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gum on 03 March 2011
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trestres said:
gum said:


"Ask Nintendo why they decided to release a new handheld when their installed base was of 150 million. It's called console life cycles and their are inevitable. Once SW sales start to decrease and attach ratios of installed base/yearly software decreases, then it's time to move on. Why are third parties supporting the 3DS?"

Again Nintendo is not in the same position when it comes to handheld: third parties have been really successful on the DS not on the Wii. That's the whole difference so if they don't improve the situation on the Wii there is really no reason to believe that the third partiy support will be decent for their next console too. It's not like they have the choice really imo.


What better that start from zero then if the current console isn't satisfying their needs? There's nothing else they can do. Either a new platform accompained by an overhaul on certain aspects and better relations with 3rd parties.

Or keep on selling only 1st party SW on the Wii. I cannot see third parties getting excited about The Last Story selling 150k units in Japoan when there's RPG's that destroy that number. Plus Nintendo is giving the bad example of not localizing their games, which is seen as the West doesn't care for such games etc.

What would your solution be? I'm eagerly listening.


First there is nothing more important for Nintendo than the sales of their own software. Of course they want to have a good third party support but for them that's like extra cash and a way to increase their installed base in order to sell even more first party software. The problem is that Nintendo and third parties have inherently opposite approaches as they don't develop the same kind of games so saying that Nintendo just has to listen to third parties is quite naive imo: of course they can find compromises but they will never be as third parties friendly as Sony or MS by nature.

So what to do? I have already given my solution to increase the third party support on Nintendo consoles. It is really simple in fact: just develop more traditional games. That's it. If Nintendo can make big franchises of Xenoblade, Last Story or whatever RPG games they are developping then it will be much more interesting for Square to release big games on their system and this will attract many japanese developpers and then more western developperswill follow, etc. Having big FPS franchises could of course also really help them to have a better western support. Of course they have to keep the originality of their own licences but in parallel developping more games like that would help them immensely I think.