Twilord said:
Firstly I'd need to make a point of Nintendo's track record of high-quality delivery of games and the fact their series are often consider 'the basis of genres' (not that their games are alone in that ofcourse, many historical games like Final Fantasy and GTA are known as that as well). This means that players know exactly what they're getting and can have alot of faith it'll be great. This makes less "certainly great" games suffer more than they would without the rivalry. Secondly I'd need to make reference to the number of franchises they have which each only see a release every five-twelve years or so. I mean the likes of Kart and Smash are 'once in a generation releases' and as such remain 'evergreen titles' with a living playerbase for much longer than alot of third-party games. This can ultimately make them seem more tempting than other titles for multiplayer centered gamers , which drives there sales up and sadly that results in its rivals being pushed down.
Nintendo's big problem, in my view, is that they are a producer of a much larger number of high-quality high-profile games. Not to say that things like Halo, Uncharted, and both GoWs (heh, I love that abbreviation), aren't great but Nintendo's number of franchises are crazy.- I have a ton of ideas for gamepad based games such as a dungeon crawling real-time tactial roleplaying game (think Fire-Emblem meets Zelda, with Fire-Emblem's overworld); problem is I would not put a game on Nintendo for less than 'artistic' reasons, for all their new skill with dealing with indies Sony and Steam still seem more likely to profitable for me.
Ultimately it all goes back to Sony's being easier to work with and not having any intimidating IPs back when the PS1 came out. Nintendo had to choose between becoming insular or accomodating. They decided back then to rely on their own skills and reputation, making themselves more intimidating to third-parties, this began a near infinite loop of sorts. They are working on getting out of that loop but its not quite an easy trend to break. To be fair its only about sixty-percent Nintendo's fault, third parties have made a habit of cheaping out on Nintendo ports in alot of cases, the end result of which has left many Nintendo heavy gamers in a position where they are heavily suspicious of third parties and resulted in most multi-platform gamers buying the versions not on Nintendo.
They make great iconic games, this is their gift, this is their curse, they are Nintendo. |
Okay. Fair enough.
Rol still made the argument that sales=quality in the OP.
I agree that third parties are intimidated by Nintendo. But I also think that the differences in the audience of Nintendo games vs those of PlayStation and Xbox are vastly different-- I think that has a bigger influence on why Nintendo games sell so well.
