Malstrom: "My purpose is to reveal and inform people about Nintendo."

[Mr Khan]

Joelcool7 said:
I have a hard time signifying Malstroms article with a response. It is so asinine that I really don't care to or want to go into all of the errors in it. I see many of the forum goers have done a good job showing his article to be full of crap. Sadly consumers don't understand business they don't understand games. They react to games that come out and have absolutely no clue what they want.

So you want more Mario games? Yet millions of gamers have left Nintendo and stopped buying Mario because their is so many of them.

Malstrom simply lacks any ability to look five to ten years from now. Short term profits mean shit if they can't be maintained. Lets look at Activision they destroyed an entire genre giving the gamers what they wanted, they killed Tony Hawk which could be going strong today they are killing CoD.

Sony has done this too. The PS3 was exactly what the customer asked for more power, bluray all of Sony's big properties. The second Sony started listening to its consumers and following their advice bamb Sony starts going down. Today they still haven't realized the consumer doesn't know what they want.

The casual market the Mario market. Casuals come and go they are not loyal customers they are not a reliable market unless they become core consumers.

I'll use personal examples.

My mom owns about four Wii games. WiiFit, WiiFit:Plus, WiiSports, Harvest moon. She has not bought a single new game in years.

My sister another casual consumer owns a Wii and about five games.

My friend from church owns a Wii and two games. My buddies grandma owns one game. Every casual consumer I know owns less then five titles.

Now lets look at myself the core consumer you and Malstrom hate so much. I have nearly 30 Wii games. My buddy has over fifty. My other friends who game have 20-40 games each. Almost all of us owned GameCubes those games that don't sell 20+ million copies help keep us buying games.

Look at it this way would you rather have 16 (5 million sellers) or 4 (20 million sellers). What good are all these sales if they don't lead to more sales?

What good is a casual gamer who buys only 2-5 games if they don't become a hardcore gamer who buys 10-50?

PS CoD is a casual game by definition. A massive amount of the players these days game in 20 minute sessions once a week or two. Personally I know three girls who only own 360's and Live solely to play CoD.

Selling hardware is no good if it doesn't sell software. Selling software is no good if it doesn't lead to selling more software. Is a yearly 2D Mario game going to sell 20-million copies each? Absolutely not. Nintendo games have legs because Nintendo keeps at least a year or two separation between releases even of spin offs.

Some markets are more dominated by the vocal minority than others, which is very much the case in gaming. In this case, you can't listen to what is said, you have to observe how customers actually act.

Elitist as it may sound, consumers sometimes don't consciously know what they want.