| RolStoppable said: 1) I don't agree that it works in favor of your point. The question was if Nintendo's mentality was the same and it was. Third parties made the difference in what the NES and Wii eventually became. Suppose Atari and Sega operated their businesses at losses of hundreds of millions $ per year (like Microsoft and Sony did in the seventh generation), the NES's success wouldn't have been the same. That kind of money could have bought Atari and Sega a lot of third party exclusives, making the NES library worse than it was. 2) Anyway, the long term profitability of the 3DS isn't really in question, but the fact that you admit the 3DS won't surpass the DS lifetime totals should give you a hint that Nintendo changed their gameplan, because this will mark the first instance of decline in Nintendo's handheld business. You didn't offer a different explanation on why the 3DS won't surpass the DS, so I feel inclined to take that as silent agreement. |
1) We'll have to agree to disagree here but I'll meet you half way; I do agree that Nintendo was focused on games that appealed to the masses with both the NES (SMB, Duck Hunt), and the Wii (Wii Sports, Wii Fit) as opposed to the majority of games on the N64/GC. So yes, putting the "fun" back in gaming was their goal for both. But because the market was in completely different shape at the time of the NES than the Wii, I still feel that Nintendo's mentality was a bit different. Remember that the NES launch in 1985 (US) was coming off of the big video game crash of '83. I remember many retailers here in the US flat out refused to carry the NES at first, as home gaming had pretty much been killed due to Atari flooding the market with garbage. Fast forward to 2006 when the market was in amazing shape with competitors who have enormous amounts of money and resources. Nintendo knew they could not win a direct fight with Sony or Microsoft, so they instead purposely differentiated themselves with the Wii. To summarize, the NES mentality was not about defending against direct competitors, but about showing all people (kids, teens, adults, families, and arcade dwellers) that home gaming was back. The Wii mentality was instead about making something so radically different that the competition was automatically pitted against each other. The big difference to me is that the Wii focused on "blue ocean" expansion, but left out many teens/twenty somethings. The NES focused on revitalizing the market for everyone.
2) Actually Nintendo's first decline in the hand held business was with the GBA, which didn't sell as well as its predecessor, and is the very reason I find the GBA and 3DS so similar. I don't think that the 3DS will match the DS in sales because, frankly, the DS was a rare phenomenon and it'll be awhile before anything reaches those sales numbers again. It offered completely new gameplay concepts; something that the 3DS or GBA just can't compete with, as they are basically power upgrades to their respective predecessors.
