The financials behind Nintendo going 3rd party

[kristianity77]

Teeqoz said:

Wright said:

Wouldn't the recoup be substancially more damaging to Nintendo than the profit they already make?

You're assuming expensive R&D doesn't pay off when compared to be a merely publisher, but you can't back this claim with nothing substancial. If anything, R&D on handhelds prove to be a very lucrative bussiness for Nintendo.

Then we have the 30% increase ratio in profit-per-sale software, on which you could argue a Mario game definitively would sell 30% more in other platforms. But what about things like Pikmin? Or F-Zero? Things would be too unpredictable to just simply take the risk.

 

Sure, I don't think Nintendo loses anything by becoming a third-party developer, and I'd actually embrace it, but they're in a confortable zone right now and they have no inmediate need to ever think about that.

Expensive R&D (Research & Development) is a neccesity to make a video game platform. I'd wager the Wii U cost maybe 30 million $ to design etc (at the very least!), so that's 30 million they'd save by being a third party publisher. Like I said in the OP, they deffinitely should continue making handhelds, so no issue there.

My logic for software sales is that none of the fans that currently buy Nintendo games would stop buying Nintendo games just because they go third party, so no games would sell less than if they were on a Nintendo home console, but some games have potential to pull huge numbers as multiplats, such as, as you say Mario, Zelda, Metroid (This could turn into a huge franchise if it was multiplat and marketed right), Mario Kart, SSB, heck, Xenoblade Chronicles X would also benefit greatly from releasing on the PS4 imo.

Nintendos problem for me is that they have literally millions and millions of fans who want to play Nintendo games, but don't want to pay the money to buy the console to play literally 2-3 games per year.  Its just not a sound investment (hence why the console sales are horrible.)

So all thats happening is that outside of the die hard Nintendo fans, they are being left by the wayside.  Like you said, Nintendo have franchises which would be up there with the biggest selling games of all time on the Xbox and PS4 respectively if they decided to release games elsewhere, I have no doubt about that.