Nintendo's Issues (Or why they aren't making as much money as they could)

I love Nintendo. Great games, family friendly, just overall fun. I currently own every single one of their home consoles (though my NES is a retro clone), and I own a GBC and DS Lite, so the only games I currently cannot play from Nintendo are 3DS games.  My most recent acquisition was a Wii U and it is a wonderful piece of hardware. Quality controller, good software library, and the eShop is very nice.

Limiting Supply

But Nintendo has found many ways to try and irk me, and I don't quite understand why. Nintendo is the only company that limits the supply of their games and accessories. They are doing this even more so with their new Amiibo products, and I don't understand why.  

Let's use the example of Metroid Prime Trilogy. This game was a compilation of the 3 Metroid Prime games with the first 2 being updated to a wii control scheme. The game had a single print run and was only on shelves for probably 2 or 3 years, always at its original asking price of $50, never dropping.  Once it went out of stock, the game became unavailable.  Completely and totally unavailable.  Used copies would sell for upwards of the original asking price or higher.  The question is, why? If they could make this money by selling more, why don't they?

Now MP: Trilogy is actually a case where Nintendo came through for me, and released the game as a downloadable on the Wii U, and now I can finally enjoy MP: Trilogy for a reasonable price (I got it for $10, but it currently sits at $20).  

Other games have not been so lucky.  Games such as Xenoblade: Chronicles or Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword have never gotten a reprint.  These games have not gotten a re-release via the eShop and simply remain incredibly difficult to get a hold of.  The cheapest used price for Skyward Sword on amazon is sitting at $41.  

This has been even more of an issue with the new Amiibo toys.  I can't seem to find a Samus Amiibo available for a decent price anymore now that I have a Wii U.  I was holding off and now I can't find it.  Same goes for at least a dozen other Amiibo designs and there is no good reason as to why Nintendo limits supply.  They don't get any benefit or make any more money when their product isn't available.  So why let them go unavailable?

Regional Differences

Now, as mentioned above, Nintendo has released some of their old Wii catalog onto the Wii U eshop.  Which is great news, and really, if it continues, will mean new life for some of these games that were made unavailable to Nintendo's supply limitations.  Also, given all current games need to be released to stores and the eshop simultaneously, we don't have to worry about these supply problems in the future, or so I hope.

Now the problem is region locks.  What are region locks? They are arbitrary locks that prevent games from one region (say, Europe) to be played on a console sold in another region (say, the US).  This goes a step farther and eshop games that are available in Europe may not be available in the US and vice versa. Why is this? I have yet to figure it out.  Just take a look at this list (handily compiled on Wikipedia) to see what I am talking about.

When Nintendo first announced that they were going to start releasing Wii games on the Wii U eshop, it generated a lot of buzz and they promised 3 games (Metroid Prime Trilogy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Punch-Out!!!) and they were all to be released one a week for 3 weeks.  Since those three games have been released in the US, not one other Wii game has been released in the US.  Europe on the other hand has had a consistent stream of new Wii games being released on their eshop.  At least 1-2 a month.  All of these games had disc releases in the US and are not widely available in the US either, but for some reason, they remain unavailable.  Games such as Kirby's Epic Yarn or Donkey Kong Country Returns are available for download right now in Europe, but not here in the States. The coding is obviously complete, and almost all European games have an english translation, so that can't be the cause.  Then Why? 

Other virtual console games have suffered from this, such as Metroid: Zero Mission (for the GBA) or others.  From wikipedia, we see that there are 5 more games released on the European VC than on the US VC.  Why the difference? I dunno. 

Even new releases, such as the new Yoshi's Woolly World, are available in Europe, right now, today, but not available in the US.  Heck, there isn't even a release date besides 3Q 2015.  And due to the region locks, I cannot order from amazon.co.uk and have it work in my Wii U.

Exclusive Extras

Another odd choice for Nintendo is limiting the release of many extra products to Club Nintendo subscribers only.  And given that Club Nintendo is shutting down, there will be no way to get these items. The soundtrack for Mario Kart 8? Only available to those in the Club.  How about a Golden Nunchuck to go with that Golden Wii remote you got in that cool Skyward Sword Bundle? Only available to Club Members.  Mario Kart 7 Trophies? Captain Toad Lamp? Soundtracks? DS Cases? All club nintendo exclusives.  I'd gladly plop down $10 to buy those soundtracks off of Amazon MP3, but they aren't available.  I would have spent extra to get that Nunchuck, but it wasn't available. It just flabbergasts me to think that they could have sold all of these things to me and didn't.

The Future

Who knows what is going to happen next, but it is obvious that Nintendo has some kinks to work out.  There is talk that the next system will not have region locks, but that does not make the current situation any better.  Will the US get more Wii games? Unknown. All I know about the situation is that I have a few hundred dollars I would be willing to give to Nintendo at this moment, but they for some reason have found reasons to make what I want unavailable.  The ball is in Nintendo's court, so let's see if they will pick it up and play, or just sit there.

