Nintendo and DeNA join forces to bring new games to smart devices

[Luigison]

The alliance between Nintendo and DeNA will bring new Nintendo game apps to a new multi-device membership service worldwide.  This new service will be accessible from smart devices, PC and Nintendo systems, such as the Nintendo 3DS portable system and the Wii U home console, and is expected to launch in fall 2015.

All Nintendo IP will be available to the alliance for creation of new original games.  They will not be porting any games made for the Wii U or 3DS.  Instead, the hope is that consumers will explore more with Nintendo's dedicated video game platforms.

http://press.nintendo.com/articles.jsp?id=42533

[BP]

I am excited about this. Specifically the mention of PC there. Maybe it won't go anywhere, maybe it will. If nothing else, I take it as a message that they won't be too proud to develop games for other systems if they absolutely have to. I don't mean that with mean spirit, I am relieved that if their baskets all collapse, they won't give up on finding new places to put their eggs. That's what they should be proud of, that their games are too good to stop being made just because the way people want to play them changes.

I'll be frank, though, part of me hopes their ships sink and they focus all their money, effort and creativity on making the best games they can, and those games end up on Steam. I think there are a lot of possibilities... PC gaming is a growing market, Nintendo has a lot of power that can change it, maybe help with some of its weaknesses, even.

Maybe! Nobody knows what'll happen.


Edit: I wonder if Nintendo has thought about how many of their games are being played on PCs already, right now, at HD resolutions and sometimes with widescreen added in where it wasn't before, via illegal emulation. Sure, pirates will be pirates, but a good amount of the reason I do it is for convenience's sake and I probably would make shortcuts to individual games to run via emulation in my Steam library if I weren't afraid that someone with handcuffs would be watching me boot them. With the way the Wii VC is handled on the Wii U I'm expecting to say good-bye forever to that on the next system and possibly good-bye forever to the Wii U eshop on the one after that. How's that backward-to-N64 compatibility going, Wii U? Still 480p only and nothing you don't have to go through the Wii menu to boot? How disappointing. Why not put everything you've got onto a platform that promises nigh eternal backward compatibility for the future? 'Cause it's already on there, you're just not making any money off of it...

[Weegee]

Whatever, so long as I'm still able to use a controller. Screw keyboard controls.

[BP]

I agree, I'm even the kind of person who uses a controller in FPSes. A wired Xbox controller already takes care of that. Native support is common enough that you almost never have to ask if a game supports controllers. The only game I have on Steam and play with keyboard/mouse is Scribblenauts Unlimited. Everything else* I have, mainstream or obscure, has native 360 controller support and works just like it would on a console, no questions asked.

What I'd wish for would be to have Nintendo's controllers gain native support too... in my case, I'd then have three good controllers to use, two of which would be wireless. Which brings me to why I think Nintendo and Steam could be a match made in Heaven. How great would Wii U controller compatibility be for people who already have them, and get a Steam Link in November? I don't need a Steam Link, personally, because my setup already has my computer connected to my TV. But soon, it'll be easy for anybody to connect their computer to their TV from wherever the two are in their house. With the right marketing strategy (such as "guess what else you can play Mario Kart on now"), it could even become commonplace. Nintendo holds local multiplayer sacred, while it's probably PC's greatest weakness, for now. PC could benefit from Nintendo here. Suddenly we have a cheap little box that makes cheap big games playable on a TV without any need for a creative setup. People who live with the people who have this will ask, when can we play this together? In what new ways can we play this together? If Nintendo answers, they're sure to lead by example. Again, this isn't what I predict will happen, but it sure is what I hope will happen, my idea of a best-case scenario. Nintendo, PC gaming, and people who play games could all benefit.

Or they could blow it all by not getting involved with Steam, if they stubbornly cling to this "membership service" like EA with Origin and Ubisoft with uPlay. Or maybe they don't mean games are coming to PC, just that it'll be like Miiverse and be usable from them. Big waste of an opportunity and a bad-case scenario if you ask me.

*except Dark Souls 1, which has a completely abysmal port, and basically requires a mod called DSfix to work like it's supposed to. A few files dropped in where they belong and now it works like it's supposed to... except it's still a bad port, terrible optimization, even though my PC could run it at 60fps I have to lock it to 30 or I risk death by wonky elevator collisions. And the netcode is completely awful. FROM learned their lesson and DkS2 is much much better.

[WarpRattler]

Without addressing the port-begging, two things:

-The fact that I can play many of Nintendo's biggest titles from the past on my Wii U for a reasonable price, even if I have to go through Wii mode for some of it, still puts it above PC, where even with the existence of GOG, a significant chunk of games I'm interested in from the past just are not legally available for purchase digitally. (I'm not counting import-only titles here, just so we're clear.) The only reason I can legally play something like No One Lives Forever is because I happen to own the retail discs. I'm not so lucky with titles like Sorcerian or Ever 17.

-Anyone complaining that Dark Souls has a bad PC port has never seen an actual bad PC port. Go play Devil May Cry 3 or Saints Row 2.

[BP]

-Sure it's not perfect. I know that. I don't mean to imply consoles never have any advantages. But I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me by saying retail games that went out of print, as retail games tend to do, and never got made available in a digital form that can be expected to last, are now unavailable. I know that. Retail games go out of print during the generation of the console they're for. Digital games see peaks years after the generation they were released in. That's half my point. The other half is that, sure, even though that probably has no reason not to happen on consoles if the digital market is maintained there, the Wii's Virtual Console has mostly not been brought to the Wii U eShop. They could prove me wrong and keep the eShop rolling, it just seems to me like it would all take less effort if the entire machine didn't get abandoned every five years. Although it's also true that the downloads won't just disappear from the abandoned machines. I guess you can lug out your old consoles for specific downloads anchored to them, or make a museum exhibit once you've got 20 or 30 consoles and get a lot of input switches...

-Heh, I know it's not unplayable, I played over a hundred hours of it. But being not the worst doesn't mean it's not bad. It is bad, ports that bad and worse shouldn't be considered acceptable, and I'm a bad person for accepting it anyway.

[WarpRattler]

Dark Souls is only a "bad" port in the sense that it doesn't have extra features or graphics options or various other stuff you usually expect from PC games. It's a one-to-one replica of the console version. Given the usual efforts of Japanese devs on PC—Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, out at the end of this month, is actually worse on PC than on last-gen consoles—you should be happy that's the case, instead of *****ing that it's unacceptable that a dev with basically zero PC experience even attempted to support a market that doesn't even exist in their home territory, when most devs don't even do that.

[BP]

Fair enough.