Malstrom responds to Wii price cut.

[Erik Aston]

LordTheNightKnight said:

trestres said:

LordTheNightKnight said:
The gap was in the hopes third parties would fill it, which they did with the DS. So it's just as much the fault of third parties for not taking the obvious opportunity.

How do you know that? It could have been that they were relying too much on a couple of big hits instead of having a more constant release of games. Either ways it's their fault for relying on someone from the outside.

They did it with the DS. Did you miss what happened there? And don't tell me it's Nintendo's fault for "relying", when they had plenty of reason to think it would repeat with the Wii. The third parties chose not to take advantage of that. It's their fault for refusing to go with the system sooner.

Uh... huh?

It is never the responsibility of third parties to drive hardware sales.

Clearly Nintendo thought Wii Music and Animal Crossing would drive hardware sales. They thought that music was a universal concept like sports and fitness that could be a cornerstone experience of the console. And they thought that Animal Crossing would be a new experience thanks to voice chat, even though it did not feature significant new content. They thought those games would get them through to Wii Sports Resort, which they were planning for a spring release.

So the drought between the Brawl/Kart/Fit triumvirate and the arrival of WSR was due to failed strategy behind 2 games, and a delay of the 3rd. It was not some intentional plan to leave their own fate in the hands of third parties.

As for DS, Nintendo brought Layton to the West, they've had main entries in the Kirby and Pokemon series, they've had Style Savvy and Rhythm Heaven and the Cookbook game and Math Training and most recently Tomodochi. The new DS game in the August NPD data was Fossil Fighters... from Nintendo. And oh yeah, they launched a thing called DSi you might have heard of, with new built in software and downloadable games. The question is not whether DS is being most driven by those games, but whether Nintendo ever intentionally abandoned the fate of DS to third parties. (Hint: they didn't.) And they didn't with Wii either.