Metallicube said:
Call me crazy, but I still feel Nintendo is in better shape than its competitors. Yes, the HD consoles are finally starting to BAAARELY outsell the Wii, but let's look at all that it took in order for it to happen..
-SEVERAL price drops, especially for the PS3. PS3 has dropped 50% of its initial value after only 3 years, which is pretty unheard of. And it's still struggling in America, the biggest gaming market.
So ? Noone stopped Nintendo from doing their own price drops ?
- Multiple bundles and console skews, again, particularly for the PS3.
So? Did someone stand next to Iwata with gun in a hand telling him to never do any bundles? And that's if we convieniently ignore the fact that Wii is only console that was always bundled with game and later two games outside of Japan (and few smaller countries).
- Redesigns for BOTH consoles, which in part act as a fresh new launch, as many people run out and rebuy their console. Look at what the redesign did to the DS after all.. So it's almost as if Wii is going up against 4 consoles.
So ? Again if they wanted they could have been lot more active in this field - even by simply increasing number of colors
- Universal support of third parties, like 90% of the support as opposed to like 10% for the Wii. More support means more, and better games, which means more sales, and more longevity.
That's the price Nintendo has to pay for releasing console that is generation apart from competitors in horsepower. But i don't see any effort on their part to change this situation - look at Microsoft they spend milions to receive software support but it's now paying off since noone can ignore x360 now. They could have at least offered small Japanise devs support in releasing their titles WW.
- Motion control devices for BOTH consoles. Kinect in particular has been treated almost like an entirely new console launch for MS.
So ? How is that diffrent from what Wii Fit did for Wii ?
-The added value of Blu Ray on the PS3, which seems to be having an effect in Japan particularly, as PS3 console sales are high there but game sales are pretty low.
Most PS3 game sales in Japan are concentrated around launches of new games - not in a bunch of same evergreen titles which regularly chart in top 10. January was releatively weak as currently 1/4 of PS3 games sold comes from Samurai Warriors 3 but next few weeks will improve that ratio.
Clearly MS and Sony are more reliant on hardware features to maintain momentum. But you only have so many of these cards.
They also have superior online support (especially Microsoft) and bigger distribution networks (Especially Sony) and it's them who have 3rd party support.
Wii on the other hand simply needs more games to thrive. Right now it doesn't have them. NSMB, the biggest hardware mover, is now over a year old. If Wii just gets more games that can sell, it easilly negates all of these marketing moves (and yes, a price drop couldn't hurt at this point either ;)). This to me is more sustainable than relying more on hardware features and marketing.
Except they are now too busy making 3DS software so the next wave of Wii games could arrive in 2012-2013 if all those studios shifted from handheld to console development right after finishing launch 3DS titles. And again with all the money they have been doing in previous years they could have accumulated more studios - Sony on it's own has one big title planned for each month in 2012.
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