Nintendo’s Missed Question Mark
Jump, dammit. Jump!
You know in Super Mario Brothers when you just forget to hit the button to jump and so you run into an abyss and die? Sometimes I feel like that best encapsulates Nintendo these days.
A few years ago, this was a popular thing to say — and I did. These days, Nintendo is in a bit of an upswing thanks to the phenomenon of Pokémon Go (which, aside from the IP, they had very little to do with, of course), the promise of the Nintendo Switch (which does look pretty good, but there are a lot of question marks — the kind Mario might jump for…), Super Mario Run (it feels like the right price), and the launch of the NES Classic Edition (which sold out almost instantly upon release a few weeks back).
I actually view all four as potentially problematic for very different reasons. But for the purpose of this post, I want to focus on the last one.
I think by most accounts, the NES Classic Edition has been a huge success this holiday season. It’s absolutely one of the must-haves. And I could not be less surprised because I basically laid out the playbook a few years ago for Nintendo to make this exact product. And they did. And the sales have flowed like wine.
Of course, you probably only view this product as a huge success if you were able to get one. If, like me, you went to Amazon on launch day only to be greeted by a barrage of errors that slowly morphed into middle fingers, you probably don’t view the launch as a huge success. More like a shitshow. Especially because weeks later, you still can’t get one (unless you want to pay something akin to the price of a ticket to Hamilton).
Now, it’s entirely possible that Nintendo is limiting supply of this product on purpose. Buzz, buzz, buzz, right? I highly doubt it. I believe, sadly, that Nintendo just had no idea how popular such a product would be. They thought it would be a marketing gimmick that some old school die-hards might buy to hold them over to the Switch.
They were wrong.
Again, I’m cautiously optimistic about the Switch. I think the console/mobile hybrid is the right thing to try in our current mobile age. But I’m still not sold that everyone is going to carry around another device on a regular basis. And there’s no way people are giving up their smartphones. So it all comes down to Nintendo making the games great — games you can’t live without. This is their strength. So we’ll see.
But I still think it was — and is — a huge mistake to underestimate the draw of their nostalgia. The NES Classic Edition is absolutely what people want. It doesn’t take expensive R&D or crazy new technology to figure this out or to deliver this. It just takes foresight and managing a supply chain correctly. Nintendo, sadly, forgot to hit the ‘jump’ button in this regard.
That’s what continues to worry me about the company. Obviously, they’ll sort out the supply chain issues eventually. But they don’t seem to understand what their customers want. The Switch could be great, but I actually think the market for the NES Classic Edition could be bigger. This isn’t just about tickling the nostalgia of some people who were kids in the 1980s. This is about those kids, now starting families of their own, introducing their kids to the iconic characters and gameplay of Nintendo.
Conventional wisdom these days says you shouldn’t look backwards. This is usually followed by a Steve Jobs quote. But I’m not so sure that’s always the right game plan. And I think Nintendo is making a mistake by not focusing on this. They’ve already proven themselves to be incapable of beating Microsoft and Sony when it comes to horsepower in gaming. So why not go the other way? Embrace Retro.
