June 12: Currently trading at $13.62 (up 1.34% -- the first increase in a week).
We haven't seen a steady decline like that since Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB ) IPO. But that's what you get when you fail to impress consumers, developers, and investors. That's what you get when you do everything in your power to destroy the console gaming business . If consoles decline during the next generation, Nintendo will be primarily to blame. After all, it was Nintendo who helped expand gaming last time around with the original Wii. The Mario maker convinced senior citizens to game, among others who don't normally do so. Wii U won't do that. Nintendo will be lucky if it can sell Wii U to hardcore gamers.
Bear in mind that lifetime sales of GameCube -- a system that, like Wii U, did not launch with any killer apps -- were stunted at just 21 million . Nintendo Wii -- which launched with a new Zelda and had a steady stream of triple-A software in the 12 months after release -- sold nearly five times as many units.
Contrary to what a select few (again, read: a very small number of consumers) will tell you, quality games equal big sales. Lackluster (lame, boring, predicable, and/or sleep-inducing) games do not.
And what if the triple-A games do come later? It could be too late. GameCube had one of the greatest games ever made (Resident Evil 4), but people still wouldn't cough up the money to buy a GameCube because it arrived four years after the console was released. As a result, sales were so low that the game's developer and publisher, Capcom, was forced to port it over to PlayStation 2.
Guess what happened next? The PlayStation 2 version went on to sell 3.62 million copies -- more than double the 1.69 million copies sold on GameCube. Even the Wii version (which arrived two years later) sold more units than the GameCube edition.
“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.
