Soundwave said:
But the fact is the market ultimately decides and the market has never supported three successful consoles in a generation, except for the Wii which had to bank on the casual audience that's been completely corrupted by freemium gaming on their smart devices. Nintendo can't sit around and wait for a controller miracle to fall into their lap again (fun fact: the Wiimote was invented by an American who shopped the idea to Sony and MS first, it wasn't even made by Nintendo, which shows you how hard that type of an idea is to come up with). If Nintendo is going to survive in the hardware business, then they need to simply adopt an attitude of going for the kill. The industry is what it is. You can either adapt to that or sit around and die. They have to toughen up in a lot of ways. I liked Iwata as a person, but I hope Kimishima can understand that. Microsoft is not some unbeatable entity either .... Nintendo can beat them if they're smart and act swiftly, Sony is a tiny company compared to MS too yet they've managed to take them out. Nintendo gave MS too much respect; they're a great OS company sure. But 15 years in and the XBox brand is basically spinning its wheels stuck in the same rut it was at the beginning -- viable mostly only in the US and far behind the Playstation everywhere else. If Nintendo can make the NX take off in Japan, have OK-ish sales in all of Europe (not just the UK), and then start to make inroads in the US maybe more akin to the N64 (which was very popular in the US) ... they are in business even if Sony far exceeds them. But MS, they gotta get them, they can't be in third place, it's time to lose the "losery" attitue that third place is OK. It's not when you're not selling 100 million handheld units every 5 years anymore. |
Err, they have... if one console flops, it's because it was released mid gen and had mid gen specs that made it into an oddball that is too much of a hassle to support...
As for the Xbox brand, it literally has the opposite problem of Nintendo. They are deeply rooted in the Anglosphere, whereas Nintendo spreads themselves too thin and wind up as a minority everywhere. Sony is the only company that has mastered the "take over key markets and the rest will follow suit" approach and that's why they are outselling everyone else.
Since MS doesn't has to collapse for Nintendo to succeed, all Nintendo has to do is take the market that is still disputed ground and they will easily square up against MS... once they realize that they are both in a battle where they can't win, they will join forces to override Sony and then divide the markets between them. For a picture of how it would look if the Wii U had been as powerful as the XONE and PS4, we would literally have three consoles hovering at the 20M mark together with fluctuations throughout the year (the XONE hikes to 23M during the holidays, the PS4 catches up steadily throughout the year, the Wii U+ then builds momentum during Summer) and the three companies would be giving it their all to finish first.
The market can deal with three (though four is way too much) if they are close enough spec and price wise. In fact, one of the reasons for the huge gap in sales with the PS4 for the XONE was that the console was $100 more and had inferior hardware. If it had been released as an standalone and been cheaper, it would have been a much smaller gap since the price would justify the performance.
If I was Nintendo, I'd start by taking a look at that continent I call home and Americans and Japanese call "Europe" since that's terra nullius as far as consoles go...
