Enter Nintendo

Now here comes Nintendo into this situation. Whether through some sort of master genius trend anticipator, a corporate account with Miss Cleo’s psychic hotline, or sheer dumb luck, Nintendo has just the strategy to take advantage of the situation. The Revolution will be cheap. Rumors range from $200 to $250. It will be a game system, not an all-in-one multimedia home theater experience extraordinaire (with built-in blender and Blu-Ray drive) like the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Its graphics potential will be considerably lower than the Xbox 360 and PS3, but for the first time in history, this may be a good thing. Game publishers and developers industry-wide are complaining of ballooning development costs, mostly due to art teams that have to grow exponentially to create all the content that’s possible. Think back to Mario 64, one of the best-looking games of the early N64/PlayStation generation. It had flat textures, maybe 1000 polygons per character, and trees that were made of a cylinder and sphere. Now, think about Call of Duty 2 or Perfect Dark Zero. How many man-hours would be needed just to model, animate and texture the faces of the characters? Never mind the technology involved in getting lip-synching working, or the various facial expressions, or all the special shader effects. The typical Call of Duty 2 level – just the level – probably has more polygons, textures and lights on it than all of Metal Gear Solid. Programming has faced similar growth in terms of demands and complexity, though at a slower pace. In short, team sizes have ballooned.

Now take Nintendo’s Revolution. It’s going to be easy to develop for by design, being a simple system rather than some convoluted multi-chip, multi-core, Microsony Playbox 363. Not only that, developers are going to spend less money on artists, because when they make games for the Revolution, the standard of art – the upper limit of what’s possible on the console – is going to be lower than what they’d have to compete with on the Xbox 360 or PS3.

Of course, the success of that strategy depends on the Revolution carving out its own niche. It has to separate itself from Sony’s and Microsoft’s offerings sufficiently so as not to be seen competing with them on their terms. If Revolution is seen to be in direct competition for a market, purely on terms of hardware performance, it will fail. However, Nintendo has three distinct features to move the Revolution into its own segment.

1. The most obvious is the controller. It’s wacky, it’s weird, it looks like a freaking TV remote from the 1980s but and it has been the butt of my jokes for months. This video, however, convinces me perhaps not of the ultimate utility of the Revolution controller, but of the potential. It will, at the least, work. Its potential, however, is high and it offers a new way of interacting with our games.

2. Price. The disparity between cost, especially in times of relative economic uncertainty, can put the Revolution into a new category. The GameCube was a cool “second system” because it was cheaper. The Revolution, on the other hand, is cheap enough to be “the people’s console”, for the every day Joe Schmoe – with the Xbox 360 and PS3 competing to be the second consoles, and only among the richer or more dedicated folk.

3. Image. Image is important. I mean, look at Apple – why would anyone, ever pay that much for anything unless they were image conscious. Nintendo’s image is different. The kiddie-friendly persona lures in parents, but the retro links and gaming history bait hardcore console gamers. Moreover, just the idea that the Revolution is cheap to develop for and might have cool independent games is sexy. Just like the iPod, it’s the idea – not the hardware – that’s sexy. And yes, I know I am helping to spread that idea with this very article.