So basically you are whining because Sony is on the verge of bankruptcy even with the PS4 selling like crazy, and you decided to take it out on the company which only has one department that they have to make money off of despite selling the worst this generation?

Most people viewed things like third party licenses as a method of quality control. Have you seen the crap that happened on the atari? I believe the game was called Custer's Revenge.

Who the fuck cares how powerful the Wii U is. Not me for one. Maybe you aren't old enough to remember NES graphics, but even those were fun to play. If you want Real graphics, turn your head away from the computer and look outside the window... We're here to game, not stare at pretty pictures. So stop talking about graphics, Nintendo fans DON'T CARE....

I can't talk about Sony's other departments but their gaming department is down specifically because of the PS3. Defend it however you like, but the PS3 was a terrible idea. The only reason you're so hell bent on pissing on Nintendo is because they can take a generation that Sony throws out the window or brings to new heights and still make a profit off of it.

Sony wasn't doing something great when they undercut Nintendo's policies everywhere they could. They were leveraging their other departments to allow them to sell at a loss so that they could kill off all other competition before turning it into a monopoly. It's a common business practice. My father used to own a petstore, then pet smart came in, made a giant store the size of walmart, and sold the petfood at a loss. Within a couple years every other petstore in the city shut down. That is what Sony is trying to do.

So you mean to tell me that if a company spends more than it makes, that is better than a company that spends less than it makes? 

What if thye didn't intend to spend the overages?  Say the first company actually projected profits but that ultimately became losses (exactly what has happened to Sony for this fiscal year)?  That's a good thing to you?

And what exactly is a reinvestment in the industry to you?  Is spending more than you make reinvesting into the industry?  What makes that any better than direct investment while retaining some of the profits?

And of those profits, how do you know they were not reinvested into the industry?  Have you not seen the massive increase in R&D spending from Nintendo in just over the past few years?  It is now 20 times what it was 10 years ago.  Did you come across any of that in your 'research'?  Did you conveniontly miss that "fact"?

Yes, you're right, I forgot about investors. Profits can be used for corporate spending or investor dividend payments, not just the latter.

But if you understood that, why were you saying stuff  like, "It's not like Nintendo must keep 32 billion dollars or it dies.", "They chose to keep their 32B$ in their pockets.", "If accessibility meant massive money spending they would be there using their 32B$ to please gamers." (these quotes come from the same page you've found my post)

Again, you are twisting things to suite your needs. This time saying, "they have gone to the pockets of Nintendo's shareholders". In this whole thread, your making it seem Nintendo is the enemy of gamers. You know they are a public company and have to please thier investor like any other company. They also have a business to run, and may need to increase spending to sustain or increase growth. 

You should be a professional journalist. Good read, most of the stuff I agree with, but much of it I don't.

1. Nintendo pockets their profits when Sony/MS don't is a bad thing? No, Nintendo needs a reserve for when they make a bad system like the WiiU. MS and Sony are part of larger companies and they can temporarily "borrow" money from other departments. Nintendo can't.

2. Adults that grew up with Nintendo were already too old to be pleased with the same experiences? Simple sports games only for kids? No way buddy, Wii Sports appealed to adults and kids alike. It was simple, but that's why it was fun everyone can play without investing too much time learning the controls. Mario Kart also outsells GT, so get real. It's not all kid gamers

Same with the RPG's, I still love JRPG's now. XenoBlade was awesome, and the SNES was just loaded with amazing gems. Sony took advantage of this high demand market, and with the PS1 gave them lots of space for pre-rendered cutscenes and large worlds.

It's because Nintendo LOST focus on JRPG's, that the PS1 got so damn popular. If FFVII and XenoGears were N64 games that era would have gone completely differently.

But I do agree about Nintendo spending the last 10 years "not spending" and that's why they are struggling now.

3. Nintendo putting a chip to stop free development of games in the 3rd gen.....This probably saved gaming. If forced a lot of crap off the shelves. Sure PC's get tons of cheap games, many awesome, but imagine if we saw all those at retail again? It would be a huge crash again.

4. Nintendo building consoles for their needs, regardless of 3rd party needs, is probably what's going to kill them in the console buisness (at least home console).

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Anyway good read, a lot of facts distorted by opinion, but a lot of this is true. Nintendo during the NES era really operated like a cold-company. Kinda feels like Microsoft now, forcing Kinect upon us, trying to force Digital Only sales, and new only sales. Nintendo go away with it because of the 90% market share, MS just failed because Sony is there to outsell them if they do.

