| MikeRox said: It's interesting that barring the Wii, the chart goes predictably in chronological order. This would lead me to conclude that the market itself changed, while Nintendo didn't. Which actually makes me sad, as I love Nintendo consoles and think the Wii U certainly offers the most interesting software lineup of the 8th gen home consoles so far (to me). |
I think that you're on to something here.
With the exception of the Wii, every subsequent Nintendo console has sold progressively worse. Now obviously the Wii U is going to sell more than 9.5 million units before the end of its lifetime, but barring a major turnaround we can it expect it to sell about 15 million units. This would be a pretty consistent trend for the drop-off that we saw from the Gamecube prior.
I think that you are right, the console market has changed while Nintendo has not. In the early 90's video game consoles were primarily a "kid" focused industry. Yes there were lots of mature games even on the SNES, but the key demographic was kids (think about Sega's marketing strategy with "Blast Processing" as though they were fuelling the playground arguments about which console was better). That started to change with the Playstation and changed even more when Microsoft entered the console market. Consoles started to become more like computers with extremely high end graphics chips and the consoles themselves started to become more like home entertainment centres. The key here is that these consoles are not marketed towards children primarily. Nintendo and Sega's 90's kids had grown up and Microsoft and Sony were perfectly positioned to deliver the kind of gaming experience that they now wanted.
In short, I don't think the Wii U would have done much better even if it was more powerful, had a better name, or was more effectively marketed. Even if there was a $100 price drop I don't believe it would be selling that much better than it is right now. It's just a console that's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The good news for Nintendo is that there still is a kid market out there: it's called mobile gaming. Furthermore, it sounds like the mobile gaming market is experiencing similar struggles to that of the console market back in the early 80's. Currently, there are a lot of low-quality games on mobile devices that are starting to bloat out the higher quality gaming experiences. Good mobile developers cannot easily rise above the pack to get their games noticed above all of the bad ones. Nintendo is in a perfect position to revolutionize the mobile gaming market the way they did with consoles in the 80's. That is, to create an exclusive environment on smartphones where people can go to play extremely high quality games (think about the old "Seal of Quality" that Nintendo used to have). Furthermore, Nintendo's kid friendly graphics will be a perfect fit on mobile devices where First Person Shooters will likely never be a successful game genre.
In summary, I think the future is very bright for Nintendo. I just hope that they don't bother with another dedicated home console. It wasn't the marketing or the price that killed the Wii U.
