What are the principles of game success (with a focus on Nintendo)

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at Nintendo’s story to learn the principles and insights that make a game successful in the market.

 

Since the first simple tennis video game called pong, technological advancements have made games increasingly colorful and pushed the boundaries of expression. These advancements have allowed games to capture the attention of many people and entertain them. As the number of people playing games has increased, the market has grown. As the market expanded, so did the number of companies entering the industry, resulting in a plethora of companies and a plethora of games.
While the market is still large today, the industry has long since reached saturation point. As many games are created, many of them fade into obscurity shortly after their release. A game needs to be able to satisfy gamers and have something that sets it apart from other games in order to gain traction, or it will literally be buried alive. According to game critic AVGN, there have actually been cases of unsold game cartridges in the US being buried in the desert.
The current gaming market is like a jungle jungle. Only a handful of games are able to survive in the jungle, while the rest of the games are left to die. The competition to survive in this red ocean is fierce. In order to survive, games need to evolve, and the games that have survived in the current era, the games we play today, have already evolved. In order to make a successful game and make a name for yourself, you need to evolve beyond what’s already out there, or you need to evolve in a way that hasn’t been done before. In short, the barriers to entry for creating a successful game are getting higher and higher, and the competition is getting fiercer.
One of the reasons for Nintendo’s success is that games should be fun. It’s a no-brainer, but it’s a key reason why Nintendo has been able to stay ahead of the competition. No matter what the game is, people essentially play games for fun. This is something that is often overlooked, and no matter how fancy you make your game, or how much technology you incorporate into it, it will only initially intrigue gamers, but if the game itself isn’t fun, they will quickly tire of it.
Before Nintendo’s 8-bit Famicom came along, there was an Atari, which exploded onto the scene with an initial boom in popularity, and the gaming market expanded rapidly. But by the end of the decade, the games that worked on Atari machines were all terribly boring, and the games had lost their value. This is because game companies realized that they could crank out as many different types of games as possible, even if they weren’t fun, and as long as one of them sold. This led gamers to distrust and even boycott the video games of the time, causing the market to collapse. This was known as the Atari Shock, and the gaming market was hit so hard that it declined by more than 90%.
In response to the overall downturn in the gaming market, Nintendo introduced the Famicom and introduced a system to help overcome this. In order for game makers to create and sell games that would work on the Famicom, they had to have their games pre-screened and licensed by Nintendo. This gave Nintendo a head start, and they benefited from it. But most importantly, it prevented low-quality, uninteresting games from appearing on the Famicom.
Nintendo also focused on making fun games themselves. Employees were encouraged to come up with ideas, and star teams were organized to create games that appealed to gamers. Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and many others were the result. These are what we call killer content, and they sell like crazy around the world. Nintendo captured the majority of the gaming market share with killer content.
During the heyday of the Famicom, a new competitor emerged in the form of the Genesis, a 16-bit gaming machine made by Sega. The Genesis had better 16-bit graphics than the Famicom, sound quality comparable to CDs, and processor technology. But even with its superior technology, the 16-bit Genesis couldn’t outperform the 8-bit Famicom because it lacked the fun games and killer content of the Nintendo. Nintendo maintained its lead and later released the 16-bit Super Famicom, which defeated Sega. Meanwhile, Sega continued to focus on technical implementations, releasing the Genesis CD and 32X (hardware that could run 32-bit quality games). The games that were supposed to run on the new machines were just games that took advantage of the new hardware’s capabilities and were not fun to play, so it ended up being a failure.
The examples of Atari, Genesis, and Famicom show that in order for a game to succeed, it has to stay true to what it’s supposed to be: fun. Atari’s strategy of compromising quality and fun not only led to their own demise, but also shook up the entire gaming market, and their obsession with technical implementation lost out to Nintendo, who put fun first through licensing and killer content. Sonic, the iconic Genesis character and Super Mario’s eternal rival, is now suffering the indignity of being featured in a Nintendo game.
To succeed like Nintendo, you need to understand what games are all about. And that is to have fun. Of course, with the development of computer technology and the internet, the rise of social networks and smartphones, the gaming market has changed considerably from the past. We don”t play games alone anymore, we play online with other people, and we play games on a variety of devices, including computers, smartphones, and portable gaming devices. However, the main function of gaming hasn’t changed much. People play games because they’re fun and worth spending time on.
If you look at the games coming out in Korea these days, most of them are MMORPGs. There’s no end to the number of MMORPGs out there. If you look at the non-MMO games, they don’t deviate much from the games that came out in the past. Some of these games are very successful, but most of them don’t do well and get buried. I once heard a lecture from a game company that said that if even a quarter of the games they release are hits, they are successful. Why is it that the mentality of making a lot of similar games to follow a trend, or imitating games that came out in the past to make it easy to make a game and hope that one of them will be successful, reminds me of the old Atari case?