This is why I feel Sony is 1st with their PS4. Nintendo is back a gen with the WiiU, not willing to spend $$$ to do some R & D and catch up, and not designing a system in mind for 3rd party studios (Bethesda has spoken about them not making games for WiiU). MS tried to force rediculous policies which would hurt the gaming ecosystem.

Yet Nintendo has always made quality handheld games. Next gen, I don't know what Nintendo is going to do in the handheld market. Like you said a lot of their games rely on old architecture, and true Nintendo handheld games probably sell well because they are simple....,but there is only so much people will take. I don't exactly see Batman and Assassin's Creed selling that well on 3DS/DS...

1. Sounds like moving the goal posts to me. "Nintendo hardware isn't innovative and limits creativity...except for all the innovative things they did that allow creativity but lets just not talk about those because they don't fit my argument".

2. I said current gen. Yes you can buy old consoles but that just isn't how the market works. The market buys the new stuff and if I looked at the three consoles, Nintendo was the only one who made theirs affordable and accessible to the mainstream market.

3. you missed my point. You said Nintendo didn't release software that set a good example, I showed you some of the great software they released in the first year that could be taken as an example by third parties. I wasn't talking about the definition of AAA...

I think we all agree that E3 was pretty bad that year but a bad marketing decision should not be used to vilify Nintendo...If you want to say that Nintendo led the way for shovelware, go ahead, but the shovelware is not on Nintendo's head.

4. I guess I get what you are saying but most of those things are very rare or only present in a specific type of games. Out of all the games I have by every company I can't really think of any with non linear story or advanced physics and the only open world game I own is by Nintendo (Xenoblade). Also, the fact that you called the AI in Batman "advanced" is pretty laughable to me.

5. I repeat, Turn based games are not inherently inferior and you have yet to prove to me that they are. both turn based and real time RPGs have their own set of pros and cons. If Rockstar continued releasing GTAs in the old style they could have continued to make great games. The old games and the new games are both very different from each other and neither is inherently superior to the other. Games similar to old GTA games such as GTA Chinatown Wars and Retro City Rampage continue to be very well critically received. 

6. Okay

7. "Those cartridges were all the same or they were from different formats as the ones of N64 backwards?"

Oh dear...the english in this sentence hurts my brain. I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say...

8. Ah, now I see where you are getting all your info from...Wiki xD I kid, I kid...but seriously, don't use Wiki as your source ever. 

Also, Nintendo spoke to some 3rd parties and were promised "unprecedented support" on the Wii U...they had a strategy. Unfortunately they were abandoned at the first sign of trouble and they had a few bumps in the road that they didn't forsee.

I disagree with the bold.  Too much of his bias is mixed into it for him to go professional.  Throughout this entire thread he still hasn't even tried to address the issue with his "article" as you may call it.  Sure, he can try to be a journalist.  However, a professional would research better and try to be as objective as possible, which he clearly wasn't doing.

@Italics, I don't think they are unwilling to spend the money to do R&D and "catch up."  This most likely has to do with what Nintendo deems a worthy investment.  Believe it or not, Sony's R&D cost was so high for PS4 that they actually don't expect to break even with PS4 sales until 2 years after it's been out.  Of course Nintendo would see these level of costs as something of a gamble and Nintendo probably thinks it's better off doing what it did with the Wii U (which was invest less on the development and more into the idea or "gimmick" as people love to call it).  

@Underlined, do you mean the hardware architecture or do you mean the games mechanics?  Depending on what you mean here, I'm not sure if I would say I agree.  And when we talk about "simplicity" and "complexity" like the OP, then I don't think it's a bad thing.  A lot of games aim for simplicity as they are easy to pick up and go with.  But it is also a false assumption to say that all Nintendo games are like this.  There's a lot of complexity even in games that control simply (or have simple mechanics).  Example being such as complexity of level design.  

edit:  I actually forgot to add with the Italics section that Nintendo did cater the Wii U somewhat to 3rd parties, but they didn't take it far enough.  To assume they didn't try at all is misunderstanding completely why the Wii U is failing as badly as it is.

Don't be silly. The giant petstore simply cared more for their customers and sold their product at a loss solely for the good of the customer. It means they weren't as greedy as your father, whose pricing points allowed for profit. Such a greedy businessman he was!

Ha! That really gave me a good laugh!!! I guess the thread wasn't useless afterall.

As I mentioned before, not relevant in the context of modern Nintendo. You're trying to attribute a specific mindset to a company, through the span of over 30 years, on a technology-driven market, and despite the fact that they have changed their policies. Does this really make sense to you ? Do you also believe Sony and Microsoft haven't fundamentally changed over the years ?

