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Soundwave on 19 February 2015
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RolStoppable said:
DanneSandin said:

I think it's a shame that you didn't answer him properly, since I think he had a few good points in there. But I guess you've had similar arguments with others before and have grown tired of answering the same counter-arguments?

Yeah, I've had such arguments before.

Think of a hypothetical scenario where the mentioned flaws didn't exist, so you are looking at a cool black console that has proper sequels to Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time as well as a Perfect Dark 2. Take into account that Nintendo's grip on the FPS market on consoles would dwindle because of Microsoft's Halo and the Xbox's architecture that shifts PC ports away from Nintendo and towards Microsoft; furthermore, take into account that Microsoft's marketing angle would be about painting Nintendo as kiddie which would be easy to do because Nintendo would not abandon Mario while Microsoft has Halo and all those FPS ports of PC titles. Now pretend Nintendo's proper sequels sold just as well as their N64 counterparts and each one of those additional copies sold (compared to the actual GC software sales) would result in an additional hardware sale. It's a very generous way to look at it, but with reasonable estimates you would still be looking at only 30-35m consoles sold.

That sounds acceptable until you realize that this best case scenario is the same amount as the N64 sold, and when you extrapolate this strategy to future generations (focusing on the enthusiast gamer), the ever-increasing development costs for games coupled with the hardware requirements that Sony, Microsoft and third parties have been pushing for, make it quickly clear that it's an unsustainable way for Nintendo to run their business. And that's why I am laughing at such suggestions.

Then again, we are talking about handhelds here. The OP is talking as if EA is a major player when it comes to handheld games. Now that's funny.

Nintendo needed to act more decisively with the GameCube and be more on point, allowing Microsoft to walk onto their territory and basically retreating was always a very bad strategy on their part. They never should have let them make such inroads in the first place. MS isn't some unstoppable force, Sony has been able to largely hold them off for years now, outside of the PC OS scene, MS is actually a fairly clumsy competitor. Unfortunately Nintendo found a way to make even more mistakes than MS did. 

N64 sized hardware totals for their console (33 million-ish) I'm sure Nintendo execs would run down the street naked to see those numbers again if it included N64-sized software sales too. 

EA was just one single suggestion. Actually EA is one of the biggest mobile gaming producers ... all their games on tablets/phones, but FIFA has always been very popular on PSP. A very powerful Nintendo handheld could for the first time provide FIFA and Madden experiences on the go that are fairly close to console quality. That wouldn't be a bad feather in Nintendo's cap.