| AbbathTheGrim said: If we consider a world without Nintendo facing the game crash we would have to dwell on the realm of speculation and parallel realities. If we consider a world without Nintendo TODAY, then I will just say that the majority of gamers don't play on Nintendo consoles. |
That's not really true. Between Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo still accounts for the largest chunk of consoles sold this gen (they may well get overtaken by Sony if the PS4 keeps selling like it is, but Sony hasn't overtaken them *yet*). Plus a lot of people got into the Wii or DS last gen, and I know quite a few people have stayed on those consoles (or PS3 or 360) rather than jumping into this gen. That's sort of reflected in the fact that overall, when you roll them all together, consoles have sold a lot more slowly this gen than last.
There's also the case to be made for some of the very influential things Nintendo does in game design. Some of their ideas don't stick but plenty of them go on to become industry standards: targeting systems, analog control, touch screens, rumble, scrolling in games, motion control, non-games. All of these things (and plenty of others) were either brought into games by Nintendo, or at least made popular by them. I don't think there's another company in the biz that would even come close when it comes to influencing game design on such fundamental levels as much as they have.
If Nintendo left the games industry now, we'd basically just have a very homogenous industry - Sony, Activision, Microsoft, Ubisoft and EA all tend to prioritise fairly similar things in game design, and Sony and Microsoft's consoles have ended up being quite similar as well. Whether or not Nintendo's decisions go down well with people (sometimes they don't), they're in many ways the least conservative of the big companies because they wilfully push video games in a very different direction from the rest of the big players. They challenge the industry, rather than just focusing on the technological arms race that the rest of the pack usually goes for. The industry needs that in order to be kept on its toes.
