oniyide said:
I hear and everything you are saying makes sense, but IMHO all those things are being done better by...well just about everybody else and if im being really honest the others have been doing a better job at it since before the WIi U even hit the market. Like you even said timing is everything and they've been late too the ball too many times. I dont agree with the expansion part, arent they doing exactly that with games like Hyrule Warriors? Wasnt that the point of getting Bayo 2? Hell i would even put Mario Maker and Splatoon in that category. Thing is i dont even think the WIi (soccer moms and grannys) even care about those things. And if they did as i stated before literally everyone else has been doing a much better job than Ninty ever did on those fronts. So to simplify, there was nothing they could have done, I mean there were better options but anything still would have been a big drop. a Wii 2 would probably be doing n64 numbers which is better but still not great. |
Probably I haven't explained myself, I didn't mean a console with those feature would have sold as much as the Wii, my point was about what strategy could have been optimal to try replicate the Wii success. We can't know of course how many units it would have sold (maybe about 30m, maybe more), but still likely much more than the actual WiiU. Even if they were late in some department, with a competitive console they would have had still 1st party quality software ad an advantage.
About the "expansion" part. What they are doing with Hyrule Warriors, Bayo and Mario Maker is quite different to what I meant before. The WiiU wasn't designed to offer a more varied offer of smaller 1st party titles, it wasn't their intention. The WiiU was designed with the attempt of getting X360/Ps3 3rd party support (needless to say it failed miserably), those games you mention are just the result of a later makeshift made when they realized no one wanted to support the console. Also those games are not made with the intention of expanding the offer, they're targeted to loyal customers of enstablished brands (a Zelda spinoff is targeted to Zelda fans, as well as Mario Maker is targeted to Mario fans). Bayonetta is a bit of an oddball, I don't see any strategy behind it, my opinion is that they just took an occasion to get some good publicity from the media (an occasion that was just under their noses, since they had been working with Platinum on W101 in the same period Sega scrapped Bayo2). Splatoon is really the only game that can be considered a true attempt to expand their offer, it's just a single game.
Plus, as I mentioned in previous posts, it's very important (for any company) to create a coherent market proposition, these games you metion are the perfect example of this principle. If the WiiU, as a product, was coherent (and with coherent I mean it being designed in every specific aspect with the same goal in mind) than, in order to expand the 1st party game library and offer more variety, it would have need a very strong focus on digital delivery, with lower game prices. For a customer, spending 20$ for a new (unknown) game or IP is much less risky than paying 40 or 50$. Also, from the developer perspective if you plan to make a wide range of smaller titles you can't have the same budgets of AAA games; if you sell games at 60$ than the customer expects the AAA kind of quality, if you offer games for 20$ the customer doesn't have the same expectations. Now, since the WiiU was not really designed with that goal in mind, their efforts to expand the libary can't be very effective since it's incoherent. With phisical copies at 40$ to 60$, customers are expecting higher production values and are less willing to risk on new IPs.
