RolStoppable said:
What I really want to hear from Nintendo is that they remembered the basics of business. It's only two points:
1) Secure your base.
2) Expand your market.
With the 3DS they haven't really done either of these two things which is why the launch was so disastrous. This news at least gives hope that they are aiming for the second point, but it really wouldn't hurt if they also worked on the first point.
With the Wii they were doing so well and totally following this basic plan. Every major IP from the Gamecube saw a Wii sequel within 18 months of launch. The only exception was The Legend of Zelda which was a dual-release on Gamecube and Wii, but the sales numbers for this game showed that the majority of the fanbase was moving over to the Wii. When it comes to market expansion, that was obviously done by Wii Sports and, a good year later, Wii Fit. |
I agree with your two main points being very important. However I don't think Nintendo secured their base with DS or Wii. If they had software sales on Wii wouldn't have flat lined and hardware sales wouldn't be falling flat either. Looking at Nintendo from the start of last generation they have focused entirely on expanding their market with far less effort put in actually securing their user base or maintaining the user base they had.
The comment of every major GameCube IP launching within 18 months of launch, lol! Are you forgetting the launch of Wii? The only IP present within 18 months were Mario, Metroid,Pokemon and Zelda related! In fact the Pokemon game is renowned as horrible because Nintendo actually took the home console Pokemon franchise backwards removing the story driven games we got on GameCube and returning to the N64 battle driven game nobody wanted to see again, with less features then the N64 game had.
In fact Nintendo's most successful GameCube title didn't receive a sequal till 2008! In fact MarioKart which was the second highest selling franchise on GCN came out that year as well. Neither of the two highest selling GameCube properties were present within the first 18-months of launch. Animal Crossing the sixth highest selling IP on GameCube also came along that year. Pikmin the 13th highest grossing Nintendo title on GameCube never saw release on Wii at all(Other then the ports). In fact WarioWare one of the Wii's earlier titles was in fact the 31st highest selling game on GCN. StarFox which sold far more copies then WarioWare also never saw release on Wii despite Adventures selling over a million copies and Assualt over 800,000 making the franchise one of the best selling IP on GameCube. Donkey Kong which between Konga and Jungle Beat was one of the more successful franchises on GameCube didn't recieve a proper entry till last year.
Yes Nintendo released the majority of their successful franchises on Wii. However they did not do so within 18 months and in fact they didn't release many of the bigger Nintendo properties at all. The absense of Pikmin and StarFox prove Nintendo failed to give many of their users the games they wanted.
As for 3DS, its not that Nintendo neglected their user base on purpose. They had hoped that third parties would have supported the platform. With DS and Wii Nintendo changed their approach from trying to dominate their platforms with first party software to giving third parties a better chance to compete. This means Nintendo laid off releasing less prominent titles in hope that third parties would sell the platform.
This news is very bad, Nintendo doesn't have the resources to both expand their market and secure their existing one. They can't provide all of the high quality first party software fans want while at the same time giving new consumers the software they would like. Nintendo is a long ways off from being able to do this.
If Nintendo is to release all of their prominent IP's as well as provide consumers with the new software those new consumers want. Nintendo is going to have to expand and out source. But expansion costs money and Nintendo is losing money I doubt they could convince managment and share holders to expand.
