I know you must be facepalming from my last post to Trucks, but bear with me.

Now it's true that you can't compare commonality between an apple and a broccoli in terms of texture. That's true. But one thing you can do is compare their nutritional values.

That's why I was going abstract. Ultimately these are video games, and what metric we can use to measure their appeal is sales.

The question was, what is more profitable for Nintendo. So whether one is a racer and one a platformer really is non-relevant to the matter at hand.

OH MY GODDDD! I hate this guy! He always gets things right about Nintendo and it angers me to the core!

(I just put that there so Rol's speculation about the posts in this thread being stupid would be ultimately correct.)

Nice.

Why thank you! I feel the need to back up Rol ever so often.

Now for the big guns, are you ready?

This e-mail was written by a lunatic. Nuff said.

Sounds like something you'd say Mr. Rol.

EEEnteresting, and what might that be?

Sorry, the ramblings of an idiot. Pardon my issue. The WiiU is certainly not a controller, let alone a Gamecube controller. A conceptual construction so far off it's no wonder his reasoning is so far-fetched and off the mark.

Nintendo did not ram 3D at anybody, they attempted to offer a value-add, thinking that's what their customers wanted. They sadly failed and had to absorb the overhead cost of an unwanted feature. Shit happens.

I never heard anybody say "Now is the time for 3D!", let alone squeal during an Iwata Asks roundtable... Source needed.

Nope, you are a sensationalist, and your portrayal of Nintendo's mentality is off the mark given your exaggerations, hyperboles and wacked extrapolations. What you describe is fiction based on fact. Call it revisionism.

Since your understanding of the mentality of Nintendo is also flawed, it's no wonder your predictions also are (as others have mentioned in the thread, Minecraft for example).

That's because Nintendo revised its strategy.

I don't get his leaps in logic. He's not mentioning something.

What is he alluding to, I have no idea.

Well, they're not necessarily right but they aren't completely wrong either, as Nintendogs+Cats shows. The game lacked exposure, sure, but that was lightning in a bottle right there. You can argue the theme does not have longevity, but that isn't true as the preview videos showed. Much more could be done in this sequel, but that was it, lightning in a bottle.

Other franchises are more secure, like NSMB, but even that might not be fail-safe. Nintendo needs to protect these IPs AND seek out more lightning in a bottle, because they pop up when you least expect them. The DS and Wii are testament to that. Nintendo never predicted its own staggering success in the casual market. Lightning in a bottle.

It's called hit and miss, as well as lack of vision or impared vision. They've tried in the past (with the cube) and failed miserably. They also didn't see and didn't expect the Mario revival to do so well. They also redid 2D Wario but that didn't work. Sure Mario is better, and all, but it was a revival. It didn't work on the Cube.

Because some lightning in a bottle seems absurd when first proposed. Hindsight is always 20/20.

If you were more rigorous in your logic, maybe more people would listen to your so-called investigation. As it is, you hyperbole constantly, and turn people off with ill-founded critiques.

What obsession exactly? That they make Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess and sell in the 10Million range? I'd be obsessed too.

At the expense of 2D Mario, maybe not. But maybe Nintendo sees something you don't: i.e. stagnation of the 2D series. If you're selling something at 20M+, the last thing you want to do is milk it to death imho. Sorry, pal.

Fair, they could have released a 3rd NSMB during gen 7, but that's stretching it I find. They paced it properly in my view, but it's a debatable point. Either way it's far from being due to obsession.

This is why people don't respect you. This is not founded in anything but speculation. And even if your speculation were true, I too would be dreaming wet dreams of dominance in a technology that still holds much promise, despite terrible stigma. True, implementing it in the 3DS came at an unaffordable cost, but they had to try it to know. Your badgering Nintendo for their missed efforts doesn't make people happy about you. And anyways, they took a hit for one  year, nothing that they can't recuperate over the long term.

And you know what? Maybe 5 years from now you'll be biting your tongue, after Nintendo becomes the hub for 3D entertainment worldwide. Who really knows, this is business afterall, and promise involves risk. It's one Nintendo was willing to take, and I don't see it as being all that bad. Thankfully, it didn't hurt sales, and ultimately on the long run that's what matters assuming Nintendo can recuperate the lost profits over manufacturing tricks.

What about it?

So what do you want them to do, to force developers who don't want to work on certain franchises to work on them?? But they don't want to for heaven sakes, just leave them the hell alone. In the process, they'll create more IPs and just increase Nintendo's treasury of intellectual property, how criminal is that, honestly?

Some of these devs are gone or some even passed away, what are you grasping for??? My God, talk about being stuck in the past!

This is a fair point. Nintendo, listen to your customers.

I'm not sure if this is true, but if it is, again, listen to your customers Nintendo.

Having said that though, this is an artform as well as a business. It's important that catering to the market does not either suffocate creative processes. They need to go hand in hand. If not, artistic freedom takes first place, it should always pay off. I say should.

This is good for now.

You mean 5th and 6th gen went as Nintendo planned?

And rebuttal shall be offered.

There is also Tetris for Game Boy, Final Fantasy VII that pushed the PS1 to new heights, Pokemon that revived the then ancient gameboy, NSMBW that revived Wii for a couple of years, GTA 3 that gave a tremendous boost to PS2, Halo that spearheaded Xbox Live and prevented Xbox for being a total disaster and even outsell Nintendo. Single games can have enormous momentum changing effects.

Yes, SM64 changed momentum in that it didn't sustain it the way 2D Mario used to do. It was important that it existed, because Nintendo had something to prove going into 3D, and I disagree that others at the time did it better, SM64 still has edges over many 3D platformers, but that depends on what you value in games.

Since the sales stabilized around SMW/SMB3 sales, I think it's a fair assumption to make.

SMB2, SMB2(American), SMB3 and SMW competed against more games in the same genre than any 3D Mario ever will, so even if the market was, and even the first had competition when others saw, and tried to imitate its popularity, so I'm not getting what you're trying to get across.

I'm sure whoever made it could have used the N64 hardware to make it feel unique enough :) It's hard to really come to a factual conclusion when dicussing alternate history, but I think a N64 with both SM64 and a SMB game (and Nintendo allowing 2D so the 2D platformer genre was represented) would have done rather well. (N64 controller is more comfortable with the left hand at the D-pad)

Though now that I think of it, I'm much more curious about how a 2D Sonic would have done on Saturn, because that console was a 2D beast.

^Yeah, I'm finally starting to understand what Rol meant when he said that the 64 failed on its own merits.

He was wrong in the sense that Nintendo was crushed in the red ocean by Sony, and that wasn't due to software in any way but to many circumstantial factors we already talked about in the past.

But he could be right in the sense that had Nintendo adopted a blue ocean strategy as of the N64, they could've come out the other end unscathed.

Yet all hypothetical. The sure solution would have been to solve the other factors first (catridges, 3rs party relationships). Those were sure wins.

But a 2D Mario true, it could have been a winner. But as you said alternative history is hard to judge for things like disruptive strategies. It was a different time than the Wii, a different team. If Nintendo failed the Nintendo Difference mission on the cube, who's to say they wouldn't have failed on the 64? Maybe 2D Mario wouldn't have worked as well as expected, and a 30% drop off the series could have ensued.

The sure winners were solving the red ocean problems and also going after business risks in the blue ocean, but that didn't happen, so let's hope the WiiU can rewrite history in the present!

Malstrom is pretty much right. He explains Nintendo is giving consumers what the consumer wants with the Wii and that they are telling them what they should want with the 3DS and the Wii U. The new strategy is flawed.