RolStoppable said:
Your post is kind of... vague. I'll expand on all points. 1. Nintendo games sell Nintendo hardware, that much is obvious. However, Nintendo went through various periods in its history when they did what they wanted, sales be damned. The earliest example of this would be the lack of Super Mario Bros. 5 for the SNES. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, Super Mario Bros. was the biggest IP by far, having games that sold more than 10m copies at a time when 1m was already a big success. But instead of pleasing the market and releasing a sequel to the SMB series, there wasn't a new game until 2006 (New Super Mario Bros. for the DS). Said game sold more than 25m copies, clearly proving that there had been strong demand for SMB all along. Other instances of Nintendo doing what they want are games like Super Mario Sunshine and The Wind Waker, or the release of a console (Wii U) that was significantly different from its highly successful predecessor. Based on the Wii's sales (100m+), anyone with half a brain can conclude that the market liked the Wii Remote, but with the Wii U Nintendo treated the controller as if it had been a failed experiment, so it was relegated to the status of tertiary controller behind the Wii U Gamepad and Pro Controller. 2. I don't look at the gaming market in a black and white manner (i.e. there are only hardcore and casual gamers). The hardcore are a small subset of core gamers, but they are very vocal. Ignoring them won't hurt Nintendo, because the hardcore weren't going to be Nintendo customers anyway. 3. Nintendo games sell Nintendo hardware. Everyone who is honest with themselves wants to see software that is exclusive to Nintendo. Multiplatform games would only lead people to react with remarks like "I can already play those games on a platform I own, show me something interesting, Nintendo." 4. The biggest fallacy when it comes to Nintendo and third party support is the assumption that the most crucial thing is parity in everything with Sony and Microsoft. In reality, third parties tend to dismiss Nintendo regardless of what Nintendo is building, so the only way for Nintendo to not get ignored is to sell so much hardware that it can't be ignored. The most obvious example is the seventh/eighth generation because third parties continuously called for a Nintendo console that allows them to port games (read: it's not about sales, it's about specs), and when Nintendo had such a console, third parties changed their stance to "let's see how it sells first". In a nutshell, third parties will always complain about Nintendo, but if Nintendo wants to get third party support, the only realistic way to get there is to sell as much hardware as possible. That's done with Nintendo games, not by providing specs and a controller that third parties are asking for. And what does sales history show? Nintendo's worst selling consoles are the ones that gave in the most to what third parties wanted while Nintendo's best selling consoles are the ones where Nintendo attempted to please the market. |
Eh the NES and SNES are 2/3 Nintendo's "successful" consoles, they gave third parties more or less what they wanted.
Find me one single third party that wanted the Wii U's specs for 2012. They simply used outdated hardware again becuase of the "hey this worked for the Wii so lets just do that again" logic.
Nintendo has been shut out of the traditional market because of their own poor decision making for the last 20 years with that market. It's like letting an invading army just walk into your country and take over and making multiple strategic errors. Give them 10-20 years and basically they will have your country, and that's what Nintendo basically did, they'd been thrown out of their own country.
They needed to make a stronger stand with the GameCube at least to prevent Microsoft from gaining ground in the market, and if they were going to do the whole casual thing then they needed to at least keep that audience, but they failed at both.
