Wyrdness said:
Yet the gen before the NES where every product was the same debunks your claim here and backs what I say about market approach, even Jim Sterling himself touched on this when he was looking at games. You're still not making sense on the monopoly side of things because having an monopoly made GBA a massive winnner as no other platform was there to compete so it was unhampered when it sold what it did before it got dropped. Actually you're wrong there as the west was very even when it came to portables and home consoles, GB outsold SNES, MD and NEOGEO combined in the west, GBA in the west outsold both GC and Xbox combined in the west. It was with Gen 7 where markets began to shift because of the pursuit of high end tech which changed the approach to gaming for modern gamers in the west now who now chase the experiences brought on by this approach, portables stood no chance replicating this which was a problem as that side of the market had progressed to a point where the experience on them was going to be like consoles as opposed to alternative experiences only problem is its console gaming with out the high end approach that most of the mainstream are going for in the west. The west as a resulted shifted more to consoles instead of double dipping like before, this shift also hit Japan but in the other direction as the Japanese market aren't as big a fans of the modern approach to gaming on them but found portables still heavily offered what catered to them, this is why GBA sold much less in Japan as consoles still had a footing back then I think it was the last gen where any console did well over there as today in Japan the majority of gaming is dependent on Portables and Mobile. GBA is not the same gen as DS and PSP that's why GBA's sales are not added to the total of the latter 2 otherwise you would have to add DS/PSP sales to 3DS and Vita sales, when you're arguing mobile boom and so on you're trying to compare an entire market to one platform to declare that the portable market has been in decline it is flawed. We have to compare both markets as a whole, mobile had a massive boom yes and portables may have shrunk from the DS/PSP era but when you bring in the GBA era and we look at the portable market as a whole compared to now it has increased over the GBA era, this shows that traditional portables as a market have not suffered at all. 3DS was competitive because of its hardware approach and handling, it's the first Nintendo portable that naturally succeeded a predecessor to actually have a competitive generational leap over its predecessor in order to properly compete this is how 3DS was reaction to what the expected Vita would be competively. This meant that developers could not only jump onboard of the platform easier from the PSP due to the large progression over the DS but the platform could be handled in a competitive manner to negate the competition. DS is so easily proven to be a knee jerk reaction as it wouldn't have been announced and released 3 years into the GBA's life, R&D means new platforms are always in development from all companies from release of a new one but it's obvious the are events that can trigger reactionary decisions from companies like Switch replacing both its predecessors now because one of them died 3 years in. Nintendo do things their way but believe me it does matter if the competition decide to fight you blow for blow for your market share had the PSP given Sony control of the portable market the same way they did home consoles back then with the PS1 believe me Nintendo would have been buggered as that is a tonne of revenue they would have lost out on it was a serious threat to them. They recognize the home market was lost when Sony established themselves while they were doing what they liked with the N64 and saw the same scenario possibly repeating if they left the GBA on the market instead of a more competitive one. |
Despite GBA having the market all to itself, it still got outsold by 3DS in Japan and PSP in Europe. Therefore, the argument of GBA had a monopoly = the reason why 3DS didn't outsold can't be used.
Why didn't you mention how PS1+N64+Saturn outsold the GB line? Why didn't you mention that PS2+GC+XB+Dreamcast outsold the GBA line? Or that PS3+Xb360+Wii > DS+PSP?
So you see, consoles always came out on top without hampering handheld sales.
The only real shift happened in Japan where handheld sales went up at the expense of falling consoles sales.
If the home console market grew in the West, it clearly wasn't at the expense of handheld sales, as GBA sales showed that it performed really well in it's short life cycle. Therefore, no shift occurred in the west.
Also, you can't deny that, on home consoles, the market went from Nintendo and Sega, to Nintendo, Sega, Sony and MS (until PS2 generation). Whereas on handhelds, it was Nintendo and Sega, then Nintendo, and Nintendo and Sony.
The only relevant difference - or the one that mattered - between 3DS and Vita was the 3D screen. But it was so relevant that 2 years into 3DS' life, they launched 2DS (no screen), because 3D wasn't that appealing anyway.
If you are talking about how easy it was or or wasn't to develop for, i seriously doubt that devs had a problem with Vita (specially when it was pretty much a portable PS3, something that devs knew pretty well).
How can you say that 3DS/Vita increased over GBA's era when GBA's lifecycle was cut short and 3DS/Vita are leaving past their supposed time (due to Sony and Nintendo not making a new portable)? You can't just ignore these important facts...
And how can you say that competition doesn't bring more customers when that's what, in your own view, made the market bigger for 3DS and Vita?
The GBA sold 65m in 4 years and Nintendo was panicking so much about the PSP that they released the DS a year before the natural time? Why? Because the ultra successful sales of GBA would fall off a cliff as soon as PSP arrived?
One can argue if DS came out to fight the PSP or to actually be a 3rd pillar, but you can't call it a weapon to fight the PSP unless you know that DS' R&D changed mid way to make it different from PSP.
So, despite Nintendo winning hands down in the PSP/DS generation, they still had to care about Vita? Doesn't make much sense.
Yeah, when Nintendo lost the home market to Sony it was clear that Nintendo followed Sony's footsteps as GC proved, or Wii and Wii U.
Losing market never made Nintendo copy Sony's style.
