In slightly comical scenes in Amsterdam yesterday, Nintendo reaffirmed the launch of the 3DS for the gaming media. Due out in three months, it promises to bring three-dimensionality to the handheld gaming world without the need for stereoscopic glasses. It will sell millions of units. The interesting part (for me) of the launch was that it showed one of the most powerful marketing stories, the platform story, in action.
Platform stories have long been the way that games have been sold to the public. But they are under threat like never before, and may well be about to go away. Why?
The Platform Story
The platform story is the marketing story that a console manufacturer tries to tell in order to sell its new technology. Every console from the NES through to the Xbox 360 has one, and platforms that have failed to build a compelling platform story (of which there are many) usually die. The successful story talks to the market and moves it forward. The unsuccessful story fails to convince the market that it is moving forward enough (The Sega Saturn), or it pushes too far forward with a story that the market is not yet ready to hear (The Sega Dreamcast).
As with any kind of marketing story, the platform story is not really about features or technology. It may appear to be so on the surface, but you only have to look as far as the mistakes that Sony made with the PS3 launch when they tried to sell the world on features like Blu-Ray. Tech specs are not a story.
Marketing stories for platforms, like any other kind, are about capturing imagination. Every successful platform story does this with a bold innovation within its story that shows the way forward. The Wii’s gestural controller, the original PlayStation’s cool design and the Sega Genesis’s “16-bit” moniker are examples of that boldness.
The typical story centres around a technical invention. It is easier to tell an invention story than any other kind (like cool design) because it gives the technology press something to talk about and the fans something to mod (and post Youtube videos). With the beach-head of the key invention established, the story then talks about the killer games that it brings with it.
An important aspect of the story is exclusivity. This says that the new platform is the only way to play this new (and awesome) form of entertainment. Gaming celebrities like Hideo Kojima are wheeled out on stage to talk about the exciting new project that they have been working on for the new platform. Platform stories all want to have that ‘killer app’ factor that makes the platform a must-buy.
The objective of the platform story is, ultimately, to sell units. More than that, however, the objective is to own the mindshare of next generation in the minds of consumers, publishers and developers. If the story can capture all three then the resulting virtuous circle will self-sustain, resulting in games for the public, continually renewed interest, and more opportunities to keep telling the story.
And that’s how billions of dollars are made in profit in video games.
Nintendo’s Story
In a brilliant article by Dan Cook, he explains how this strategy has been the underpinning of Nintendo's success for decades. Nintendo are the game industry’s equivalent of Apple in that they are the company that projects the story of being forward thinkers, and every other major company tends to think of them as market validators. Nintendo’s platform story is one that they have repeatedly told since the days of the NES, and it can be expressed in six words:
Nintendo invents new ways to play.
Almost every Nintendo platform story features a major interface invention, and it has mostly worked for them. Even in the apparent down times when Sony ruled the industry, Nintendo just plugged away at new platforms and new games, selling millions of units of hardware and software and often being the most profitable game maker in the world. They have always been less glitzy than some of their competitors, somewhat stiff even, but the consistent adherence to their platform story has eventually shone through.
In his book Tribes, Seth Godin describes the processes by which fans gather around organisations that are important to them. He relates how they follow leaders, visionaries (or heretics as he dubs them) and that this quality is what brings the tribe close together. Nintendo is one of the few game publishers in the world that has such a tribe, and their tribe is enormous. While casual consumers are the people who buy into Wii Fit, the Nintendo tribe is the one that buys their new platforms, signature games (Zelda, Mario, etc) and believes in big-N’s ability to always push the envelope to invent new ways to play.
Nintendo have earned their tribe and they keep them close. Almost every game reviewer and journalist is a member, as are many professional developers in companies all around the world. Standing apart from the more Hollywood-inspired antics of most of the rest of the games industry (which many gamers secretly despise), Nintendo seems to be one of the few companies that are able to remind everyone else that games are fun. Much of the market generally agrees, and happily forgives them their awkward on-stage appearances and less-than-slick presentations because they know that Nintendo will deliver.
The 3DS follows along in that vein. Already an innovative platform that brought the world touch-screen gaming (and soundly beating the more staid PSP into the dirt in the process), Nintendo has refreshed the DS story a couple of times already with DSi, downloadable games and signature Mario and Zelda games.
Now, they’re doing it again with the 3DS. The 3DS’s big feature is that the upper screen is capable of three-dimensional graphics. Relying on the nearness of the screen to the player’s eyes in order to display split images (a similar idea to 3D stickers in breakfast cereal), the big invention for this platform story is that playing games in 3D without glasses is a new way to play.
