By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
setsunatenshi on 04 November 2016
Edit Thread
Veknoid_Outcast said:
setsunatenshi said:

I never moved the goal posts, since the beggining I mentioned that the Wii was the outlier as each Nintendo home console has sold respectively lower numbers than the previous one. So what exactly makes 1 console sell around 100M and the next one sell a 10th of that? What happened to all those millions of people that love Nintendo IPs so much? 

You know what happened, they were never there because of the Nintendo IPs, they were there on a novelty item that caught on fire and sold to everyone and their gramma. I hear you on the fact that the Wii was lower priced and that obviously played into its hardware sales success, but I'm still not sure why you think the Switch is going to be priced the way you have mentioned. Also it's not the party item the Wii was, where people would gather around and casually play golf or tennis with their friends and family around the fireplace.

Again I raise this one question that I would love you'd actually try and give an opinion. If you think Nintendo should aim at the fans, all the same ones that got the Wii U, why not just go 3rd party? You've established already that people already have a PS4 and Xbox1 for all the GTAs and Mass Effects, right? With the $300 extra the fans will need to spend, imagine how many Mario, Zelda and Pokemon you could buy if they would simply focus on making the games you seem to want.

Why not go third party? Because a company like Nintendo stands to profit more from staying in the hardware business. If it was a third party provider of content it could no longer sell items with huge profit margins like controllers and accessories (at least not with the same urgency and frequency), it would forfeit licensing fees and be forced to pay them, and it would be at the mercy of Sony or Microsoft or whatever in terms of operating system, online functionality, marketing, physical media, etc.

Moreover, history shows us that hardware manufacturers who leave the business end up producing inferior games, with a much smaller footprint in the industry, e.g., Atari, Sega. Who knows if that would happen with Nintendo, as its development teams are far more accomplished than those at Atari and Sega, but there are no success stories on which to count.

P.S. I never said Nintendo should aim at WiiU owners. If anything, you're the one arguing for that, with suggestions of third-party ports (remember Mass Effect 3, Black Ops II, and Assassin's Creed IV?). I said it should aim for all the people who are casually interested in video games, and who would be willing to drop $200 for a cheap system to play Mario Kart and Pokemon.

Very well, I guess we just fundamentally disagree on how we feel they should present their product.

I personally would not want a Wii as I believe it was a subpar product. I do remember though Nintendo being quite successful in an industry where there was a some multiplatform parity with Sega consoles (Nes, SNES) adding strong exclusives to complement each library. If they presented a console that was at least technically comparable to Sony's or MS's, there would be no reason why 3rd parties wouldn't support them.