Why I am not that excited with the Wii and Wii Fit sales

[Ail]

FishyJoe said:

Bodhesatva said:

Ail said:

FishyJoe said:
There is no comparison to Atari, I'm not sure why people keep bringing up that analogy. Atari was sold to larger corporate entities that had totally screwed up the the original company. Maybe you should study why Atari failed instead of rewriting history.

People bring it because of this gamasutra article :

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18483

Japan is the first market that has massively being overtaken by casual gaming and you can't really say that the size of the gaming industry has increased there over the last 2 years so it was done at the expense of core gaming...

The key sentence in the article is the fact that 'there are way too many new DS titles at once' which is what is worrying Japanese developers.

There's a gigantic difference between Atari then and Nintendo now, though.

Atari was positively hemmoraghing cash when the market crashed. They blew all their money in a flurry of stupid ways and it all came down so hard it was nearly unbelievable.

Nintendo is making more money than any other company in the history of gaming, and the other manufacturers -- Sony and Microsoft -- are the ones who are bleeding money out their ears. If anyone is going to cause a crash, it will be Sony and Microsoft, without question.

 

 

 

Let me repeat this, for emphasis, because it puts an end to all discussion on the topic: Atari bled a ridiculous amount of money and nearly went bankrupt. Nintendo is making more money than any company in the history of gaming.

The end.

Not only that, all their best programmers left because they refused to pay them, leaving them with no way to create any quality games. They thought they could just hire nobodies to create games and they could make lots of money.

 

The parallel I am making is not so much about Atari and Nintendo that about the games being developed for the respective platforms.

The Atari crash encompassed a lot more than Atari as a slew of developers went down at the time, it would be very limiting to just consider the games developed by Atari.

The issue was that everyone could make games for Atari2600 and Atari had no control over it.

The market only recovered when Nintendo had the brilliant idea to have their console check for ' licenced by Nintendo'  on the cardridge before accepting to play a game. ( that's the simplistict way to say it, the console checks for a key chip and the game has to acknowledge they licenced it..)

Yeah, that's how you can't develop a game for the Wii, the PS3 or Xbox360 these days  without the console maker getting to QA and approve it because the console looks for the licence and you can't infringe it and still sell or you get sued big time..........

 So yes I have a pretty good idea of what the crash was about and the issue is not so much how badly Atari was managed at the time and how well Nintendo is now, one of the big reason for the crash aside from Atari's idiocy was that the market was suddenly flooded by games as everyone tried to make a quick buck out of what seemed an easy market at the time. That is the parallel you can draw with the DS these days, the Wii isn't there yet.........

PS : What happened to summarize the crash is that the game market exploded, everyone flocked to it and it led to a crash which lasted roughly 2 years in the US until the NES came out...

That's what Japenese developers are afraid is happening for the DS now in their home country.

 If you compare 2007 to 2006 the market over there grew by 13.4% ( media create numbers) and seeing how a huge part of those were casual titles you can't but believe that the core market probably actually shrunk.

The weekly numbers we see on this site for Japan doesn't make it look like the core market has recovered at all over there as aside from a few big hits the weekly software sales for Japan are quite depressing........