| enrageorange said: I believe all three companies have a bleak future. The following statement is coming from my own personal beliefs so please do not rage at me if you don't agree with me.
Nintendo 3ds initially flopping and then after getting a huge pricecut causing it to be sold at a loss, it rebound decently, and then getting a bunch of discounts and deals for sales to explode during the holidays. The ds didn't get a pricecut for a very long time and at least here in the United States, it was sold out every holiday without any further holiday discounts and deals. If software doesn't sell well and I mean nonbundled software "cough cough mario 3ds land, zelda OOT, and nintendogs, then nintendo is just throwing away money with each 3ds sold. I do not think nintendo can afford to have their gaming devision lose money for even 2 year like microsft and sony are able to. Wii U is a radical new idea that nintendo themselves said is only suppose to appeal to the tech junkies. Nintendo has fallen from grace before. I think it will happen again with the wii u, so I think nintendo is a bad option.
Sony, vita's huge drop week 2 in Japan is concerning considering even the 250$ 3ds held up much better then that in Japan on a nonholiday month and Japan has become psp's biggest market in recent years. What also worries me is that a lot of people bought the original psp for movie and music playback, with gaming as a nice little bonus hence the terrible tie ratio even compared to other commonly pirated on devices. All those people now have smartphones and itouches. I think the psvita will sell much worse than the psp. On the bright side the ps3 is selling better than ever and the ps2 is still selling decently. On the not so bright side everything else sony makes seems to be losing marketshare. Not enough is known about the ps4 for me to have an opinion on it.
Microsoft is also a big risk. The dedicated desktop is slowly dieing and I think eventually its only customers will soon be dedicated gamers, and powerhouse users. I personally think tablets are just a fad and people will return to the far more convinient laptops soon, but if they don't, and windows 8 tablets fail to gain an audience, then microsoft is in big trouble, considering no computers means no microsoft office sales which is their other big money maker. Their windows 7 phone startup despite huge marketing campaigns and good reviews is failing. Their only product that seems to be performing well is the xbox 360, and that accounts for such a tiny amount of their revenue that its almost irrelevent. With microsoft it doesn't matter if their next xbox is a smashing hit, or a huge flop, unless they gain traction on the dominant computing platform, or customers return to PCs, they are screwed. |
On Nintendo, they are still sitting on a huge pile of cash and could afford a good deal of damage before they actually start going into debt. 3DS will get profitable when production volume brings costs down (which may be occurring since they are hitting a pretty nice volume already), and software sales are picking up neatly enough between Mario Kart, OoT 3D posts good numbers, and Mario 3D Land. The harder part is the part Nintendo has no control over: currency, and that is why you see a strategy with the 3DS designed to stack up Japanese third party support, making them money with actual worth which will help them more.
As for Microsoft, Office sales are not going to go away just because people like tablets. The business world is still predicated upon a desktop or laptop for every cubicle, and while pads and such find their way in, they are supplementary and do not serve as a replacement. Microsoft is trying to fight their way into that market (or moreso than they have already), but are reasonably secure in the other for the foreseeable future
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
