greenmedic88 said:
For a 4-5 year hardware life cycle (of optimal or rising sales, not past peak declining sales) it wasn't a bad strategy considering Nintendo made a healthy profit on every unit sold from Day 1. More profitable as manufacturing costs dropped with increased yields and any streamlining that may have happened to the hardware. But yes, in terms of software support (third party, everyone knows Nintendo had a handle with games on their own hardware), I think the limited hardware specs (RAM and VRAM is another big constraint) relative to the competition in addition to the basic non-standard control scheme, directed most of the big soft franchises away from the platform. Of course easy portability for the Wii with similar hardware specs (better processor, better GPU, more VRAM and RAM) would have meant that the Wii would have been either priced similarly to the competition or at a lower profit, possibly both. And that's just not how Nintendo makes its gold coins. But, since this isn't a typical 4-5 year hardware cycle, we're beginning to see more of the problems with Nintendo's Wii strategy. Even if Nintendo dropped production today, the Wii couldn't be seen as anything but a monumental success for Nintendo given the number of units already sold and all the Nintendo published titles they sold. |
My opinion on the Wii is that Nintendo never intended it to be more than a successful niche product and they priced and specced it accordingly. Sure they probably felt it would outsell the Gamecube but I doubt that they even thought it would outpace the PS2 in like for like terms over the first few years of its life. It was both underpriced for the demand and underspecced to leave its niche. Nintendo painted themselves into this corner because they never believed that their product would sell 70M consoles by late 2010 or be sold out so consistantly over the first 2 years of its life. Remember they initially were going to sell the console for $199 U.S.D. which would have been even more inadequate and they only raised the price when they found out how much the PS3 was going to cost.
Im certainly not saying that Nintendo were unsuccessful with their Wii. However it does appear that they failed to back their console appropriately. Even minor changes relatively could have made big improvements to how the Wii responded to the current market conditions. Something as minor as making the analogue stick the 5th button to hand and installing a 2-4* more powerful CPU and slapping in a little more RAM and a modern GPU which could have raised the Bill of Materials $30-40 which would diminish over time and given them at least port compatibility with >50% of the DX9 console markets games could have been all they would have needed. Developers could have designed games which are compatible to all 3 had it actually been realistic for them to do so. The major cost in not doing so is the fact that their market is so hit driven on the Wii. Either you strike or you strike out whereas on the DX9 consoles there are enough people who buy 5-10 games a year to allow niche games to at least bring back some revenue.
Tease.
