Mandalore76 said:
IcaroRibeiro said:
Guess it's the same reason why Nintendo is mostly irrelevant in Latin America, they never made any effort to increase their brand here. Nintendo sells a lot based on nostalgia, if you weren't raised with Nintendo IPs games that evokes nostalgia becomes empty and meaningless The only Nintendo home console to ever sell more than 8 million copies in Europe was the Wii. In many markets Nintendo is a company to buy handhelds. This is so true that in Europe Nintendo handhelds always performed better than Sony's with the PSP barely outselling GBA and 3DS and being destroyed by DS and GB/GBC. I won't even talk about Vita Brand loyalty is a thing people often ignores when it comes to buying hardware. Xbox and Playstation library are 90% the same, Xbox is often less expensive and even has GP, yet PS3 outsold 360 by almost 10 million and PS4 decimate XBone, why? Many reasons, but brand loyalty plays a big role here Point is, Sony invested to sell Playstation in every market they could while Nintendo only focused in Japan, Western Europe and North America that's why Sony is always going to have an edge over Nintendo in both Europe and ROW. Not saying Nintendo can't win there, it's just harder and that's rather deserved |
An important thing to note though is that of the Big 3 in the video game hardware manufacturing space, Nintendo is the only one that did not have an existing worldwide distribution model/infrastructure from other divisions within their own company to work with. I think that when looking at the success of the Sony Playstation, a lot of people tend to forget or take for granted that when that system released, Sony wasn't some unheard of company trying to enter the fray. In the US, where I live, it was more like, "Oh, wow, that well known company that I already own products from in my home is also releasing a video game console now." Everywhere Nintendo has gone, they have had to build from scratch or find a reliable partner. The latter is something they had both good fortune with and bad. Teaming up with Worlds of Wonder in the 80's to distribute the NES in the US was a case of terrific good fortune. Worlds of Wonder had been founded by ex-Atari employees who know all about the video game retail space in America. Not all of these partnerships were fruitful though. In some of the major parts of Europe, Nintendo relied on Mattel to handle the distribution of the NES. By all accounts I have read, Mattel was completely inept at this, stocking the NES primarily in boutique shops where it would go unnoticed by the average consumer. So, there are numerous cases where that Nintendo nostalgia doesn't exist, because they didn't find the right partner to secure them a foothold to grow in that particular country. Take Nintendo's recent success in China for example. Nintendo has been working at a position in China since the early 2000's. Even before consoles could be directly released there, they had teamed with iQue to create and release a cartridge based plug and play version of the N64. |
