| Alby_da_Wolf said: A totally unified library, if it will happen, will mean lower (probably not too much) total revenue from games. But it will also mean lower dev costs for games that were planned to be both on portable and home console anyway, and higher sales for games that were usually planned only for a platform. Total HW sales, portable+home, could be lower too. But total profit margin HW+SW for Ninty and SW for 3rd parties could be higher thanks to the aforementioned dev economies and cost optimizations, so who knows, if Ninty really believes in the project, pleasant surprises could happen also for game prices, and even more if 3rd parties will appreciate it too.
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That doesn't make much sense really. Imagine you're a handheld console owner, you don't own the home console, nor do you plan on owning it, but because you own the NX handheld you can buy all of the console games. This means you have more options.
Same would be true of the console owners, they can buy all of the games that would have been handheld exclusives.
The idea that sales of software will be reduced only works if all NX owners own all hardware. TBH if Nintendo allows NX owners to buy any NX game and run it on any piece of NX hardware they own then they automatically open up a new revenue stream.
If we take the 3DS market, that's an extra 57 million people that couldn't buy Wii U games because they only had the ability to play 3DS games, in the case of the hypethical unified NX ecosystem Nintendo has one ecosystem of handheld and console owners.
Wii U and 3DS combined (according to VG Chartz) have an install base of 70,435,281 people, that's over 70 million potential gamers who can buy software, right now Wii U gamers can't buy the games on 3DS and the 3DS gamers can't buy Wii U games. By opening up the ecosystem to include both devices Nintendo potentially increases home console software by 5.6X and they also potentially add another 21% to the sales of their handheld only games.
Even if the handheld owners of NX only bought one or 2 extra games each from the console line-up that makes it worthwhile doing this.
