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oniyide on 25 January 2016
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zorg1000 said:
oniyide said:

 

a good chunk of the games you mentioned had follow ups on 3DS, they didnt do too good, so what were they suppossed to do? Keep making games in the series that clearly people didnt care for too much anymore? What would have been the excuse then? I will say that marketing and price hurt it more than anything. Whats interesting and what people want to ignore is that those games were NEVER going to sustain those kinds of numbers. You can even look at the WIi games for proof by the 3rd iteration of a game the numbers drop drastically. Zumba, Carnival Games, Deca Sports all of them dropped more and more despite Wii user base getting bigger and bigger. 

As for the RnD thats on Ninty for underestimating cell phones and tablets, but we will see what they do now.

 

I went into a bit more detail in my response to Soundwave.

On DS, Nintendogs, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Brain Age, NSMB, all released back to back to back within an 8-9 months span. None of these games individually would have done a ton for DS but having them all release one right after another like they did from August 2005-May 2006 caused a huge increase in casual interest and Nintendo & 3rd parties continued to provide strong support for this market for the next few years.

This never happened on 3DS, Nintendogs+Cats released at launch in March 2011 but that one game can only do so much by itself, games like Style Savvy, Art Academy, Brain Age all released in late 2012/early 2013, which is 1.5-2 years later. There wasnt realy any notable casual software released between March 2011 & September 2012. 3D Land/Mario Kart are casual-core and they released 8-9 months after Nintendogs and NSMB2 released another 8-9 months after that.

This same thing applies to Wii/Wii U. Wii had big casual games right out of the gate and these type of games really never stopped coming for the first few years. Wii U on the other hand had the big NSMBU+Nintendo Land combo but pretty much nothing else for a year when a few released during holiday 2013, another case of too little, too late.

Software output isn't the only problem, 3DS/Wii U both cost $100 more than DS/Wii at launch, both had consumer confusion issues, 3DS was thought to be a DS revision with a 3D screen, Wii U was thought to be a tablet accessory for Wii, when retailers have to make signs telling consumers that these are in fact new devices than u know u fucked up the design & marketing.

Software output+poor hardware design+poor marketing+high price for what device offers is what killed the casual market on Nintendo devices. Of course mobile contributed greatly and a decline likely would have happened regardless but Nintendo could have had a much better showing without making so many mistakes.

It's not necessarily that Nintendo underestimated mobile, it's more like there simply wasn't a big mobile presence when R&D for 3DS/Wii U was happening. iOS released in 2007 along with Android in 2008 and the gaming scene on both took awhile to take off. I think 2010 was the year mobile gaming really started to get bug and by that point 3DS was just about to be released and Wii U about to be unveiled so by that point it was too late to react and adapt.

 

the software sales for those types of games were actually gettng WORSE before 3ds and Wii U even came out, so again was Ninty and others supposed to keep making those kinds of games? People never wanna answer that question. Not saying that the other points arent true.