EA on NX support: "If it makes sense for us - we'll be there"

[Soundwave]

RolStoppable said:

Soundwave said:

If the case is though that they're going have a home console with little/no third party support like the Wii U does, then I think long term they may as well just cut a deal with Sony.

- Agree to put specific "big" titles on Playstation home consoles. Sony agrees to waives licensing fees so Nintendo gets full profit. Nintendo can make their own Playstation controller on which they keep the profit.

- Sony in return agrees to support Nintendo portable consoles with software titles and encouraging third party partners.

Because what then really is the point of a Nintendo console if its just going to play Nintendo games? Nintendo receives no royalty fee revenue from developers so the console is basically just there for Nintendo games, might as well then just allow the games to be distributed for a wide audience so long as Sony doesn't charge them licensing fees.

There's no point in having a console that's only going to sell 10-15 million units.

This reminds me of a recent post of yours where you stated that the whole point of consoles is to collect royalty fees from third parties. You did some maths (something along the lines of 50 third party games selling an average of 700k units) and came up with the result of $280m per year. Do you know what else amounts to $280m? A Nintendo game that sells ~10m copies. Suddenly royalty fees don't look that awesome anymore, because Nintendo sells a lot more than 10m first party games per year.

IIRC a NeoGAF thread had cumulated data for the percentage of Nintendo's revenue that comes from third party royalty fees. It has been quite consistently between 5-7% throughout the years. This means it's more of a bonus rather than the main reason to make a console.

Your 10-15m consoles sold reasoning has no merit when Nintendo's future is going to be more like Super Smash Bros. 4, a game that is available on more than one system.

Train wreck said:

Isn't sucking up?  Is this 1992? It tells us that the NX is not on any western 3rd parties radar and why would it?  Nintendo can't even make money on two consoles they have a monopoly on these past four years.

If NX has no expensive hardware features that are rejected by the market, then Nintendo won't be in a situation where they have to sell hardware at a loss. That in turn is going to improve Nintendo's bottom line significantly over the Wii U/3DS era, even if overall hard- and software sales would be the same in both generations.

So what would stop a Nintendo 1st party game from selling 10 million on a different platform? *crickets*. You falsely frame this as an either/or when it's not.

Nintendo would still have portable hardware, they'd just move maybe the 6-7 console IP they have that really sell anything that noteworthy to a more mainstream platform rather than being stuck on a home console that doesn't sell much. For that I'm sure Sony would likely offer them a fairly nice sweetheart deal and Nintendo could insist on their support for their handheld as a bonus.

If 80% of your own buyers purhcase the handheld unit in a "unifed platform" rather than the home console, a home console that has little/no developer support then really are you even in competetion with something like a PS4/PS5? No, you are basically a handheld company, so I don't see the harm in that scenario in offering some IP to Playstation's massive audience if you can get a favorable deal in return.

Of course licensing fees are the main motivator to have a platform as well, why wouldn't EA just make their own console for example? Why pay someone else $8 of every game you make for no reason?

Receiving royalty fees from developers is what offsets the headaches and risks of making a platform (chipset investement, marketing, manufacturing, etc. etc.). That's the whole point of why Nintendo made the Famicom/NES with its licensing fee model for devs, which is the standard business model that exists to this day in the business.