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

[Bodhesatva]

Ail said:

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.........

 

 

Ail, I don't think you're understanding this. The Atari crash did not occur because people made so many bad games -- the crash occured because everyone lost a ton of money. That is always, always the bottom line in business.

Now, one could claim that the bad games caused Atari to lose money, which caused the crash, and I'd agree with that. But the ultimate cause was, once again, that everyone lost a ton of money and most went bankrupt. If Atari was still making cash, they obviously could have recovered from dangerous economic conditions.

By contrast, Nintendo is making more money than anyone in the history of gaming. In fact, Nintendo made more money last year than Sony has made in gaming total, since they entered the industry in 1998. That is effectively the opposite of causing a crash.

Crashes do not occur because too many bad games get released. Crashes do not occur because too few games are released (meaning, what if a company raised standards so high that only 4 games could be released a year?). Crashes occur because industries start losing tons of money, and right now, it's the PS3 and 360 that have bled tons of money, while Nintendo is raking it in hand over fist. Again, if anyone is going to cause a crash, it's Sony or Microsoft, and absolutely, positively not Nintendo.