Soundwave said:
I hate to say it, but they're just too much of a kids company I think to ever compete with Sony/MS for the mainstream console core audience which is largely made up of teenagers/college age males and/or young boys who want to play whatever their older brother is playing.
NOT to say they're a kids only company, of course adults can still enjoy their games (I'm certainly one of them), but they are definitely more kids-centric than the other two and that will always be a problem for them in mindshare/marketing. By the time they get to 10/11 even a lot of kids don't want a "kids console" they want to be playing games they shouldn't be playing like GTA. The Wii temporarily solved this issue by bringing in casuals to augment the regular Nintendo audience, but that audience is now gone to smartphones/tablets.
I haven't seen a Nintendo TV commercial in like 6 months since the New 3DS launched, but my nephew was over today and we put on the kids TV network here, and lo and behold within like five minutes there's a Nintendo TV spot for Yoshi's Wooly World hosted by two kids.
They can't compete with Sony/MS who message/market almost exclusively to older core gamers and tailor their entire product line to an older audience, Nintendo will always be stuck trying to compromise between the kids market and trying to hold a slice of the core market.
It's not so much about Nintendo's execution at this point, it's just that the market has changed so much from the 80s/90s where the console market was more kids-oriented. Even if NX is relatively decent spec-ed, what happens in a year or so when Microsoft shows off a much more powerful next-gen XBox or PS5 hype starts to ramp up? There won't be 7-8 year cycles this gen because neither Sony/MS took massive losses early on this gen that required a longer gen to recoup costs.
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Ehh... So much misinformation in this one.
The market haven't changed, only the industry has. Back in 1981 was the first time I played a videogame, it was my grandfathers Pong clone. When I really got into videogames, it was 1985 or 1986 when I used to visit my friend to play Commodore 64 his father had, and another friend whose father had a C64, and another friend whose father had a C64...
As long as I remember, the core market have been, according to industry analysts, the 18-35 year old male. It was Atari 2600 and NES that brought in the kids (and families), and when Megadrive and SNES (and later Playstation, Saturn and N64) were after the Atari and NES kids, the adults moved to PC. What have changed in the industry, is that computer games have moved to consoles in the last decade or 15 years. Ever since videogame consoles made they way into homes, kids have been the core market, you just don't see the analysts talking about kids because kids have (virtually) no disposable income. All the casual games the industry churns out are set to fail because the industry buys it's own bullshit about the core market - while the indies who don't buy it have their games everywhere. Every time something have happened in the industry, it's always been against the industry. NES became succeeded in a time consoles were supposed to be obsolete. Playstation succeeded in a time it wasn't supposed to be financially viable to make games other than blockbusters. Wii succeeded in a time consoles were supposed to be obsolete AND only blockbusters were supposed to be viable.
Wii brought in families and friends, pretty much the same thing that NES did in the 80's, that's what the smartphones and tablets don't do. The smartphones and tablets hurt Wii U, PS3&4 Xbox 360/One much more than they could hurt Wii. Tablets and smartphones offer same kind of experience than your gimped down PC plugged into your TV, only being much more convenient. The consoles are today's computers plugged to your TV that get squeezed between PC's and portable computers (laptop/tablet), and on the other direction with consoles you use only for playing games.
The more the specs are ramped higher, the more expensive it is to create games, which means the lower specs devices become increasingly important and will have more games. And how much more can you do with higher specs anyway? Run your games on 4K resolution? When the popular games Minecraft, Growtopia and the likes look like shit anyway even on a small screen. The interesting part is, what will happen when todays creative geniouses (note the sarcasm) retire in the next decade.
