megaman79 on 13 January 2009
misterd said:
They can. They just don't.
No question Nintendo has some advantages - their mascots are the icons of gaming, and very few IPs have that sort of fan base - of 1st party titles, only Halo/MasterChief can compete with Mario/Zelda (though Sony is trying).
They avoid competing with themselves (Nintendo one platformer, one racer, one adventure title, etc).
Nintendo understood the Wii before anyone else (by necessity) and so were in the best position to exploit it.
But what I think helps Nintendo more than anything else is that they are a game company, and have no pretensions of being anything else. The Wii was never a "gateway playform" like the 360 and PS3 are supposed to be. Their focus from the start has been on gamers, and they've spent a good part of the last decade trying to figure out how to make more gamers, rather than trying to get gamers to use their console to watch movies.
Finally, Nintendo is as all awesome as we like to think. ETernal Darkness sank like a rock. Metroid Prime 1-3 did very modest numbers. Pikmin has never been more than a niche title. Its really just a few of the aforementioned mascots that really drive the sales through the roof, and many companies have their own "killer" IPs that can stand toe to toe with Mariio and Link - Halo, Resident Evil, Madden, Gran Tourismo, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, etc.
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Pikmin remake on Wii has done 100k in 2 weeks. Its got some cred
“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.
