| cusman said: Nintendo is the only one out of the three that manages to sell 20+ million copies of their $30-50 games and is still ridiculously reluctant to spend significant money to make those games. While Sony spends tons and tons of money on lots of new IPs and is happy to sell 1 million copies while doing 10 billion dollar yearly loss as a company. Both their approaches are a little wrong. |
What you forget is that Nintendo takes the money that they got from selling their 20+ million of one game, and uses it to pay for development of a heap of titles that don't sell as well, but round out the system's library to expand its appeal. And it makes financial sense for them, because it increases console sales (and they make money on every console sold) and thus expands the install base, thereby encouraging greater third-party development on the system.
To put it another way, Nintendo spending relatively small amounts of money on NSMB Wii and making heaps off it is what gives them the money and confidence necessary to make games like Xenoblade, Pikmin 3, or Disaster: Day of Crisis. Note that I chose those three titles to demonstrate the various possible outcomes - Pikmin 3 is likely to perform quite well (well over a million), Xenoblade sits in a comfortable but not strong position (650,000), and Disaster was actually quite well named (~50,000). Sometimes, it'll pay off, sometimes it'll flop badly. But it's a sensible approach to the gaming industry.
And of course, a lot of people criticise Nintendo for lack of new IPs... despite the fact that they typically have multiple new IPs each year. Just looking at Wii (asterisks means Japan only), there's Wii ___ (Wii Sports, Wii Play, etc), Disaster, Captain Rainbow*, Flingsmash, Dynamic Slash*, And-Kensaku*, Tact of Magic*, Pandora's Tower, Xenoblade, The Last Story, Kiki Trick*, not to mention the unfinished Project HAMMER, Wii Crush, and Cosmic Walker.
