Quality of Life

Last week Nintendo presented their quarterly report and apart from a most welcome profit report the first news about the quality of life program seeped through. Of course this is only one stone of many, which will in the end make up the quality of life program, but it gives us an outlook of what we can expect. And from a technological standpoint it's very impressive. Satoru Iwata presented the idea of a sensor, which will monitor your sleeping behavior. Your heartbeat, the frequency of your breathing and other things will be recorded and analyzed. And the impressive thing is, that all of this will work wireless. You don't need to hookup yourself to the machine. The collected data will then be streamed into a cloud service and analyzed there. This cloud service will make up the core of the quality of life program. All of this sounds pretty good to be true, but the be also completely blunt, I don't care. I'm a fan of Nintendo, but I'm mostly in for their awesome games. But in our health obsessed society and especially in Japan I can see them doing very well with this service. But it's not for me and I accept that. Because of that I found the reaction of some other Nintendo Fans pretty hilarious. Some comments sounded like they were forced to buy the quality of life service. Just like, if you're a Nintendo Fan you have to buy ALL of their products. Well Nintendo also owns some Love Hotels, so I hope you and your partner are in the mood.

This is, of course, complete bullshit. I'm a huge Nintendo Fan. I absolutely love Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Metroid and all the other franchises. But there are also Nintendo franchises I've never got into. Pikmin or Animal Crossing for example. They just don't interest me. And the same applies to the Quality of Life service, because I'm pretty satisfied with my lifes current quality level.

But this doesn't mean I'm following the news about Quality of Life closely. Because one thing worries me. Satoru Iwata said that this new venture won't affect the traditional games making business. It will be a third pillar next to the handheld and stationary consoles. Hmm when have I heart that the last time? Ohh right... When the DS launched, it should be a third pillar and not a replacement for the Gameboy. We all know how this turned out and this knowledge always lingers in the back of my head, when talking about Quality of Life. What if it is another huge success, just like the Nintendo DS? Will Nintendo then abandon the traditional game sector to fully persuade this more successful market?

To be honest, I don't think so. Satoru Iwata is a game developer. I can't see Nintendo abandoning it's identity under him, but what is a real possibility is they drive back their output in that field. Coupled with the already bad 3^rd party support their systems have (and lets just assume that this stays the same in the next generation) this could turn out to be a huge problem, probably forcing them to abandon (at least) their home console business. And that is something I don't want to see happening. I think one of the main reasons for Nintendo Games to be as good as they are, is their own platforms. Their consoles are tailored exactly for the needs of their own developers. It's a great strength of Nintendo (and of course a weakness in regards to third party developers) and with loosing that Nintendo may take Segas route. And we can agree that no one wants to see this happening.

So in conclusion I think that the Quality of Life service is a good idea and the first information sounds pretty impressive. But I also hope that it doesn't become a huge mega success like the DS or the Wii. A moderate success that turns it into the third pillar for Nintendo, but not the main pillar. This should always be the games business.

And as always

Thanks for reading