TheLastStarFighter said:
As an investor I'm a huge fan of Iwata and Miyamoto. I think their strategies are excellent on many levels. Low-cost hardware, very powerful brands and games that sell millions while being relatively cheap to produce.
I'm very pleased, obviously, with the 3DS strategy. It should turn massive profits for this coming year and has managed to thrive despite Sony, smartphones and tablets. Bringing MH to the system basically killed their within-market competition, enabling them to fight the outsiders.
With Wii U I am pleased as well, though it has a greater challeng ahead. I think the cheap hardware was wise, and I think the touchscreen interface will also appeal to mass market in time more than more ram or processing ever would. Where I do see some mistakes with Wii U are in Nintendoland - which was poorly named and thought out, in NSMBU - which I thought was a good idea for a launch title but should have had some better features (play as Peach?)/visuals to differentiate it, and in the western marketing of the system, which has been awful.
But I think with Wii U the strategy was to launch early with some easy to make games, work out the bugs in the system, and give their developers a full extra year to make high-end impressive games to launch at the same time Sony and MS competitors release. I liked this strategy and I still like it. I'm expect surprising and interesting announcements about Wii U at e3, and the system to get a major push in the second half of the year.
With a very strong year expected for 3DS it will only take a moderately successful year from Wii U for Nintendo to meet Iwata's goals. Quite honestly, it seems silly to not expect Nintendo to post a significant profit this year when you look at their history, and how 3DS is doing and should do. Wii U would have to completely bomb or dropped to a major loss-inducing price for the company to come up short.
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While I don't agree with your points, what really gets me is they are some how posting a loss (or at least flirting with a loss) while using this so-called "underpowered/cheap chipset" philosophy.
Which is mind boggling because the Wii U isn't exactly cheap, you can walk into a store and buy a $160 graphics card that wipes the floor performance wise with the Wii U and pick up a 7-inch tablet with a better quality screen and built-in ARM processors + RAM for an extra $99.
I think a lot of the Wii U's cost is based around Nintendo's niche fetish of having a system that only consumes 33 watts of electricity while running a game, which I really don't think many people care about it.
Essay Pro