The market from the 80s (NES) is as different as it gets from the 00s (PS2)... I don't even know where to start... Much smaller and fragile (the crash just happened...), less developers/publishers, different trends in terms of genres and all media in general, different and more limited technology, less communication between all parties, lower financial expectations, a far more stigmatized medium, higher barriers of entry to the industry, isolated markets by region with their own practices, higher manufacturing costs (at least software wise), etc... Honestly, I don't know how you can ask this... In any case, I have no interest in debating about the NES era here. And the hypothetical you argue about has no basis to even be discussed. There's so many factors here involved and so many possible hypothesis to consider that there's no clear conclusion to be reached, and the fact that you assume a particular set of intentions here evidences your bias.

Besides, you're also completely ignoring handhelds here, where Nintendo dominates... Why didn't they "abuse" 3rd parties through say, GBA ?

Developers don't need high-specs to create successful games, either critically or in sales. The market has already proved this many times. A subset of developers/publishers wants high-specs. A big difference here. And many of these companies were formerly dedicated to PC (Epic, Bethesda, ID Software, Bioware, etc), and changed their focus to consoles after Microsoft entered the market, which is one of the reasons the Western market shifted directions (predominance of Western devs and higher specs at launch). These companies don't represent everyone, and it's their decision to ignore Nintendo hardware. And when you see many of them still releasing games on PS3 and 360 while ignoring WiiU (The Evil Within, GTA V, MGS V, Tomb Raider, Destiny, etc), there's enough evidence to doubt whether they would even be willing to support Nintendo platforms regardless of specs. For example, how the producer of Dark Souls II didn't even consider WiiU despite the fact that the platform is perfectly capable of running the game, because "the audience is a lot different". So, what's the incentive for Nintendo to listen to them ? Why should they risk their finances to satisfy this "need", which would only get them a few multiplatform games at best ? And how are they going to compete in specs while also providing new types of controllers like WiiU's gamepad, which has a cost of its own ?

As stated before, Nintendo does support indies and many other developers/publishers who are actually willing to develop for their hardware, so it's not about giving 3rd parties everything, or you're doing nothing for them. That's the false dichotomy. And by not following the same direction of Sony and Microsoft, they add diversity to the market. An alternative platform where specs are not the focus, but gameplay is. And common sense would dictate that for those few games which "need" more, PC is already there.

About naming 3rd parties that took advantage of Wii, I don't consider the possibility of having released an HD Wii to be realistic, so I was thinking of everything that made Wii what it was, including the controller. I don't think there was any considerable chance of Nintendo taking such a risk with an HD platform, and there's no way to tell whether the platform would've been as successful as it was if it had been priced well above what it was. It's also cheap to talk about what could've been done now that we know what happened, yet at the time the platform got released, most expected Nintendo to fail and go 3rd party... Considering all this, I think that Ubisoft, Activision, Sega, Warner Bros and EA took well advantage of the platform by using the Wiimote, finding a considerable audience for many of their games, and releasing relatively low-budget games that gave them a ton of profit, or avoided losses. Other successful niche games like No More Heroes and Muramasa: The Demon Blade or big sellers like Resident Evil 4 and Monster Hunter Tri could also be mentioned here, as they took advantage of the low specs to find a place through a lower risk (the first 2) or increased their profit margins (the latter 2).      

Cell was about "moving forward" ? How so ? All I saw was just another microprocessor, which didn't even proved to be useful in the long run. In any case, I already stated to you what's the role I see for technology in gaming, so there's that. Kinect does count for me, but I doubt it would've existed without Wii proving the viability of motion controls in the market.

How did I fail to perceive that when I've been constantly bringing it up ? My argument is that those developers who are able to take full advantage of the hardware are a minority, and therefore, so are the games. That it matters little how far the hardware can go if you don't have enough time and resources to fully exploit it, leaving a lot of said power unused.

And no, I don't assume that every gamer prioritizes gameplay over graphics (I just have to visit game sites to know that's false...) nor do I believe a console manufacturer is accountable for what games 3rd parties make beyond standard policies. Regarding the former, I'm of the mind that gameplay should be the priority, and I already stated why. And for anyone that believes the opposite (which I do assume are in the minority, as they consist of enthusiasts with enough disposable income), there's the PC. Why settle for less if it's what matters most ? As for the latter, the console manufacturer is still capable of incentivize certain kind of software over others through various forms (hardware, 1st party games, support to 3rd parties, marketing, etc).

PCs may cost more at the same level, but the price and specs are flexible. It's not an accurate comparison, as you can just play a lot of games in less capable hardware that PS4/Xbox One. It's also an open platform, so developers don't have to pay royalties to hardware manufacturers. All this makes it a more apt platform for indies than any console.

The hardware costs I refer to was for consumers and manufacturers, not developers/publishers. And the reliability affects consumers the most, obviously.

