Emily Rogers Nintendo NX rumors: response without being overly cynical.

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Soundwave said:

Captain_Yuri said:

So... They are embracing mobile by going into the tablet market which is declining and has stiff competition? If the kids are so hyped about tablets, why are tablet sales going down year over year? 10% drop globally and 20% drop for ipad sales is huge... And Q1 2016 saw a drop as well.

And yea Nintendo made the decision 2 years ago but in reality, we don't know what that decision is. A few months ago, everyone was like zomg, its gonna be a home console and a handheld with shared library with AMD hardware. No one even thought they were going Tablet and Nvidia and we don't even know if that is true. But all I am saying is, if they are going this route, I would prefer/hope they have two skus with two different screen sizes and price points.

That way, they can venture into the Tablet space while keeping a foot in the handheld space for those of us that don't carry tablets.

Oh and just a disclaimer, I don't think the NX itself is gonna flop or anything regardless of Nintendo's decision. I am just trying to figure out what their logic is...

Tablets evening out in sales was naturally going to happen, you don't need a new tablet every year and bigger phones are taking away the need for tablets for some. 

Tablets are still the defacto computing device for a lot of people and I know kids cannot get enough of them. Every time I have my nieces and nephews comes over the first they want is the iPad, not the two 3DS' I have or any of my game consoles (yup that goes for you too Sony and MS). 

Nintendo's logic is I think they did extensive market research on kids and realized that today's 6/7/8 year old that normally would have a Nintendo portable as their first game machine (this is some thing that's been money for Nintendo since 1989) wasn't happening anymore. Today's 6/7/8 year old's first game machine is not a DS/3DS/Game Boy or even a PSP/Vita ... it's a tablet. DS means nothing ... *nothing* to these kids, they weren't even born when the DS was in its hey day. 

And I think that scared the shit out of Nintendo, more than any Playstation or XBox or Genesis has ever done. 

That Christmas where they had Pokemon X/Y for the 3DS and even made a budget "kids model" 2DS without the 3D even so kids couldn't complain ... when the 3DS didn't go through the roof in sales ... I have a feeling that devastated Nintendo internally. They really bet the farm hard on that and threw everything at the 3DS that they could to that point and instead of sales increasing, their shipments were actually going south. 

Evening out in sales? How big of a drop does it have to be in order to even out? It was going down in 2014, it went down in 2015, its still going down in 2016... 

I am sure you have seen plenty of ipads and even my sister has an ipad. But an ipad 2 and she doesn't care about upgrading. The issue with her ipad 2 is that she can't bring it to school because she has to worry about it all the time and it is a pretty big device to carry around. She goes to highschool, not collage or something. What she does bring though is her phone. Why? Cause its easy to carry around and keep track... I have seen plenty of kids with tablets but I have seen plenty more with phones.

While I agree that the kids who would buy 3ds aren't buying 3ds. Considering the sales numbers, they aren't buying tablets either. Again, looking at overall sales is just silly because the % of each company is just so small apart from the big two. 10 million ipads down YoY with no indication of stopping doesn't exactly scream something that people want and that's Apple's device. And you also have 10% total sales down as well.. The nintendo fans will buy a Nintendo device no matter what but the casuals/kids are the issue. So less and less people buying tablets clearly means the market is losing interest.

So if Nintendo's research as led them to this, I hope they are looking at the sales and are thinking, maybe we should have a smaller and cheaper device as well.