It will work really well for them of course because their tribe believes in them. However this kind of story, which is the same kind of story that other platform makers also tell, is growing increasingly stereotypical and may soon start to fade.
How Many More New Ways Are There to Play?
This is the central question that is increasingly haunting the entire platform business model. Fifteen years ago, the number of viable game platforms was pretty small. It consisted of the PC, a couple of major consoles and the Game Boy. The number of form factors and kinds of input were not that broad. Mouse-and-keyboard versus the joypad was still a meaningful discussion, analogue input or rumble were hot topics, and mobile gaming consisted of several versions of Snake.
In the intervening time there has been an explosion of interfaces and play styles including but not limited to, the dance mat, instruments, touch screens, gestural controllers, controller free (Kinect), online, persistent, social, stylus, tilt, gyroscopic, meta-games, high definition and now three-dimensional games. The pace at which these innovations have appeared has accelerated, and the internet helps spread the word at hyper-speed so they become anticipated much more quickly than ever before.
At the same time, many of these new ways to play are burned through quite quickly by the market. The Wii seems to be stalling, Kinect has sold many units but has large questions hanging over whether it will sustain interest, music games like Guitar Hero have come and gone, and not too many people are sold on the idea of 3D gaming with glasses.
As the number of new ways to play has proliferated, many of them have proven somewhat gimmicky. Arguably, outside of holography or total immersion bodysuits, the next decade is going to see a much slower pace of meaningful inventions in new ways to play. As with any innovation race, there is a tendency for the dramatic pace of invention to become asymptotic over time, which makes an invention-based story a harder sell.
We’ve already seen this in the graphics race, which effectively stopped being a marketing story four years ago, and clearly the interface innovation race is also due to settle down. The platform story is thus at risk of becoming like the arcade games story.
Arcade games in their heyday were the place to go for interface-led gaming experiences. Where your home computer or console might make a stab at replicating the sequence from the Death Star trench, at the arcade you could actually sit in a booth, grab a pilot’s control, and do it. Arcades over time became full of all sorts of new ways to play, but they also became expensive, novelty-driven and difficult to differentiate. As home consoles competed on the graphics and depth front, the arcade increasingly was side-lined.
The question for game-playing in the home is whether the novelty of new physical ways to play will wear off. And will the actual degree of innovation that each new invention brings continue to really distinguish itself as a new story? Or will it become as forgettable as the arcade?
Boos From the Gallery
At the same time, the development community on whom the platform story relies has been anything but happy for many years. Increasing costs, crunch time, a desire for more predictable careers, better business models and more control over their own destiny has caused many game makers to move away from big platforms. Independent efforts, massive multiplayer games, casual games and social games are all examples of developers that have found alternative routes to market. Then there’s the liberalisation of markets outside the console ecosystem through the iOS App Store and its imitators. These kinds of invention are squarely placing the power in the hands of developers and publishers, not the hardware platforms.
The traditional platform story has increasingly relied on internal development teams and partnerships with big respected publishers to try and fill the killer-app gap. At the Nintendo conference, the overwhelming quantity of the software on display came from franchises which are long in the tooth. This is because there is large value in existing brands for publishers (Nintendo included) because the risk of developing a brand new game and brand has grown large.
But it lacks originality. The same old games refreshed for 3D does not really add to the marketing story of inventing new forms of play. It looks more like reinventing existing forms of play, and that’s just not as compelling. Reinvention can work, such as Nintendo’s jump from 2D Mario and Zelda to 3D versions which literally blew the world away, but it too has an asymptotic quality. The jumps seem less vast, the inventions a little more ordinary, and the story suffers.
This is why Nintendo have made a big push to resurrect a brand long since expired, Kid Icarus, as the main protagonist of their 3D platform story (which will probably work). However many of their partners have catalogues with much less depth, so the games that they are talking about are bordering on the tired or even expired. Hideo Kojima is certainly a gaming celebrity, but there really are only so many times that he can whip up excitement for bringing Metal Gear to yet another new platform before the news is just not enthralling.
Fresh platform stories need fresh games. Microsoft had either a stroke of genius or luck when they came across Halo. Sony likewise with WipeOut for the PS1 and Grand Theft Auto 3 for the PS2. Nintendo converted an entire generation to their tribe with Super Mario 64, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye. Going back to those roots for yet another round (Ocarina 3D) is nowhere near as exciting however. And so the platform story is a little more down-to-earth.
This is bad.
