| pokoko said: That just sounds like a pre-made excuse, to be honest. They're attempting to merge two markets, not disolve one so they can focus on the other. What you're saying is that they're embracing retraction but there is no business--or investor--that would be happy with that as an outcome. They need growth and they need it badly. They've said as much in the past. The home console market is clearly not dead. The Wii U was a failure, not a new baseline. I doubt anyone at Nintendo really believes that they couldn't do better. No, they have to culture growth over last generation and they know it. It's not just about margins, it's about long-term brand health. |
They are merging two markets that overlapped. That's why simply adding them together numerically makes no sense.
In a sense, they are retracting their expectations. With Wii U & 3DS they clearly hoped for two simultaneously very successful products like the Wii and DS. Their goal was two 100-million-ish selling platforms. They wound up with two disappointments. So, what is the Switch? Do you think they expect it to represent the Wii and DS successes added together, or have they accepted a single lower-risk huge success rather than trying to score two at the same time again?
There are better ways to measure growth than console sales, and even in that regard growth over last gen would mean growth over the 3DS. The Wii U isn't a factor because it was a huge failure. The only purpose for selling hardware is as a platform for software and accessories, the main sources of Nintendo's income. Wii U sold so little hardware that the investment was a net negative. The install base (therefore the target market of all software & accessories) was so small that it wasn't worth investing in. Nintendo was stuck funding games that had little chance of turning a decent profit, but the much worse effect of this is that other companies had little interest in developing Wii U games.
Whether the Wii U sold 1 million or 10 million consoles, what does that matter to the Switch? The Switch needs to sell well enough to provide a market for Nintendo's software and accessories, as well as attract third parties. The 3DS attracted third parties, but the Switch can do better, and that should be its goal.
Nintendo is absolutely trying to grow their brand and their business, but not by trying to hit Wii + DS status in the console market again. They are expanding elsewhere, into mobile and multimedia content.
