RolStoppable said:
Successful in quotations? And do you seriously want to claim that the restrictions Nintendo put on third parties during the NES and SNES were what third parties wanted? Why again did third parties go to Sega and later to Sony? Look, if third parties had had a genuine interest to port their 360/PS3 games to Nintendo hardware, they had the chance to do so. Most of them refused, some of them outright. It doesn't matter that later on the XB1 and PS4 were more powerful, because the 360 and PS3 continued to get games for more than two years after the Wii U's launch. You are incredibly naive to think that Nintendo could have chased Microsoft out of the market. Microsoft lost $4 billion on the original Xbox, yet they stayed in. For Microsoft it was not about making money from video games, it was about stopping Sony from creating a convergence box that disrupts Windows as the provider of all sorts of entertainment. It's only because of Xbox being a strategic defensive move to protect Windows that a $4 billion loss could be justified, because Windows brings in profits every year that are multiple times bigger than that Xbox loss of several years. As such, if the original Xbox had sold only 10m units and lost $8 billion, Microsoft would have still stayed in the market because Windows is so valuable. Nintendo's sales did not matter in this equation. It's also why Microsoft never made a handheld. Nintendo didn't threaten Windows, so they could sell as many handhelds as they wanted because it would have no impact on Microsoft's core business. |
The difference is PS3 and 360 had an install base base of 150 million between them, Wii U had 0-5 million, third parties were right to shun the system, you can't show up 6 years late to the market and think you are going to get equal support. Even then Nintendo did get a fair number of the bigger IP -- Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Batman, etc. at launch, but that audience wasn't going to take such a machine seriously so late and the casuals had abandoned Nintendo already be then.
Imagine if tomorrow MS launched a portable with specs about the same as a 3DS ... who would support it? Would you be surprised if it flopped?
MS lost a lot of money with the original XBox because they made a stupid design deal with Nvidia where they couldn't drop the price of the hardware.
Nintendo has no excuse for lazy/stupid execution during the GameCube era ... this is a kill or be killed industry, they needed to be no.2 that generation by a reasonable margin, getting beat by a latecomer to the business with no established 1st party IP was a joke.
They could have done a lot better that generation if they had been smarter. Yes MS is a big company, but you can either cry about it and give up or execute, Nintendo didn't execute. There needed to be greater urgency and fight from them that generation and they simply did not show up. MS has tucked tail and gone running from plenty of business ventures when they get their ass handed to them ... see: Zune, WebTV, bing, and the most recent Nokia-Windows Phone debacle, as a matter of fact MS doesn't do that well in many things outside of their OS business at all. They are hardly some unbeatable goliath outside of their OS sphere.
Even *this* gen, Nintendo probably could've beaten the XBox One with a year headstart and a reasonably speced machine.
