Anyone believe or hope Microsoft will leave the videogame business?

[lestatdark]

WilliamWatts said:

lestatdark said:

WilliamWatts said:

A major hit? They are a mere shadow of their former selves. Over the past few years they have gone from >70% market share down to <25%. They can't just come back from this even if they strike it big with every move from here on out for the next 3 years. The PS3 will not and cannot be a successful console because they have lost so much money to get to this point. There isn't really much justification for them to lose that much money either, you can't wave it away by saying that they are establishing themselves in the business when they were already the most established.

I don't want Sony to leave the business, but if they did then it wouldn't be of great loss to the consumer as console makers usually find themselves irrelevant before the end anyway.

I'm not waving away anything :P But wasn't it the same for Nintendo from the past two generations? True that they have been profitable still in these generations, but they also went from being the dominant force, by large, on the 8-bit and 16-bit era, to being overwhelmed by Sony.

Who's to say that Sony can't do the same for the next generation? As long as they're around, anything can happen, as much as we speculate and think that this or that can happen, we'll just have to wait and see ;)

Also, I don't agree with your last statement, no console maker is irrelevant to the market before the end. Sega wasn't, Atari wasn't and sure as Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo aren't as well. All console makers are relevant in diferent parameters and different scenarios, that's why they still exist and why even console makers who left the business are still in the minds of the people who supported them in the past. 

Even if you're generous and only count the from 3 years after the PS1 was released so from that peak to just before the end of 2006 Nintendo has either dominated or held their own against Sony in terms of hardware sales, profit and software sales. They have both a handheld and a TV based console line, remember? They have never been overwhelmed by Sony at any point in recent history. At worst you could say that between 2004 and 2005 Sony held the upper hand.

Sony doesn't have the 6 Billion dollar man called Miyamoto in their stable of developers. It would be harder for them to pull off the same thing as they simply don't have that man to call their own. He launched Pokemon and Mario and many others.

The impact of the console manufacturer who is performing the worst leaving the market is very small compared to say Nintendo deciding that from tomorrow they will just be a software manufacturer for example. Only the loyalists would shed a tear for a poor performing manufacturer leaving the market, the rest have already moved on.

@ thx1139: The Wii was meant to cost $199 but they increased the price and offered Wii-Sports as compensation after they found out exactly how much Sony were charging for their console. Oh an no hardware is overpriced which sells as well as the Wii. Arguably it was underpriced at launch compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360 given their massive shortages over the years. You can blame Sony for that one as well.

But no one is denying that Nintendo has always had the biggest impact on the video game market, hell they praticaly created it from scratch after the Video Game crash in 1983, and they'll be around for a long time with much more profit and much more knowledge on how the market shifts and moves along the years. 

The people who cannot see this, must really take a history lesson of what Nintendo means to the video game market.

But I also don't count out Sony, Microsoft or any other competitors that might appear on the future, because, just as Nintendo made their way into being the biggest video game company in the world, so can any other company do the same with time.

When I posted that comparison, I was strictly talking about the console market, because we all know that Nintendo has always dominated the handheld market. The only other competitor that has managed to take a slight bit of their market share from handhelds has been Sony with the PSP, but I see that Apple with the concept of the iPhone can also bring something new to that market, even though I think that Nintendo will be a step ahead of anyone who tries to enter that market.

Also, I'm not against your points of view, I share most of them, but I also think that many things can still change, as the future of the video game market is not set on stone (this generation has been a prime example of it, many people never thought that Nintendo could pull off such a reaction for the Wii and DS, yet those same people were proven wrong), so counting out Sony, even with their blunders, I think it's a bit premature to do.