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Azzanation on 31 January 2021
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RolStoppable said:
Mnementh said:

You could argue though, that the willingness of Sony to power through the failure and burn money is helping the consistency of the Playstation brand overall. Building trust.

On the other hand PS3 never did go as bad as WiiU, especially after it launched in europe (which was months after the american and japanese launch). The eruopean launch did well and somehow saved the image of Playstation a bit.

Also, if we consider Vita, Sony was dropping it like a hot potato pretty fast, so their willingness to eat losses seems to differ. That it didn't tarnish the PS image more is only explainable with how many dissociate in their mind home consoles from mobile consoles.

In general, the PS3 is more comparable to the 3DS than the Wii U, because neither the PS3 or 3DS had suffered a complete breakdown of third party support. The point of my Wii U vs. PS3 comparison was that unit sales don't tell you how much money a system lost; it's common knowledge that the PS3 sold a lot more units than the Wii U.

The topic of trust is a different one. Since Switch sold so well, it's hard to argue that Nintendo suffered any long term damage in trust from low Wii U sales. It's much easier to argue that Nintendo reinforced trust with the Wii U, namely that gamers can count on Nintendo to keep putting out new great games even when confronted with absolutely disastrous hardware sales. In other words, even if Switch were going to do badly, you wouldn't need to worry about Nintendo stopping support for the system. The main reason why you bought the console (Nintendo games) wouldn't be at risk.

The console business is cyclical with its hard resets in installed base with each new generation. That's why the idea of building trust through high hardware and software sales is misguided as each new console is evaluated by the market on its own. It's clear that Nintendo knows this, hence why they handled the Wii U the way they did while not lacking confidence in their follow-up console. Nintendo didn't put any importance on high unit sales, but they considered it important to satisfy Wii U owners with continued releases of high-profile software. An individual Nintendo console may suffer a bad fate, but Nintendo as an overall video games brand continues to be trusted.

Consumers perceive Nintendo and Sony in very different ways. For PS fans, Sony's forays into the handheld market were viewed with mixed directions because a good chunk of PS gamers is about (cinematic) high production value games; you don't get that on a handheld which has to deal with technological limitations due to size of the device and battery life. That the Vita tanked was actually welcome by many PS fans because Sony would put all of their resources back into the home console market. Sony's failure in the handheld market can be argued to have strengthened trust in their home console business.

Iv always said sales never determines a systems success when it comes to a business perspective. Success = profits/Revenue. WiiU undersold yet bleed less money than both the 360 and PS3. I am not saying the WiiU is successful however comparing that to the PS3 which lost Sony $6b and the 360 losing MS $4b even tho they both sold 4 times the amount the WiiU did with their hardware, doesn't really make those platforms more successful, more popular yes but popularity can come and goes quite quickly as we have seen from the PS2 to the PS3, the 360 to the XB1 and the WiiU to the Switch. Success is what you take home in the bank.