopted VR;” the same way Dreamcast lovers look back and think “if only it would have used DVDs.” I don’t think that we’re about to witness a shift to virtual reality hardware exclusively, but if Nintendo wants to reemerge as a relevant contender in the console arena – somewhere it hasn’t stood proudly since the glory days of the N64 – it will have to creatively capitalize on industry trends instead of clinging to quixotic ideals.