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

[zorg1000]

DanneSandin said:

zorg1000 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?

Well let's take a look at some potential numbers

 

Mario Kart 7 potential numbers (currently 11.7 million)

13 million x $40=$540 million

 

Mario Kart 8 potential numbers (currently 5.11 million)

7 million x $60=$420 million

 

Total

20 million, $960 million, with DLC about $1 billion

 

Mario Kart 9 potential numbers (let's assume right between MK7 & MK7+8)

16.5 million x $50=$825 million, with DLC about $1 billion

 

To me this seems like a relatively realistic scenario, it's possible for Nintendo to make a similar amount of revenue with one title instead of two and u also have to consider that they are still free to make another game.

Very interesting! This made me think; how WOULD Nintendo price their games if they went this route? You usually pay $40 for a handheld game, but you pay $60 for a game on the home console. Would Nintendo price each game individually? Or would they all be set at $50? If you ONLY owned the HH would you buy a game for $60?

If Nintendo ported games instead of making them playable on both platforms they could price the HC game at $60 while the HH port would still be at $40.

I think they could go with $50 across the board for the higher budget games and big sellers. One thing to look at is the price for handheld games has consistently gone up.

GBA-$29.99

DS-$34.99

3DS-$39.99

Next gen-$49.99???

Also depending on budget/scope of the game, we will still likely see $30-40 retail games with a bunch of sub-$20 eShop titles. Some ways I believe they can get away with charging less than $60 for games is due to the lower development costs of creating 2 separate entries per series, and because of the potential higher sales of games.

We used Mario Kart as an example, but let's use a lower selling title now. Pikmin 3 has sold like 800k units, if it were available on 3DS as well it could possibly have crossed the 2 million mark. Other games like Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad, Rainbow Curse would certainly have benefited from having the 3DS user base to sell to as well.