The New Stories
The marketing story of exciting new games to play is increasingly diverging away from the platform story. Minecraft, Limbo and Amnesia are three random examples of games that are available in existing platforms, using regular old interfaces, but are exciting for other reasons. MMOs like EVE Online and Runescape are gathering users into their game worlds despite having no original platform to boost them, and they are making strong gains in their own tribes every year. Even social games (which many gamers have decided are not worth the attention) are attracting interest, even though they are basically just Flash applications on the Internet.
The common theme that each of these stories has is that they are quietly side-stepping hardware and attracting players on the software level instead. Where before the games industry always talked in terms of graphics and features, what we’re seeing more is marketing stories that are about invention in the style, community and game world.
All marketing stories need a vision, and the vision of today’s really interesting games is increasingly individual. In a previous post I described the post-platform future and how that really translates to single-franchise publishing. I think this is the story that we are starting to see emerge. As the platform story slows down under the sheer weight of invention that it has spawned, the software-led internet-based story of the game-as-platform is seeping through.
This might well result in EVE Online playable on a 3DS, or even CityVille, but if it does then I think the relationship between platform and publisher will be very different from the common relationship seen today. Where the development partners in the current platform story have long been somewhat beholden to the platforms, the single-franchise publisher really doesn’t need the platform, and so can dictate terms such as no content approval or significant revenue shares. They already have a platform, it’s called the Internet, and they have the users to back that up on their own terms.
That changes everything. It makes the hardware platforms much less powerful, and it causes chaos for the multi-franchise publishers whose business models have come to depend on new platform stories. On the other hand it makes the software-led story more interesting. That will result in more tribes existing on the edge of the market trying to lead in new directions with new stories, and less of the same-old platform story.
There is no doubt in my mind that the 3DS is going to be a big seller. The Nintendo tribe is very strong and loyal, and they will be enthusiastic about this new way to play, if only for a while. The platform story in general, on other hand, is increasingly running out of options.
While I’m wary of laying out an exact timetable for its decline, I think it’s safe to say that within three years we’ll see a definite power shift. It may be a deal between Zynga and Sony to feature CityVille as a part of PS3 Home, or a 3DS version of Runescape, but the moment will come. The next decade belongs to the single franchise publisher that does not care about platforms, but instead about its game world, community and fans.
And the consoles will be eager to have them or else risk being yesterday’s story.
No comment on portal 2 being cross compatable ps2 to pc chatwise?
Also, platforms are useful for plug and play. That won't be going away.
Posted by: granite26 | 21 January 2011 at 07:28 AM
That won't but the power relationship between platforms and software absolutely will.
Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Tadhg | 21 January 2011 at 12:18 PM
I don't think the 'hardware story' has ever been integrally tied to the success of games. If you look at all games that had a huge impact on things it all comes down to the novelty value of an experience, and only Nintendo has really aggressively used hardware to push it until recently.
What was the PS2's "hardware story" that caused GT3? There was nothing technical that couldn't have been done on Gamecube or Xbox. Sony just got lucky it was made for PS2 first. It's novelty value was the first game that allowed you to live without consequences, and was just as software-based as Minecraft.
The "hardware story" has been used a lot by Nintendo to reliably drive new novelty value in their projects. How many times have they re-made Zelda, the core ideas (bomb, boomerang, bow) being identical in each game, but the interface fundamentally changing how you interact with them? They're doing it again with motion plus.
If these things fail it is just because they lack potential to drive new innovation, like the Wii's extremely primitive motion sensing really isn't that inspirational to developers.
I don't think there is any end to innovation in these 'stories' be they hardware or software based, I just think more people figured out Nintendo's tricks.
Posted by: cdl | 31 January 2011 at 06:40 PM
Players don't buy into platforms for technical specs. They buy in because of the promise of new ways to play. From a seasoned gamers perspective, a new platform might not technically offer a new way to play, but the story seeds into the market that it does, and that's what matters.
The games form a key part of that story, such that the two feed into each other. Is it WipeOut that sold many PS1s or PS1s that sold many copies of WipeOut? How about the Game Boy and Tetris? Or the Wii and Wii Sports?
The answer is that they sang in the same choir and helped each other out.
The platform story isn't the only reason that games succeed. Really what I'm talking about here is games that arrive early on a platform and so try to be a part of the general up-swell in interest. Later games (FFVII in the PS1, for example) miss the opportunity to do that and instead sell through a different story.
Thanks for a great comment.
Posted by: Tadhg | 01 February 2011 at 12:05 AM