from Hacker News

Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

by michaelpinto on 4/6/20, 6:21 AM with 174 comments

• by bane on 4/6/20, 7:01 PM

  I think it's important to also understand that, despite broad name recognition, Nintendo isn't a huge company in the way that Sony or Microsoft is. Their entire corporate revenue for 2019 was about $11b USD with about $2.3b USD in operating income. We regularly talk about startups here that are technically larger.

  What Nintendo's philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft/Sony where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech.

  While Microsoft and Sony's revenues per platform are around the same, their console businesses are small pieces of very large organizations -- with all the ossification that comes from being huge companies.

  It's also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the "toy"). Nintendo's focus is on how to create this play experience, and what's the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.

• by taneq on 4/6/20, 7:37 AM

  "Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts".

  In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/

  That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.

• by nrp on 4/6/20, 6:57 AM

  “ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”

  Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.

• by Operyl on 4/6/20, 8:38 AM

  While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all these years, online play in their first party games is still just so .. atrocious. Ugh.

• by saturdaysaint on 4/6/20, 1:59 PM

  It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.

  If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best gaming system is the one with you.

• by schnevets on 4/6/20, 3:03 PM

  Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory.

  It gives me hope for the future - if we can get more people from various walks of life to learn how to code and appreciate technology, there is so much more we can do. Of course, that "if" has always been a huge challenge.

• by huffmsa on 4/6/20, 10:40 AM

  Even when they did ship with more cutting edge power and tech, they approached it as if they didn't have it.

  It partly comes from the video game things being a bit of a gamble and side project to keep the company alive. "Success under constraint."

  And not it's a bit of an intentional handicap, like setting a horsepower cap on a racecar. Anyone can go fast and make something spectacular with unlimited power, but when bleeding edge graphics aren't even available for you to waste time considering, you have to finds new ways to make your game "fun".

  You have to think of new control schemes, new mechanics, endearing art styles, etc. You can't just melt faces (and wallets) with the visuals.

• by epigramx on 4/6/20, 7:26 AM

  Fancy literature but in the end it says little. There is a simple way to put it. Sometimes an era has missed some of the innovations it could have done and spends too much time caring only about the core technology but it might be beneficial to stay a little more and innovate on the general design rather than just the core technology.

• by dlivingston on 4/6/20, 8:16 AM

  What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.

  More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990.

  Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.

• by analyticascent on 4/6/20, 9:53 AM

  In a weird way, I think Nintendo's approach is basically "Zero to One" to differentiate from competitors, but doing it with cheaper hardware to reduce costs.

  I'm not a gamer, but from a business perspective I'm intrigued with their approach.

• by pkilgore on 4/6/20, 12:15 PM

  Reminds me of http://boringtechnology.club/

• by meeebooo on 4/6/20, 8:33 PM

  This does backfire for them in certain cases though, especially in terms of networking. All of their games are still on a built-out peer2peer implementation they acquired in 2008 and it shows how much it holds them back - anyone that played a Nintendo online game on switch knows what I mean (no, 30 NES games I played on my Wii aren't a consolation).

  Let's not even talk about friend codes in 2020.

• by Kaiyou on 4/6/20, 10:50 AM

  Didn't Nintendo drop this philosophy the moment Gunpei left to work on a GameBoy competitor for Bandai and pushed out the GBC? Or was it after Gunpei died in a car accident shortly after? The NGC also didn't follow this philosophy and neither did the GBA. It wasn't until the Wii/NDS era, when they kind of brought it back.

• by k__ on 4/6/20, 10:38 AM

  "the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses"

  I got a smartphone and a VR headset to put it in. Yes they are cheap, but the experience is completely different from the Rift.

  These may be the most fundamental parts, but they are not what makes the Rift a good VR set.

• by growlist on 4/6/20, 8:42 AM

  Often the British engineering philosophy, tbh - frugality of necessity.

• by marmolito on 4/6/20, 6:58 PM

  me parece una excelente idea