The financials behind Nintendo going 3rd party

[sc94597]

vivster said:

sc94597 said:

They only make/publish niche games to sell hardware, was what I was saying. Why would Nintendo invest in Fatal Frame, Bayonetta etc  - when they can invest in vastly more profitable games? The answer is: to diversify their library, and sell hardware so that their big series can sell to more people as well. Games like Fatal Frame and Bayonetta will lose them money unless they have another purpose besides the revenue they make exceeding the costs to make them. They invest in these games because they know that there might be future benefits for doing so. This isn't excessively cynical at all. It's the reality of the matter. 

So what? These are Non-Nintendo IPs. If they don't pick them up somebody else will. I mean there are still 2 other platform holders desperate to sell their hardware. And if no one picks them up they're obviously not worth it. The absence of these niche IPs will not be noticeable. Or do you miss the thousands of other dormant niche IPs that Nintendo hasn't been picked up yet?

Nintendo owns the Fatal Frame IP now. And nobody was picking Bayonetta 2 up, it was left to die. But even then with their smaller IP's there will be opportunity costs involved, which tell them, for example, that making another Mario spinoff game will net them more profit than making a new IP like Splatoon or a fourth Pikmin game. Since they have to care much less about market saturation in this case (as long as the games play differently) you should expect a few uses of their smaller IP's and more uses of their best-selling IP's. Capcom does it. Activision does. EA does. Square-Enix does it. Sega does it. Ubisoft does it. Practically every big named publisher does this. We'd probably see Metroid, Star Fox, etc once every five - ten years or so (assuming sales remained at their current lows) meanwhile Mario and Pokemon would definitely get two (or more games per year.)