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IseeLight on 11 August 2011
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RolStoppable said:
Troll_Whisperer said:

I guess. It's also possible that they think they're losing the casual market to smartphone gaming (though I think the would be overestimating its importance) and want to go upmarket.

No, I don't think that's possible. In their latest Q&A session with investors they said that they didn't properly convey that the 3DS is in fact a new generation of handhelds and at the same time they said that none of their surveys or data indicates that smartphones are really cutting into their business.

Their current strategy is not much more than following Sony's business model. This means targeting the upmarket first and then over time working your way down, opening up new market segments via price cuts and additional software. With the DS and Wii Nintendo hit pretty much all market segments at once which is why those systems sold at such a high pace. The baffling thing about the 3DS really is that Nintendo executed a similar strategy as Sony would, even though Nintendo already had the blueprint for a winning strategy with the DS and Wii.

I'm not so sure the DS/wii strategy would work a second time, with the wii alot of really causual people who don't really care about gaming got it for wii sports and wii fit and alot of the hardcore nintendo fans felt burned, there's nothing to suggest the casuals would upgrade to the next nintendo console and if they repeated what they did with wii alot of the hardcore nintendo fans would have left them. As for the DS, the dual screen and touch screens got people interested but in the end they just played the same games they always do and on the wii and the DS 3rd party support was exceptionally crappy and Sony gained ground with the psp and the vita is almost certain to do better then the psp and on the other side you have phone game market going after really casual people, so hardcore nintendo fans are getting bored of the same nintendo games 100 times and Sony is gaining ground on all hardcore gamers in the portable space and the really casuals are going with phone games which are 99 cents for alot of the same shovelware DS got for 30, if they repeated the strategy both Sony and phones would gain ground on them, though in hindsight it would have been better then they are doing now, but that's hindsight.