RolStoppable said:
Nintendo buying Monster Hunter exclusivity for approximately five years shows how much Nintendo cared about Sony. They went straight for the jugular which resulted in the first and only exit from a console manufacturer since Sega's Dreamcast. |
Monster Hunter wasn't really as big of a thing on the Playstation home consoles though just the PSP. I don't think at that point Nintendo really cared much about when the PS4 was coming. The Wii already had the console side MH exclusivity (instead of PS3) so Capcom choosing to expand that to the 3DS given the DS was the dominant platform in Japan and MH was mainly a Japanese centric franchise at that time wasn't a big shocker.
I think the decision to release 3DS in 2011 had a lot more to do with DS sales in Japan starting to slow and hit a saturation point. If you look at the DS sales in 2010 for Japan, the growth was starting to wane. When a system is a big success in Japan I think Nintendo still tends to look at that market for lead trends first, what they probably saw was the DS was slowing in Japan and figured decline in the West was not far off.
Beyond that I think Nintendo simply views 6 years as a normal, successful, long product cycle. In the current QA, they keep repeating that 7 years for the Switch is unprecedented territory for them in a way to kind of say "hey we're going to try our best to maintain sales via software releases, but growth is pretty hard with a system this old, it's uncharted territory for us, don't expect miracles here" to shareholders.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 28 February 2023
