Do we underestimate Nintendo?

[Lord Alchemy]

I just want to chime in here real fast on the Lord Alchemy and Dragontamer discussion about design...

I work in game development and the roles and responsibilities that Alchemy listed off are not necessarily the same at every company. The workflow is different at every company. Also, I can assure you that designers are much busier than you make them sound and people from all over the company can make contributions. I've seen programmers come up with great gameplay elements and artists offer tweaks that help balance a multiplayer title. I've also seen designers heavily involved in certain other aspects of projects. In short, its a much more dynamic process than you make it sound.

Exceptions exist everywhere, the game industry not being an exception o.O. Really, the smaller the company the more interactive everything is. But when you get into much larger companies with like 100-200 devs, and even multiple development houses under a single publisher, the more focused everyones job is.

Obviously companies aren't going to let their design team sit around doing nothing, but what you end up doing during the main production cycle depends on how high up you are on the design chain. Obviously Level Designers are busy actually building levels through in house dev tools or maybe third party tools, while the higher up on the chain you go the more of a management position the designers tend to fall into during the main production cycle.

Again, not every company is the same but I would imagine a large company like Nintendo has everything boiled down to specifics after the design phase is finished.

 

[DMFG]

I think part of the resentment towards Nintendo comes from the fact that most of the competitive community can be considered "die hard fans" (look at how long breeding a single competitive poke takes, for example), many of whom have stuck with pokemon right from the start and have been faithfully following all the way, and yet we are seemingly neglected.

Instead Nintendo concentrates more on the small kiddies who buy on impulse, possibly from seeing the popularity of pokemon or maybe just thinking "wow Groudon looks awesome" then lose interest when the next big thing comes along.

It seems rather unfair but at the end of the day I guess Nintendo are a company out to make money, and their marketing is completely in line with that. Most of us are still going to keep buying and playing the pokemon games no matter how much we complain about Nintendo, so they realise they don't need cater for us so much.

 

[Age of Kings]

I think part of the resentment towards Nintendo comes from the fact that most of the competitive community can be considered "die hard fans" (look at how long breeding a single competitive poke takes, for example), many of whom have stuck with pokemon right from the start and have been faithfully following all the way, and yet we are seemingly neglected.

Instead Nintendo concentrates more on the small kiddies who buy on impulse, possibly from seeing the popularity of pokemon or maybe just thinking "wow Groudon looks awesome" then lose interest when the next big thing comes along.

It seems rather unfair but at the end of the day I guess Nintendo are a company out to make money, and their marketing is completely in line with that. Most of us are still going to keep buying and playing the pokemon games no matter how much we complain about Nintendo, so they realise they don't need cater for us so much.

qft

Even those who aren't as hardcore just swallow everything shoved down their throats. I honestly hated, for one reason or another, every game that's come out since the GSC generation. Well, PMD was an alright spinoff and FR/LG were fun for nostalgia. True, they threw in IV's and EV's as an afterthought for people like us, but by and large, they'd rather go for the multi-bucks 8 year old crowd who act like little fanboys and defend their games no matter how good or bad it is (I've been flamed by chatspeaking little boys multiple times), at the cost of not being taken seriously by most older gamers, to the disdain of the true fans.

Then again, the same is true of all gaming companies, though they target different audiences.

 

[Salamaster]

What's wrong with Unowns exactly?

please think about that question for a second.

 

[Cynthia]

Nintendo probably makes a lot of the trainers easier on purpose so that the younger audience can actually beat the game. If they started to min/max the stats of all the gym leader pokemon the game would be difficult to defeat without grinding, and nearly impossible for the little ones.

 

[Odinwolf]

... most of the competitive community can be considered "die hard fans" ...and yet we are seemingly neglected.

Instead Nintendo concentrates more on the small kiddies who buy on impulse, possibly from seeing the popularity of pokemon or maybe just thinking "wow Groudon looks awesome" then lose interest when the next big thing comes along.

It seems rather unfair but at the end of the day I guess Nintendo are a company out to make money... so they realise they don't need cater for us so much.

The thing is kid... Nintendo IS catering to you by marketing to kids and making money, you just don't realize it. If the Pokemon games didn't sell a ton of copies every generation and Nintendo didn't stick with the simple, but increasingly deep formula for the development of the title, Pokemon would lose its popularity and people would buy other games. If the titles were less popular and Nintendo was making less money on them, they would have fewer resources for development and the quality of the titles would suffer.

Look at the choice items and other improvements made for the competitive scene over the last two generations. Those things would not exist if Nintendo didn't have the resources to have a designer sit around and work on balancing/improving the multiplayer aspects of the game. That stuff might look like a natural evolution, but its really the deliberate work of someone who wasn't *necessary* to the development of the game for the masses.

Game development is push-and-pull. You've got to make money to keep making games and you've got to appeal to a large audience to maximize potential profits. If you can accomplish that effectively, then you have the resources to devote to making your hardcore crowd happy and improve the best parts of the game in each generation. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as making everyone 100% happy.

So take it easy on Nintendo. They understand what hardcore battlers do and what they want from the game, but they have to cater to the 10+ million fans that buy the game every generation if they want to continue to cater to the (maybe) 100,000 or so hardcore battlers out there.