Why Nintendo has ruined this gen for me

[hsrob]

killeryoshis said:

hsrob said:
I read the first half a page and the last and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss much.

Nintendo didn't ruin this gen by now allowing a broad enough range of games on their system to suit your taste. If i was inclined to point fingers, I'd be looking at third parties who have, for the most part, refused to even give the Wii a chance.

Wii's system is underpowered because Nintendo couldn't afford to take a risk on both the controller and manufacturing a system with specs that led to exorbitant game development costs. Nintendo is a gaming company first and foremost and CAN'T afford to get into a pissing contest with much larger rivals who have multiple other revenue streams to back up any losses they make in their gaming divisions.

As for your claim that Nintendo's first party titles are lacking this generation due to hardware limitions, you are of course entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is crap and I feel confident that the general weight of opinion is with me on that one.

You seem to know little

Before the generation started. Nintendo was a 30 billlion doller company. The reason why they didn't make a system
more powerful was due to the fact that its main point was motion controls. They hoped that making the costs low would
get better 3rd party support and more excluesives. But to also to make it diffrent from everybody else. Just like how the
NES,Gameboy and DS were underpowered. They were just following what made them sucessful in the first place
Also GC was $99 and it was the 2nd most powerful system last generation. and they profited from that

Not sure where you got your 30 billion figure from as it was only 7 billion in 2003 and 10 billion dollars in 2008, which was after the start of the generation and the combined success of the Wii and DS.

Anyway besides the point, Nintendo have achieved their extraordinary profitability and huge cash reserves by not taking unnecessary risks.  Nintendo saw last generation the decline of profitability due to escalating development costs and, as you say, decided to make the Wii about something else.  To deny however, that there was a very real risk that Wii was going to fail is to deny history, there was barely an analyst in the games or business world that predicted any measure of success for the DS and Wii, let alone the huge success they have enjoyed.  The possibility that the Wii could actually succeed didn't even occur to people until after it's E3 showing, mere months before it's release, and long after most R+D and design decisions had been finalised.

For Nintendo to manufacture a system of comparable power and price to the PS3 or 360 would have required them to loss lead (Nintendo can't magically produce a system that is comparible in power and significantly cheaper to manufacture than the competition). That is to say they would have had to build a system that costs more to manufacture than what it sells at retail with a dollar loss associated with every system sold. In this model, profitability is a long term goal associated with ongoing software and accessory sales, combined with gradually declining hardware development costs.  If Nintendo had done this and then the Wii had gone on to sell at levels comparable with the GC, software and accessory sales may never have gotten to the point that allowed the system to achieve overall profitability.  Remember games cost much more to develop these days so the amount of revenue generated this way has lessened proportionally.  Just look at the 360, nearly twice the sales of the Gamecube and still how many billion dollars in the red?

Gamecube may have sold for $99 but show me evidence that it was profitable at that price point,  if it was, I would imagine it was only just so.  Keep in mind it only hit this price point several years after it's release.  We actually have no idea whether the Gamecube was even profitable as a whole, it probably was, but Nintendo financials just show us that they continued to be very profitable throughout last generation.  How much of this was due to the GC and how much was due to a little thing called the GBA is anyone's guess.

My point: If Nintendo had entered this generation with the Wii remote, which was a huge gamble, and a hardware and business model more in line with MS and Sony's offerings, failure in the market would have been a very big problem for them even with their huge cash reserves.   Sony and MS are willing to risk those losses for a long term goal, history would tell us that Nintendo isn't.

wall o' text ends here.