IkePoR said:
If you consider the 11th best selling console since gen 1, that released in the heart of the smartphone era "being slowly eaten alive", I'd like to see what you consider selling good. DS is an anomaly, just like PS2. They won't be topped, ever. Considering the Game Boy Advance had no competition and sold 80M while the 3DS has sold 75% of that with firece competiton, I'm going to need you to present some trends or something to back up your statement. |
The GBA was only out for 3 years before the DS launched, yet sold 80M units. The 3DS has been out for 5 years (and was less than $170 for the vast majority of it) with no successor, yet it has only sold 60M units. There's your trend. There's no other way to look at it than mobile gaming taking a serious chunk of gamers away from handhelds. And if the NX is truly just a handheld and it's not very cheap, I see it selling less than the 3DS.
Veknoid_Outcast said:
The handheld market is contracting but make no mistake; so too is the console market. There are fewer and fewer people buying consoles. Sony and Microsoft are increasingly relying on a smaller, more loyal group willing to spend more money in order to keep profits high. Regardless of the rise of mobile gaming, there's still a place for Nintendo in the handheld market. The 3DS suffered from a high price point and lackluster library at first but once Nintendo dropped the price and introduced Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7, sales shot up. Over sixty million hardware units sold and several 3DS games selling 10+ million is nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, the point I was making is that its foolish to fight a civil war between "hardcore" and "casual," consoles and handhelds. We should all strive to make this industry as open and egalitarian as possible. Only that will stave off collapse. |
Want to back that part up? What the console market is seeing is not a shrinking, but (as another poster put it) a refocusing. Last gen, we saw the PS3 and 360 divide up many PS2 owners, with some crossover owners, while the Wii added many casuals who have mostly left, now. This gen, we are going back to the markets as they have almost always been (SNES/Genesis gen is probably the only other exception), with a clear leader and the others trailing behind. And right now, the PS4 is still outpacing the PS2 almost 3 years after launch, and STILL hasn't gone below $300, let alone under $200. And while the XBO will come nowhere close to the 360, it's definitely going to outdo the OG Xbox. The only one falling behind 6th gen is Nintendo, but they can improve if they cut the price REAL FAST.
Still, between the Big 3, in Gen 6 they sold ~205M consoles altogether. This gen will be about the same, maybe more. The PS4 probably won't beat the PS2, but it will come pretty close to matching it, so maybe 125M-135M. XBO will probably do 40M-50M. And the Wii U will end up with 15M-25M (25M only if they find some way to drop the price to $199 soon.) So about 180M-220M.
And there isn't really a civil war. It's just different markets appeal to different consumers. Home consoles appeal more to core gamers, with a small minority of casuals thrown in. Handhelds appeal more to casuals, with a decent sized minority of core gamers thrown in. And those casuals have shown they aren't interested in paying $249 for a handheld, which is why I said Nintendo HAS to keep this thing cheap, with a lot of 3rd party support, or it will face the same fate as the 3DS did. And if this thing is supposed to be their next HH and home console rolled into one, not sure if they are going to be willing to lose money on the HW in order to drop the price so quickly after launch, like they did with the 3DS.
