Nintendo console decline vs Nintendo handheld incline

[zorg1000]

Eddie_Raja said:

zorg1000 said:

Everybody knows that excluding Wii, Nintendo consoles have declined. The general thought is this is due to the added competition from the likes of Sega, Sony & Microsoft coming and stealing their audience. Well I have another theory, Nintendo wasn't losing their audience to the competitors, their audience was gradually shifting from Nintendo consoles to Nintendo handhelds. Let's take a look at Nintendo hardware sales per generation pre-Wii.

NES-62 million, Game & Watch-43 million

SNES-49 million, Gameboy (89-96)-54 million

Nintendo 64-33 million, Gameboy (97-03)-64 million

Gamecube-22 million, Gameboy Advance-81 million

Each generation sold 100 million give or take a few million, with the handheld sales increasing at roughly the same rate as console sales declining. So what exactly would be the reason for people shifting from from one to the other?

Nintendo's best selling games and consoles are ones that emphasize on simple, pick up and play, casual experiences. As consoles became more complex by adding more face buttons, shoulder buttons, triggers, analog sticks, the games became more complex by default. Nintendo handhelds on the other hand retained their simple, casual style thus consoles began to decrease and handhelds increase.

With Wii & DS, Nintendo created the ultimate casual experiences thus sales exploded, with Wii U & 3DS they have reverted back to making more complex control schemes and games thus it is on track to becoming the worst selling generation in Nintendo history.

This just proves that Nintendo can only afford to fully support one console at a time.  The Wii was a fluke that sold on its gimic alone.

For ur first sentence, ya I agree, and that's why Nintendo seems to be heading towards a unified future where the handheld and console share a common architecture, operating system, online infrastructure, account system & software library. With such a strategy certain games are no longer tied down to a single low selling device and are accessible to all owners of Nintendo hardware. Nintendo can also diversify by not needing to release two separate entries of all their major franchises, so even if the total output stays the same or is even slightly lower than it currently is  their will still be more variety and lack of software droughts. It will now basically come down to personal preferences, do u prefer to play games on the go or play them on ur big TV? In terms of specs, something like this should be feasible

NX Portable-300 gflop, 2gb RAM, 540p, $249.99

NX Console-1.2 tflop, 8gb RAM, 1080p, $249.99