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Soundwave on 18 February 2015
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Materia-Blade said:
Soundwave said:
To be honest I'm not really even sure if Nintendo is capable of selling much more than 20 million home consoles anymore unless there is a miracle gimmick attached to the whole sales proposition. Even the N64 ... if people knew going in wasn't going to be like the NES and SNES in terms of overall support and understood the economics of the cartridge vs. CD decision and everything that entailed ... the N64 probably would've sold considerably less.

A lot of people bought the N64 early on with the expectation that it would be like the NES and SNES.

And to be fair I don't think Sony/MS would sell much more either with the same level of third party support.

People by and large simply don't want a console with a specialized/niche library, when they buy a console they want access to all the games. Wii U is just a return to the norm for Nintendo, taking them back to the trajectory they were on before the Wii.

The other thing is Wii sales really declined fast once MS introduced Kinect and Sony introduced Move ... suddenly motion gaming on a console was nothing special or exclusive to any of the brands, they all had it. That's also a problem with basing your whole sales pitch around a controller -- anyone can copy a controller. Analog stick, rumble pak, wand controller, all copied eventually. Nintendo is probably actually lucky that Kinect didn't launch in 2008 or 2009.

There's not any point in predicting sales of unannounced consoles without basis.

sony/ms would barely sell any unit without third parties.

Wii sales didn't decline BECAUSE of kinect or move.

Actually I wouldn't be so sure about that. 

People always say "well Nintendo stopped releasing games" but the Wii was never contingent on having "big releases" constantly to begin with, and certainly things like "release more killer apps like Smash Brothers and Zelda!" weren't what drove the Wii to success in the first place. 

Really actually the Wii was just getting Just Dance (a huge seller) at that time and uDraw, so third parties were delivering the goods for Nintendo from the POV of providing new casual hits that should have kept the system selling high. Just Dance was a much bigger hit than Wii Music or Animal Crossing for instance. 

Yet we see a large decline in Wii sales after Kinect and Move release in late 2010. As a matter of fact after the release of Kinect, I think the Wii only outsold the XBox 360 ever again like for one month total. I don't think that was coincidence. What made the Wii unique/special was the motion gaming aspect, when it became standardized on all three consoles, the Wii suddenly wasn't so special anymore. 

That said the whole Wii/Move/Kinect pissing match would be rendered moot fairly soon anyway, as the iOS/Google Play store would steal all of their thunder. Today, smartphones and tablets have virtually monopolized the casual player market entirely because they offer a business model that consoles can't compete with ($1/free games, easy to play, thousands to choose from, on far sexier, more desirable hardware from a casuals POV).