Nintendo Okie

Let me start this article with the firm statement that I don’t believe they are.  There are a few key differences that I think separate the two companies, but many people may not feel that same way.  Sega got into trouble by releasing too many platforms and variations of platforms.  Many of these platforms were variations of the same thing that, despite that fact, weren’t compatible with each other. 

To examine this comparison we first have to look at Sega and they’re console releases.  This starts with the Master System which was released in June of 1986.  This was their 8-bit system that was the direct competitor of the Nintendo Entertainment System which had come out in America in 1985.  It wasn’t until three years later in 1989 when the Genesis came out that the competition between the two companies really heated up.  The Genesis was the first of the two companies to release a 16 bit system and it came out within three years of the previous platform.

The Genesis is also where things really began to go bad for Sega.  The system itself was very good, but in an effort to keep perfecting their hardware and keep Nintendo on its toes there were a number of variations to the Genesis.  One of them, released three years after the Genesis was the Sega CD. This device attached to the top of the Genesis giving you the ability to play CD based games and they did that long before Nintendo began to use disc based media.  The problem is this not only is essentially a new piece of hardware it fractures your user base.  There were now some people who could play this new form of media and some that couldn’t.  Now fast forward two years to 1994 and the release of the 32X.  The Sega CD had been a failure in terms of business for the company so they released this new add on for the Genesis that required its own power supply and cables in order for the graphics to be displayed properly.  This was another essentially new console that fractured the user base for the Genesis even more. 

Around the time of the 32X release Sega had wanted to get the jump on Nintendo into the next generation of consoles and the release of the Sega Saturn happened within six months of the 32X, when it released in May of 1995.  This may have also been the biggest blunder in Sega’s console lifespan.  The Saturn was announced at E3 in May of 1995.  Sega was also looking to get to market before Sony’s new Playstation console and less than a week after the announcement of the system it was released to retail on May 11^th at a $400 price point.  Sony would use that to their advantage and drop the price of the Playstation to $299 at its release.  Despite that the Saturn would be the longest lived console for Sega lasting four years until the release of Sega’s last home console the Dreamcast in 1999.  That system would last three years before being discontinued by Sega in 2002 and their announcement that they would move on to become a third party software developer.  With the end of their hardware products they had released six new, or essentially new, consoles in 13 years.  On the home console front Nintendo has consistently released a new system every 5 years with little to no iteration on those systems.  They had released 3 consoles in that same amount of time. 

My concern comes on the portable front for Nintendo, but I think there is a huge key difference to what Nintendo is doing compared to Sega and this is why I don’t think they’re on the same track.  Nintendo has released only three “new” portable systems since the Game Boy launched in 1989.  There have been some iterations, like the Game Boy color that could be cause of user base splits, but essentially the hardware is the same until the next generation.  The Game Boy had the Game Boy Pocket, and Game Boy Color, both of which were completely compatible with the previous iteration of the system and only the Game Boy Color had the potential of fracturing the user base at that time.  Nintendo then moved on to the Game Boy Advance, which would see a few hardware revisions that would not change the compatibility of the system in anyway. 

The DS has been a bit of a different story.  There have been, since 2004 four different versions of Nintendo’s current handheld.  The DS was released in 2004 and the form factor was changed in 2006, but the system itself was exactly the same as it was before that revision.  The release of the DSi in April of 2009 is the first time that you can consider the user base to have been fractured, but there have been very few games that take advantage of what the new hardware has to offer.  The biggest difference is the ability to download software that’s not available on the DS Lite and it has lost the compatibility with Nintendo’s previous generation of portables.  Until there is a large amount of software that is compatible with the system it is essentially only a slightly enhanced version of the DS Lite.  The DSi would receive a bit of a face lift this current year, 2010, with the release of the DSi XL which does nothing but increases the size of the system, but keeps all the current features in tact. 

We now have the announcement of the 3DS, which is going to be Nintendo’s next generation of portable consoles.  It will be a fully new system that will be backwards compatible with the current generation, meaning that new users will still be able to play old titles.  It is a new system though and its release in 2011 will mean that Nintendo has released 5 different versions of it’s handheld in 6 years.  That’s a very similar and even speedier track records than Sega produced.  The biggest difference is that Nintendo has kept the user base mostly in tact through these systems.  They’re on top of the market in both the console and the handheld space, where I believe Sega was trying to one up the competition to leap frog into the top spot. 

Not the actual 3DS.

I’m very much looking forward to the 3DS.  I think it’s a revolution in portable gaming that we didn’t see coming with Nintendo.  We’ve come to expect great things when Nintendo does move on to the next generation and Nintendo has thrown a curve ball into the thought process of many fans with the announcement of this new system.  I know they’re not following the same path that Sega did; it just feels a bit like they are.