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Soundwave on 18 July 2015
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MoHasanie said:
Soundwave said:


Unfortunately it's a declining profit pool, because 3DS is receding, the 7 million or so 3DS shipments this year represents Nintendo's lowest handheld shipment in almost 20 years and that decline will get even worse next year. 

Wii U is really not gaining any real momentum at all, it's stuck its mediocre 3 mill/year shipment pattern which is very bad also. So they can't count on Wii U to make up the slack either, it's a Mario Kart player stuck in the mud spinning his/her wheels. 

For Nintendo to be healthy and strong they need to be shipping in the range of 20+ million hardware units a year, this was the norm even in the GBA-GCN era, for them to be scraping by at only 10-11 combined handheld + console shipments a year is getting into very low territory. 

That's to say nothing of software, when you have hardware selling this poorly, software sales suffer. Yes, Splatoon is doing alright on the Wii U, but on a healthier platform it would be selling double or triple that easily. 

I agree but there's nothing Nintendo can do about it. Of course Nintendo wants them to sell better but their consoles have reached the end of their lives. 


Well yeah. That's why you have to release new hardware to kickstart your business. So much is made is this board about releasing consoles too early, I think the reverse is actually more true. 

If you allow a generation to go on too long it can hurt you. 

Both Nintendo and MS even made a mistake in letting this past generation go on too long and who benefitted? Sony. It gave Sony time to remuster their resources, plan, and have enough time to make profit off the PS3 in the later years that they badly needed. Meanwhile people got sick and tired of the Wii, and by the time Nintendo came out with Wii U the reaction was more like "oh Nintendo, we lost interest in that like two years ago, thanks but we'll stick to our shiny new iPad now". 

Both the Wii/DS successors should have been released a year earlier. Waiting that extra year basically allowed Sony to get it together and allowed tablets/smartphones/freemium games to get further onto the battlefield so that when Nintendo rode out with their cavalry, they were surprised to find they were basically ambushed from every direction. 

You need to be on offence, not defence.