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happydolphin on 25 September 2012
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RolStoppable said:

The difference is that Nintendo having the best IPs can be backed up with evidence. No other company has managed to sell so many of their games at the original MSRP for such a long time. No company wants to drop the price on their games, but most of them have to, if they want to keep moving copies. Saying that Nintendo has the best IPs is a safe claim, because people keep buying the games at a high price. The only way to argue against this is by saying that people who buy Nintendo games are idiots, but at that point it's clear that there is no sound argument. Just bitterness.

The vocal minority is insignificant in the big picture. A common observation is that on the internet Sony's first party games are hailed as the greatest things in existence, yet time and time again they fail to really set the sales charts on fire. Sony's first party games have all this prestige, but it doesn't extend to beyond the internet. And in the rare cases that Sony's games actually sell, the vocal minority has nothing to do with it. Neither do the negative things they say matter. The Wii had no prestige since the day it launched and there wasn't a week without blog posts complaining about the Wii's undeserved sales. What ultimately brought Wii sales to a halt was Nintendo giving up on the system (Wii Play Motion being their only release in the first half of 2011 says it all), not a lack of prestige.

So the question is how important is prestige really?

I wouldn't say they are idiots, but they may not have excellent taste and will gobble up anything Nintendo releases, as can be seen by the constant sales of game slike Mario Kart, Mario Party, NSMB and more which have little enrichment properties from one entry to the next (NSMBU will be an exception). However, many are already unsatisfied customers. It will be hard to gauge how much this sales strategy can last.

Also, sales =/= quality, but sales == popularity, exposure and appeal. As such, to use sales a basis for superiority is misleading.

For example, what would you say is a higher quality game or better game:

Wii Play or Xenoblade Chronicles?

The exhaustion point above applies very well to Wii Play, and other big sellers, which are no longer able to yield the same numbers. We've gone over this before, but since then we have demon training which is not doing well, only solidifying this perception that sales does not necessarily mean long-lasting value. The DS touch gen games and Wii casual games most of the time a case in point.

You make good points, I don't deny it, but there are nuances and balances to be made to it that are very important. You can't say I'm judging on taste and justify someone else saying a game is good based on sales, it doesn't work that way as sales can be attributed to many factors, indisputable excellence not necessarily being one of them.