(With the kiddies back in school, I've finally gotten a chance to sit down and return to my fun job; writing for RFGen!)
I can easily follow the internet collective's double-take on the 2DS. As has been commented (predicted?
) here, the 2DS comes across more like Nintendo's engineering department accidentally following up on discarded notes from R&D's drunken April Fools party. When offical pictures of your product look photoshopped right out of the gate, with a concept pulled from the punchline of an old joke, it's easy to question whether any publicity (bad) is still good publicity.
And yet, as I shook my head over how wacky Nintendo can be, I quickly realized who they intended to buy this thing;
Me.
After the touch screen to our original Mario Kart DS system lost sensitivity, I gave it to my six-year-old (whose favorite game, Mario Kart DS, didn't need the touch controls anyway). He carried it around everywhere, and despite my consistent warnings, he'd carry it by pinching the corner of the top half. Sure enough, after one drop the hinge broke off, and then later the top screen gave up the ghost and went all-white. Now its in a corner of my project room, waiting a resurrection as a modified GBA.
Which means my son fits squarely in the announced demographic for this new wedge-shaped oddity. Will we get this new square peg for our little square hole? (That felt weird to write. I gotta get an editor.)
Truthfully, probably not. At least, not soon; our Wii U Zelda Edition was just pre-ordered (family Christmas present to each-other) and with the 2DS announced at $30 past that magic number 99, I'll loan him the DS Lite for awhile. But for the holidays, this newfangled contraption actually fits a niche more than we may know. Its no more designed for the folks making fun if it than a Leapster or Jitterbug Phone. Its sturdier and purposefully more disposable than our sexy 3DSXLs or Vitas. Its Nintendo doing what Nintendo does; finding a market that could be better targeted and going after it. We here at RFG may be mostly 'core' gamers, but when Angry Birds and Just Dance are two of the best-selling franchises of all time, businesses are more interested in where the money is coming from now and where is the next potential source of revenue.
Its the same reason the XBox One was not primarily designed with the 'core' gamers market at the, well, core. 'Core' gamers no longer pay the bills; the millions of Netflix and Cable/Satellite subscribers are now the bigger, and bigger paying, market. There is simply not enough money to be made in a console exclusive to games in today's 'connected' world. When a developer sees the crazy money made from service providers, mobile games, and FTP models, it becomes impossible to justify to their investors a model that, at best, won't pull in the same revenue numbers as the competition. I hate to say it, but the Wii U's biggest hurdle is not the ridiculous name, the confusion of whether it is a new system or an upgrade, or market awareness; the problem is that all it really does is play games. No Blu-ray movies, no fancy TV watching, limited social media integration, no real life outside of gaming. (Netflix may be present, but its so ubiquitous now it almost doesn't count.) The success of mobile gaming has taught game developers what marketeers have always known; the largest, most lucrative demographic will sacrifice quality for convenience and accessibility every time. (Hello McDonalds, Subway, etc.) The reason Microsoft has spent decades trying to get a 'One' service provider box into the home is obvious; most folks will eventually forget (and not put money into) an extra box they do less with.
I'm excited for the PS4 and Wii U (now that the game library is picking up steam [not Steam, but boy, talk about a killer 'app']) precisely because I prefer a gaming system for gaming, but I'm well aware of how, and why, the gaming industry has changed. The backlash on the XBox One shows that the 'future' of gaming is not quite here, but it is inevitably coming. We're no longer just seeing the signs, we're already turned on the off-ramp and picking up speed to merge onto the highway.
Hey, if we're already on this road, someone in our car will much more likely be playing a 2DS than a phone game...
OK, maybe some Words with Friends.
