rolltide101x said:
I just think Nintendo should shoot for 250$ at launch of all of their consoles (Nintendo gamers do not care about power). It also needs to use the x86/64 platform to make it as easy as possible for 3rd party devs. If they did both of those things then they would sell atleast 30ish million consoles and would profit Nintendo games + some 3rd party + cheap system = profit
Anybody who thinks Nintendo needs to try and hit a "home run" is wrong, all it will do is cost Nintendo more money. Nintendo can not compete with MS and Sony on an even playing field |
The console you've described there is the Gamecube, which launched for $199 dropping massively in price later (i.e. cheap), had a decent amount of 3rd party support and had some of the best Nintendo games ever made. GC sold a total of about 22 million. It was also a console without any gimmicks.
The point is, no matter how cheap Nintendo makes a console, there is only a finite amount of die hard Nintendo fans in the world (topping off at about ~20 million atm) who would consider buying a console only to play 2-3 good games per year. Most people, even if the console was $200 at launch would just spend that towards one of the bigger consoles which has substantially more amount of games they want to play.
Interestingly enough, if you look at the sales of N64 to GC to Wii U (not takin the Wii into account since it targeted a very different market), you will see that there is a definite sales decline in each successive console, meaning that the number of die hard Nintendo fans willing to buy a console just to play Nintendo games is decreasing. At this rate Nintendo will have a hard time ever reaching GC like sales even with a cheap no nonsense console with good 1st party games. The only way they get massive sales is by making another Wii and targeting an audience outside of the die hard Nintendo fans with games like Wii Sports. But that kind of blue ocean strategy is very hit or miss compared to Sony/MS, who always have a massive install base of current and future fans who are willing to buy their next console when it comes out due to the large number of games on there by both 1st and 3rd parties.
Also, I don't think if Nintendo went 3rd party the die hard Nintendo fans would stop playing Nintendo games. They would just buy one of the other 2 consoles and keep playing them. So sales to a first order approximation should at least remain the same in worst case scenario. But in reality now a LOT more people would have access to these games and hence they would sell much more, especially the more well known franchises like Mario and Zelda.
