| RolStoppable said: Your belief is based on what? A couple of people you personally know? Think about the Gameboy line which drew in what we would call casual gamers today. With games like Tetris, for example. The Gameboy Color sold at a faster rate than the Gameboy. The GBA sold at a faster rate than the GBC. The DS sold at a faster rate than the GBA. All these systems basically used the same gameplan. Some sort of Tetris, 2D Mario and Pokémon were always present as the main pillars. The 3DS looks like the first Nintendo handheld to buck the trend of more sales in a shorter timeframe. Coincidently, all the main pillars are absent and will continue to be absent for the foreseeable future. Think about Nintendo's home consoles. The NES was a force with 2D Mario and Nintendo sports games that sold in the millions as their main pillars. The SNES started out with a 2D Mario and some sports games, but these games never received follow-ups later on in the SNES's lifecycle. This resulted in less consoles being sold overall. The Nintendo 64 threw the pillars out of the window. The Gamecube additionally ruined the few bright spots of the Nintendo 64 (Super Mario watergun, Celda). Nintendo's home console history is a history of decline. That is until the Wii came out and put the main pillars back in place with Wii Sports and NSMB Wii, two games that can be credited for record sales. What can we learn from this? That the so-called casual gamer will continue to buy hard- and software as long he/she is catered to properly and that he/she will stop to buy video games when that isn't done. This basically is exactly the same thing you can say about the so-called hardcore gamers. Cater to them and they will buy, don't cater to them and they will lose interest. |
My opinion is based on decades of experience, game media, and people's behaviors. I just used a couple of casuals (both family members) as an example. Anyway, let's take a walk down memory lane.
The Gameboy launched in about 1989 and it was an undeniable, success. It sold to everybody because it was cheap, had good battery life, a good library of (let's admit it) shitty games with a few gems every now and then. It came packed with Tetris and Super Mario Land was a launch title. No Pokemon, yet. Anyway, everybody--casuals, hardcore, black, white, young, old--we all had a Gameboy.
The Gameboy color didn't come out until 1998!! Damn near a decade later! You don't think that people were hungry for the upgrade? Pokemon came out in 1998 ('96 in Japan) and it was for the original Gameboy!! If you look at the games that launched with the Gameboy color, you'd be very underwhelmed. Centepede? Tetris Deluxe!? A port of the original Nes version of Super Mario Bros. came out months later and it was a success but do you think Gameboy color games were the driving force behind the sales or do you think it was the improved hardware? It was a huge step up from the green and yellow (and the eventual black and white) of the original Gameboy. So, like the Wii and the DS, Nintendo offered a huge "hook" in hardware. That's why it sold. You're argument about a version of Tetris or a 2D Mario falls flat. Yeah, it had a Tetris game and a Mario game, but these were PORTS/Slight upgrades to games we already had. I could argue that the Gameboy Color sold because it was backwards compatible to a game that people could play on an original Gameboy--Pokemon. It had just become a phenomenon in the U.S.
Next stop, Gameboy Advance. It came out in 2001. When did we get our Pokemon (2003), new 2D Super Mario Bros. game (never), Tetris, etc.? In the first six months of the GBA's life? None of your "pillars" are here--especially in the same time frame that the 3DS has been on the market. You said that the GBA sold faster but it damn sure wasn't because of Mario, Tetris, or Pokemon!
You mentioned the Super Nes, as well. In the U.S., it launched in 1991 with Pilotwings, Super Mario, and F-Zero. Mario was the pack in and the hardware was noticeably more powerful...to the hardcore. I remember (and based on your comment in the "Parents complain about...." thread, you remember, too.) many casuals of the day couldn't really see the difference/improvement in the quality of the games. The Snes wound up selling less than the Nes. To be honest, I don't even remember any sports games at launch. Bill Lambeer's Combat Basketball and maybe a baseball game. It didn't get the followup Mario games (unless you count Super Mario All-Stars) until 1995 and Yoshi's Island was overlooked at the time because of Donkey Kong Country. Still most of us, to this day, will claim that the Super Nes has had the best library and the best support of any Nintendo console, ever (Starfox, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, etc.). It still didn't outdo the Nes. It was better hardware and better supported but, like the 3DS, many people just didn't see the jump from Nes to Super Nes. They stuck with their Nes's.
Even the Nintendo DS didn't have your "pillars", at launch! It came out in 2004. We didn't get a 2D Super Mario game until 2006!! It launched with a port of an old N64 game, Super Mario 64! Like I said, the DS offered something new, hardware wise that people hadn't seen before in a handheld--the touch screen, as well as unique software. With the DS on track to becoming one of the best selling (if not THE best selling) video game device of all time, it didn't follow your formula of success.
You said the Wii put the pillars back in place. Wii came out in 2006. NSMB Wii came out in 2009. The Wii was impossible to find and in high demand loooooong before Super Mario Bros. Wii. Wii Sports may have towed the line but really, a lot of people (not me, I think it was a great game) feel that it was nothing more than a Wii REmote tech demo. If this is the case, maybe it wasn't Wii Sports that drove the sales of the Wii. Maybe it was the "something new" of the whole Wii experience. Maybe it was the Wii Remote that sold the Wii. It damn sure helped Wii Play move a few units, didn't it?
So, my point in my original post was that the Wii and the DS offered something new. The 3DS (which, by the end of this year, will have its own Mario Kart and Super Mario Bros.) has to overcome the obstacle of being seen as a Super Nes compared to an Nes. It's going to be hard for Nintendo to convince people who were satisfied with a DS that better graphics and such are worth upgrading for. Like the people who went from Nes to Snes or N64 to Gamecube, that's just not enough--no matter how good the games are. Pair that up with unprecedented competition from other portable devices, and I'm just glad that I don't have to figure out how Nintendo plans to sell the 3DS to anybody but the hardcore. Same goes for the Wii U. Same goes for the PSV. Same thing with the PS3.
Of course there's more to it than what I posted but this is what I personally feel is the biggest obstacle to overcome. If anything, I firmly believe that the 3DS will have a better library than most other Nintendo devices had in a similar time frame.