Making of a Miniature, Part 1

So now that my designs are out in the wild (check this thread if you haven’t yet! ) and I wanted to give the community an idea on how the miniature design process works for me.  It varies from designer to designer, and from digital sculpting to traditional sculpting, but this is how I do it.

Now I want to start this off by saying that I am not an artist or even a CAD designer by trade.  I work my day job as a computer engineer and happened to pick up CAD work as part of an internship about four years ago.  Throughout the last few years I have worked in it on the side, but I really didn't do anything significant until the last year or so, when I made a Vulture III and a Thor II last winter.

Now I use Autodesk Inventor.  It is a mechanical CAD  program.  I know other designers use Dassault Solidworks (a Mechanical CAD), Autodesk Maya (a CAD program aimed at animation and video games) and Pixologic ZBrush (also an animation CAD).  Essentially, you have CAD that is for designing parts and CAD for computer graphics.  I come from the part design world.  My experience is in both Dassault CATIA and Autodesk inventor.  CATIA is an extremely high end software, which also makes it prohibitively expensive.  Inventor is free for anyone with a .edu email address, and since I am still taking master’s courses, it fits me perfectly, free.

Now because I work in mechanical CAD, rather than a Mesh or Node editor CAD, the way that I design my miniatures is different from how some of my colleagues may.  I start with 2D sketches and push and pull them into 3 dimensional objects.  Now, if you want an in-depth look at that exact kind of thing, take a look at my personal blog posts on designing the Thor II: http://randominterestsofanaverageman.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-making-of-model-part-1.html. 

Now I have worked on four miniatures for IWM (5 if you include my not-accepted Vulture III), and they are a bit of a hodge-podge.  Thor II. Arctic Wolf II. Arion. Chimera.  Typically, IWM plans what minis they want to produce for the year, and then assign sculptors to work on them and get them released.  Anything that is not put on the schedule is added as an online exclusive.  So when I completed both the Thor and the Vulture, they were slated to be online exclusives.  Part of the reason for this also is that my CAD style hasn’t been perfected yet, and some designs, curvier designs, are still difficult for me to capture properly.

Moving on.

So now you know what software I use and why most of my work is Online Exclusives, so let’s talk about the designs I work with and the QCC process.

First things first, I pick a ‘Mech.  We all know what IWM’s release schedule is for the year, and what ‘Mechs have already been made, so I immediately remove them from my list of possible choices.  From there, I pick a ‘Mech that fits my CAD style.  Something a little blockier.  My first attempt was the Vulture III.  Very blocky, very geometric.  No smooth curves, no difficult to model surfaces.  The Thor II was also a solid choice in this respect.  The Arion also fit this style of mine, though to a lesser degree, and because of this, I hit a few snags, which I may or may not cover later.

Now, I also love Mechwarrior 4.  It is what got me into Battletech, got me into Miniatures, and started the downward spiral I call a hobby.  This game has also directed some of my designs here and it is the reason I chose both the Arctic Wolf II and the Chimera to work on.  The Arctic Wolf also happened not to have a miniature yet, and there definitely are some people looking forward to this mini.  The Chimera on the other hand, well, I just did not like the existing mini.  Tiny legs with a huge body, and a lot of the details I just felt were off.  So, I decided to take a crack at resculpting it.

Now, when I went into the Vulture and the Thor initially, I had no intention of doing alternate configs.  But when I always finishing the Thor, I saw the Dark Age mini, and saw the stats, and decided to make the missile box arms also.  From there, I have decided to make alt configs for all of my minis when they are available.  Meaning, if there is a reasonable alt config, my minis will probably include one of them at least.  We’ll go into more details on those when we start talking about the full QCC process, probably in part 2.

Typically, for CAD designers, we start making the entire miniature, but without any details on it.  We want to decide on the height of the mini, and make sure the basic proportions are dead on.  I will be using the Chimera as my example here.  I gathered as much source art as physically possible, which really isn’t much at all.  There is the TRO image, and luckily, this is a ‘Mech from Mechwarrior 4.  Even better yet, it was designed for Mechwarrior 4 and put into TRO: 3067 after that game was released.  So, I hopped into the game a took a few screenshots:

Also, I found an image from the Battletech Pods to use as a reference, this piece of art right here, which also conveniently lined up really good with the source art:

From there, I made my first run at the basic shape of the mini, check it out:

This is what I showed IWM when I asked if they wanted to resculpt the mini, and it is what was first submitted to the quality forum for my peers to review. You can quite obviously tell that there are some issues with this block out.  Small legs are the immediate issue, but there are more.  The IWM quality forum helped me get rid of some of these problems.

What did they have to say? Well, that will have to wait for part 2…