RolStoppable said:
You are working with the wrong premise. When Nintendo makes a system, the highest priority is to sell it to consumers because that's where the money will come from. Nintendo doesn't gain anything from making concessions to third party developers who make games that don't bring in more consumers. The underlying problem in such discussions is that it's too common that people analyze Nintendo in the same way as they would Sony and Microsoft, but only the latter two are comparable while Nintendo is markedly different. It's also not absurd to believe that there is no convincing certain developers. You say that this is an industry, as if it that meant that all business decisions will be reasonable and rational. What we have in reality are third party publishers who have openly insulted Nintendo console owners which is an action that contradicts a willingness to sell products to certain consumers. We can agree to disagree on that, as well as on the rest we talked about. Nintendo always makes mistakes with their consoles, but the same is true for every other console manufacturer as well. The crucial difference between them is that third parties take the stance to accept whatever a certain company puts out as the standard, and that company is not Nintendo, so they will always divert from the standard in some way, i.e. they end up being screwed regardless of what they do. It has happened too often to ignore and the reasoning is laughable on a regular basis (like the GameCube discs you've heard of). Meanwhile, Nintendo does all their crazy things in the handheld market, but that has not hurt them anywhere close as much. That's because there is no other company who gets to dictate what the standard has to be, so Nintendo has to deal with a lot less bias against them. That doesn't come down to sales, because when the Wii ran circles around the PS3, third parties held on to having the dreaded Cell processor as their lead platform despite losing significant amounts of money on it (third parties have never lost that kind of money on Nintendo projects). |
So...in other words, you don't mind Nintendo continually pumping out Wii U 2.0s, not caring about the competition or what makes them successful? Without caring about 3rd parties? Without 3rd parties, this will be another Wii U. But, I guess it's Nintendo, so all is good.
And devs don't care what kind of gimmick you are chasing, they will support it in some way or another. They just want enough power in your "next gen" system that they don't have to basically two separate versions of the same game just to get it on your system. And now, Nintendo's 9th gen system is considerably weaker than Sony and MS's 8th gen system. That's not going to make devs happy when they are pushing the Pro and Scorpio, but then have to turn around and figure how to degrade their games enough to make it run on the Switch.
