Prediction: "Cartridges" will return for the Nintendo home console

[DanneSandin]

RolStoppable said:

DanneSandin said:

I agree with both you and Wyrdness; this would be the smarter option to go for, for Nintendo. But will they? Just think about how many people how have bought BOTH ersions of SMash, Mario Kart or whatever else. That's a pretty big revenue Nintendo would loose; the double dippers. Is your argument that this would be made up for with more games being produced and thus sold? I think Nintendo would rather sell Mario Kart two times (one time for each system) and sell about 15m of that game, instead of selling 10m MK games and make a Kirby game that sells 2m.... That's the biggest concern I have with the Fusion concept. I'd love to just have ONE Mario Kart per gen, ONE Smash bros, ONE NSMB etc for BOTH consoles, but would Nintendo be happy with not selling as many games from their biggest franchises? Would the quantity of new/other games being made make up for those lost sales?

I don't think the amount of people who buy both versions is high enough to be significant in the big picture. Your example of Mario Kart and Kirby is also a bit disingenious, because the development team that would be freed up by only making one Mario Kart wouldn't go on to make a Kirby game. I don't think Nintendo is happy with the current state of things where they have to make two separate games of the same IP because consumers expect to see certain IPs on every Nintendo system. Even if they wanted to make new IPs, their hands would be tied for the most part because there are several IPs that have to arrive early in a system's lifecycle in order to grow the installed base. And these games have to be made by the various EAD departments to guarantee a high enough level of quality, so a new IP like Splatoon is something that can only be done once or twice per generation. By the time Nintendo was done with making the important IPs for the 3DS, they had to immediately make the same ones for the Wii U; that's about four years of development which comes close to the average length of a generation, so not much time left to do something else.

The way Iwata has talked since his acceptance of the Wii U failure (early 2014) makes it quite clear that Nintendo will try to grow significantly in the next generation. They won't be able to grow if they can't make new IPs, so exploiting double dippers won't be of any importance because that would be the kind of thinking that drives companies further into a corner.

Really? You don't? I'll bet ya that 9 out of 10 people who own Mario Kart 8 also have Mario Kart 7, and that would mean 4m less sold games. Even if the numbers were 5 out of 10 that would still mean 2m less sold copies of the combined sales of 8 and 7. Although, zorg did show some interesting numbers indicating that the series wouldn't suffer all that much in forms of losses. Have a look at those numbers. But that made me think of something else; how would Nintendo go about and price these games? $40? $60? If you ONLY bought the handheld console, would you be willing to pay $60 for Mario Kart 9? Or would all games recieve different prices? I can understand NSMB being priced at $40 or $50, but the next Zelda would have to be $60, right?

So you're saying that this would free Nintendo up to make new IP's? I like that idea :D But if they ported the games from one platform to the other instead of making them compatable, that wouldn't cost them all that much time, effort or money since the consoles would share the same architecture. What would stop them from just porting games between the consoles? That way you can have exclusive games for ech system and get some double dipping.