| twintail said:
It is hard to tell with the SNES since Nintendo's own numbers dont include what it did from its launch year. Yet the N64's problem was not that it launched later (though of course that can be a contributing factor), its that it was strained for 3rd party games, which Sony was snatching up left and right, especially in 1997. the DS was never going to have that problem since Nintendo's handhelds always have healthy 3rd party support (until the 3DS). MH became a killer app with the release of the 2nd game. The first did decently enough, but it wasnt what set the PSP ablaze. And the scenario you describe is one Nintendo could never have known or even predicted. There was no 'monster hunter' since the game was so poorly recieved on the PS2, who would have thought that would have changed 2 entries later on the PSP? It would have had no real effect on the GBA, and it had no real effect against the DS either. But you were saying that homebrew stopped games selling well from 2009. And the site undertracked its sales so it most likely did the same for other PSP games. Well on this we just have to assume one of us are correct. Im not sure what the sentiment on VG was, but the strong sentiment outside on other forums I saw was 3DS Smash sales being way better, purely due to install base and its early release. I doubt Nintendo felt the home version to do better: the 3DS was making them money where the WiiU was not. Priortising the 3DS made a lot more sense finacially than it did the WiiU version and that business decision ended up being the correct one for them. WiiU still hasnt really picked up momentum even with the year it had with Smash.
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It cannot be denied that the PSP forced that situation especially given how Nintendo operated before the PSP, all other hand helds weren't cut short but the second a real probable threat appears the GBA was dropped and that's what it comes down to. N64's problems stemmed from that massive 2 year delay the was only one viable platform on the market for 2 years to release games for if you were a developer doing 3D games, this is how Sony snatched up third parties, the Saturn had coding issues due to a hardware flaw. Nintendo didn't want risking history repeating itself, this is if the GBA remained fine as you claim which personally I don't see as PSP was essentially at the time a next gen GBA in a sense and going by Nintendo cutting the GBA short it seems they didn't see it your way either.
The first MH game on PSP sold 500k in its first week and something like 200k PSPs were shifted with it, this was in 2005 the launch year of the PSP, to highlight my point this was the type of scenario Nintendo moved to counter. They weren't expecting MH to be the killer app they just expecting a possible killer app in general, it would have had a massive effect on the GBA as MH was the game that ignited PSP in Japan and brought the developers on board. With out the DS there the type of good support the PSP had in its last 3 or so years from the developers would have materialized much earlier and possibly when MH became a blockbuster making the DS' fight a lot harder had it not launched beforehand to compete with it.
I wasn't talking about VGC strictly in fact I didn't follow the notion here on this as I'm on a number of boards like Gametrailers, SB, CVG etc... the handheld version wasn't expected to sell more then the home console on the boards I saw and a number of fans. A large part of this is due to the competitive scene that drives the series being console exclusive until the 4th game and the performance of fighters on portables in general, people were expecting it to sell but not more then the home version.
