Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

As far as I’m concerned, Nintendo is on the right track to proving that the Nintendo Wii can be a huge success. Let’s face it, so far it already is. Despite having sold millions of them since launch two months ago, they still can’t keep them on shelves for any length of time. Let’s have a look at where Nintendo’s gone wrong in the past, and think about whether they’re looking at the same problem this generation.

The first issue Nintendo’s faced historically is gaming droughts, if you read any gaming news site. The big Nintendo games are too few, and too far between, right? But this is really only an issue with a lack of third party support, which is, in my opinion, a result of Nintendo’s loyal base (that’s me) buying only Nintendo-published games. This all but punishes third party efforts, because it makes it harder for them to make money. The attempt to expand the gaming market, which is something that cannot really be quantified, is critical to their success. Expand the market, and the people who only buy Nintendo games become a smaller piece of the pie, leaving room for the other guys, like Konami. Konami’s only real contribution to the Gamecube was the excellent Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, which bombed. Aside from that, all I recall seeing was Yu-Gi-Oh!.

With stronger third party support, Nintendo can back off on making the first party games, perhaps encouraging their loyals to buy some third party titles. When I look at my DS library, it’s more than half first-party games, but a higher percentage of the games are third party than were on the Cube. And looking at my Wii library, there’s only one first-party game, not counting the bundled Wii Sports. Neither of my VC games are Nintendo games.

Once again, it looks to me as though Nintendo knows, above all things, how to make money. If making cheap games and selling millions of copies is profitable, so is spending more energy on bigger-impact titles like Zelda and Metroid, and leaving the slack for eager third parties to produce games like Dragon Quest IX on DS and Crystal Chronicles for Wii. Let developers like Tecmo put Solomon’s Key on the VC and make some money that way, so they can see their games have a market on the system with minimal effort.

Indeed, Nintendo needs to keep the games coming. But even more, for console longevity, they need to leave room on the sales charts for other titans like Square-Enix, Capcom, Konami and Namco.