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Soundwave on 28 May 2015
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zorg1000 said:
Soundwave said:


Except Japanese 3rd party support for their consoles has been even worse. Ubi Soft and Activision have been actually two of Nintendo's better third party partners. 

And every console manufacturer needs Western third party support if they want to be truly relevant in the West, but I think Nintendo is kind of just out of it when it comes to that. The mistake was letting both Sony AND Microsoft gain large footholds into the industry, that's really where all these problems stem from. 

Consumers, third parties, etc. no one really wants a third wheel console. There's never been three successful consoles at once except when the Wii went to a total casual slant opening up a temporary new audience that's since shifted away. 

When talking about Nintendo, u can't just leave out the side of their business that receives about 70% of their software output. So far this generation, Nintendo has published about 30 games for Wii U and about 70 games for 3DS.

Nintendo has shipped about 40 million units of hardware, and growing, to the west on the strength of Nintendo-published titles, and with Japanese/indie/child friendly games serving as secondary support. So no, Nintendo really doesn't need the mainstream, AAA western titles that Playstation/Xbox rely on.


If they want to sell more than 20 million home consoles ever again they probably do. Japan doesn't buy any consoles so they're out, almost all console sales are in the West, and it's kind of a long term dead end to try and sell game hardware to the Western audience with no Western games. 

I don't know honestly. Nintendo's in a tough spot, because they really I don't think can adequetely compete with Sony/MS, so I dunno. I think NX is going to be profitable for them, but they're going to expand more into where things like their non-traditional business lines -- mobile games, movie franchising, theme park tie-ins, etc. eventually makes more money for them than traditional gaming does. 

Kind of like how Marvel Comics branched out far beyond just comics or LEGO makes a lot of money these days outside of just selling toy blocks. That's kinda where I think Nintendo is headed. 

They have done OK with the 3DS in the West, but their handheld line is also suffering massive losses in the West and that erosion becomes more and more obvious every year. I don't know if they'll be able to match the 3DS' sales in the West next time out, 3DS still sorta benefitted from at least early on not having such a soldified mobile gaming landscape to compete against (holiday 2011 in particular was a good one of the 3DS in the West, but the wheels fell off after that).