Pong creator turns nose up at Nintendo Wii U
Atari founder Bushnell 'baffled' by console
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has doubts over the long-term success of the Nintendo Wii U, after admitting he doesn't get the tablet-controlled console.
"I actually am baffled by it," said the Pong creator in an interview with the New York Times. "I don't think it's going to be a big success."
Bushnell - often hailed at the godfather of videogames - reckons Nintendo's next-gen machine signifies the end of an era in which consoles are the dominant force in gaming.
“These things will continue to sputter along, but I really don’t think they’ll be of major import ever again,” he claims. Consoles are being out-evolved by mobile gaming, he reckons.
Even so, Nintendo enjoyed a busy sell-out launch in the States last week and while the company is said to by losing money on every machine sold - often the case with consoles - it has since admitted the sale of just one game per Wii U would make matters solvent.
“As soon as we get the consumer to buy one piece of software, then that entire transaction becomes profit positive,” Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America, told the San Jose Mercury News.
Whether Wii U sales can revive Nintendo's flagging fortunes remains to be seen, but if the masses remain as mystified as the man from Atari and casual gamers fail to make the jump, the makers of Mario may be banging their heads against a brick wall without generating the coins needed for an additional 1UP. ®
COMMENTS
It's been at least 5 years (since the launch of the 1st iphone) that we've been told that mobile gaming will become the next big thing and it's not. The iphone couldn't manage it and Android can't.
The Nintendo DS was supposed to die out from mobile gaming and it went on to be Nintendo's biggest portable system ever. I believe it either the top selling games system ever or the second.
The 3DS still managed to have a respectable launch despite not really having any software for a good 6 months into its life.
That's because people who want to play games want to have something that plays games well and that means having something more than a touch screen.
That's largely due to the fact the controls are very poor. You simply can not play games to the same level on a touch screen. That's why mobile games are cheap. No one values them and why should they? The only good games are very simple games that work fine with a touch screen or something like GTA 3 which does indeed look nice but you just can't control it well. It's not the same experience.
Your average consumer won't want a phone that looks like a games console so I can't see anyone putting a D-pad and buttons on their phone purely in the hopes that gaming will take off so we're not going to get good controls out of mobile gaming and it will continue to be a non-event. It's something for people who can't afford to enter a real gaming market or indies too concerned about PC piracy.
Re: If anything
Buy a £250 console and you get 4-5 years of life out of it and are still able to play the latest games with the same user experience as everyone else.
Try that with a PC and most (note, not ALL) modern games and you'll be lucky if it's even going to work in noddy graphics mode 3 years down the line.
The reasons that many people buy consoles are there's no technical barrier to overcome, smaller initial outlay and no perpetual hardware refresh to play the latest games other than when you decide to go 'next gen'.
Load of rubbish
If I want to squint at a screen while on the train and play tetris then fine - mobile gaming has come a long way the last few years. If I want to blast away play COD for a couple of hours then I think I'll stick with my XBox thanks.
As I think has been mentioned before - I don't remember portable DVD players wiping out the DVD/TV market, so why should mobiles wipeout big screen gaming?
Mobile gaming is definitely moving forward, but to say they will replace Consoles, is like saying that consoles were going to replace PC gaming.
Mobile gaming is in a different area to Console.
People like the large screen and handheld controls Consoles offer.
Maybe in the future the mobile will be the hardware that links up to the TV by cable or wireless and a contoller.