And i never stated Sony and Microsoft force 3rd party developers to do anything... Or that indies weren't on their platforms... I claimed said hardware incentivizes that kind of development. Yes, developers are free to do whatever they want, but since the platform sells itself on the idea of "cutting-edge" visuals, consumers expect that (as evidenced by all the tech talk surrounding them...). And publishers act accordingly to compete. Do you think people buy a PS4 or an Xbox One to play indies ? Low-budget games that don't take advantage of the platform and are available pretty much everywhere ? They might buy it there, but that's not what they expect for the platform. They expect a considerable step above last gen graphically, and if you don't deliver, many will ignore you.

The games that are being excluded are the "medium-sized" ones. Anything between "AAA" and smartphone/indie/browser games seems to be disappearing these days...

When did I claim that consoles sell because of being less powerful ? Enough with the strawmen please... Consoles sell because of their software lineup and overall appeal, with other factors such as price and marketing influencing said decision. What I stated was about their origins and objectives. The way they came to be, differenciating themselves from the PC. And you're the one who stated that "freedom" is what higher hardware specs stand for, so how am I supposed to interpret that ? If you demand higher specs, and this translates to more freedom for developers to you, isn't that your primary concern ? If you have no problem drawing the line where PS4 and Xbox One are and argue that said specs are enough, then you can understand how I feel WiiU's specs are enough.   

The "quality control" element is a reality, whether we like it or not. All 3 manufacturers have their own policies in place, which is why you require their approval to release any game on their platforms. For example, none of them allow AO-rated games (the reason why Manhunt 2 was not released uncensored on PS2/Wii), while those games can be released on PC because of being an open platform (and Manhunt 2 eventually did, uncensored). It comes with the territory.

As for the last part, I don't consider a console that costs between $400 and $500 to be "affordable" for the mass market ($ 300 is the limit to me), nor do I think that many of the features introduced by the HD twins constitute "simplicity". And as far as the price goes, you also have to take into account the free online PC offers and lower price on games. I for one would prefer to just being able to put the game and play, without having to worry about mandatory installs and download patches. With extra content being unlockable within the game, instead of having to pay more for it. With consoles still being consoles and not glorified "PC-lites"...

PS: My last post on the subject. I wrote too much already, and it's obvious by now we're not going to agree, so let's leave it at that... I'll read anything you want to respond though, if any.

He's still much better then the guys at GamrReview. He at least proof reads for typos and errors, and makes an arguement with research.

As for research, well Nintendo is still looking for easy answers. To be fair Super Mario 3D World plays in 60FPS 1080p, and it looks great because of that. However as technology improves, people are going to expect pixar levels of graphics. Everyone else took that big investment and learnt how to make HD games, but I think one reason why WiiU is struggling is because Nintendo doesn't have the capacity to make that many HD games. Pikmin 3 as an example was suppose to be a 2011 Wii game (one reason why I got the Wii), then it got delayed twice and moved to the WiiU only to be delayed again. Had they had the resources, this could have been a launch title, and maybe even helped out with sales.

Nintendo did not cater the WiiU very much to 3rd party's. Bethesda said that by the time they were informed about the WiiU, it was already having it's final stages of production done. I think all Bethesda wanted was a more powerful rig so they can more easily downgrade PS4/XB1 titles, but the WiiU is too much like current gen machines.

I was refering to the game mechanics. Nintendo is very good at making fairly complex and well designed games, which are very very easy to pick up at play. Pokemon is a great example, it's easy and anyone can play it, but at the same time if you play competetively it's very complicated and there is no single perfect team.

I think one reason Nintendo games are so good is because they know how to integrate puzzles and complex game mechanics into very simple games. Meaning casual and core can play alike. Even then there are some complete casual games (like Mario Party), and some full out core titles (like XenoBlade).

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Personally I feel Nintendo is a company on the fence. I can't ditch them because I know every system they have (except the WiiU) will have at least a couple AAA 9.5/10 games. Had I missed out on XenoBlade and Last Story last gen it would have been a real shame (even though I feel Lost Odyssey is better). Because of the example Nintendo makes, I now make it a habit to own every console, and buy all the games I feel I would enjoy best. This is ironic, but because of Nintendo I started to buy some retro games for my older PS and Sega consoles, to really have a full library of games.

Nintendo is good, gaming is good.

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P.S. If we had no Nintendo, handheld gaming would be dead. PSP was awesome, but Vita just feels like a portable PS3 to me. Nintendo on the other hand has been very good at making dedicated handheld experiences. Without Nintendo, we'd all be playing on smartphone.....glad they were around to make things better.