Nintendo Q2 Earnings October 30th - Results Inside

[Arius Dion]

Shadow1980 said:

Arius Dion said:

The VB is the most glaring, obviously. But the N64 flopped everywhere but the US and the Gamecube was also a collosal failure WW. GC's failure birthed the Wii. Actually, Nintendo dumping Sony was a wise move. Sony didn't want to partner with Nintendo, they basically wanted to own Nintendo.

All I'm saying is, this party time attitude inside Nintendo with execs and devs dressing like cats, remaking past failed games and devs having free reign to explore their inner picaso is over. Their financials since Wii U released have been in the toilet, changes are needed.

And going further, if they think a 3D Mario, an upressed Wii Sports and another Wii Fit are going to change their fortunes, they will be mistaken.

How do we define "flop" and "failure"? Is it a specific sales threshold? Undisputed commercial hardware failures include the 3DO (2 million units sold), Jaguar (<250,000 sold), the Virtual Boy (770,000 sold), the CD-i (less than a million sold). By comparison, the GameCube's nearly 22 million tally is rather decent, and even the 12 million N64s sold outside of North America fares well by comparison. While neither system lived up to the sales of their predecessors, they still far outsold all of the also-rans in gaming history, whether they be abject failures like the Jaguar or even systems like the Master System, Turbo-Grafx 16, Sega Saturn, and every second-gen system that wasn't the Atari 2600.

As we can see, finding an exact sales threshold that determines "success" is difficult if not impossible. What about other criteria? What were Nintendo's goals? What could we really have realistically expected from those systems, the conditions of their respective generations being what they were (e.g., the GameCube was pitted against the PS2, which had already shipped 20 million units before the GC even launched)? We do know that the GameCube was profitable, as unlike other systems it was never sold at a loss. This arguably makes it more successful than the Xbox, which, while it sold over 2 million more units than the GC, was never profitable. It also had the best attach rate of any Nintendo system ever, and as a consequence lifetime software sales were only about 7% less than that of the N64 despite hardware sales being 34% less. While the GC was indisputably Nintendo's least popular home console, I think calling it an outright failure is a bit of a stretch.

Finally, I have no idea why you think so poorly of SM3DW. Mario is a proven system-seller, and this new one is generating a lot of buzz. It's also been shooting up the rankings on Amazon and elsewhere. I have no doubts it will quickly become the best-selling game on the system so far. If WWHD could move a decent number of units, then SM3DW could move a lot more. It's coming out on Black Friday week, which could help boost sales that week even higher. Given how other systems typically perform on Black Friday, I think that week will see the Wii U shift around 500k units worldwide that week alone.

Oh, and I hope that "remaking past failed games" crack wasn't levied against Wind Waker. It sold nearly 5 million copies, which is a solid figure which puts it in the top 30 titles of the sixth generation.

I'll keep this brief.

1) N64 was a massive decline fom the SNES, Gamecube was a massive decline from the N64. N64 was a flop everywhere outside of the US, look at the numbers dude. Gamecube flopped WW. And Wind Waker was a massive decline from OoT. Additionally, Wind Waker failed to give Gamecube any significant hardware boost. The Gamecube sold 22m..World Wide! N64 sold more than that in the US alone.

I'm not looking at things in any other context other than business. I'm a fan of many N64 games, but seperating my own personal experiences and looking at things objectively, the numbers speak for themselves.

I'm amazed at how the Gamecube a decade later is spoken of as if it was a fantastic console. It was crap, it was crapped on and made fun of. It made Nintendo a joke in the console space, and its failure birthed the Wii. But I loved REmake, RE4 and Prime! : )