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Alterego-X on 03 October 2009
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Dr.Grass said:
Alterego-X said:
Dr.Grass said:

1- Your 'historical' argument is useless because (a) the strategic aspect is more imporant and (b) ANY good statistician will tell you that to make a prediction based on known data you need a big enough sample space. What am a saying? There have only been the NES,SNES,N64,GC (I'm not counting Wii) so to deduce that much just from these is rather presumptuous.

2- Sony has been the only 'twice-in-a-row' winner and they launched first so there's some incentive.

The "historical trends" argument is usually wrong, if people connect it to irrelevant coincidences, and call it the cause-effect relation, without detailing the relation.

For example, claiming that since shark attack and ice cream sales increase in the same months, ice cream attracts the shark, (instead of looking for a reasonable common cause, in this case, the summer season)

You did exactly the same with suggesting that  that historical first releases might have caused long term successes, without explaining the connection. Please, explain, why do you think that releasing early gives a significant advantage?


OMG. You picked that up! I'm impressed.

So my 1st and 2nd points are using contradictory arguments. In fact my 2nd point is using the argument I tried to disprove with my first. I don’t for a second believe in historical points, but I was just thinking of covering my bases. This is what I mean:

If he says he expects no 1st launch because of historical then my 1st point is showing how the historical argument is very weak. I put the 2nd point there so that IF Nintendo were to go historical (which doesn’t make any sense) then why not copy the only twice-in-a-row-successful  company in history?

You could probably have picked up that I don't think the 2nd point is significant since I didn’t deliberate on the point at all. If it was a serious debate I would’ve put point 2 as a subargument to point 1.

Capiche?

It's not true that "historical trends don't make any sense". 

For example, as I already said, historically it is always the most popular console of a generation that is kept on the market for the longest time.

Now, that does make sense, because there is a proper common cause for popularity and longevity, and that is momentum.  

 

It would be stupid to say that it is the branding on the box that somehow gives them extra longevity, but it doesn't mean that longevity is totally random, and past generations couldn't give an indication in some way.