Errrrr..... nintendo didn't fight against anything.

If anything, Nintendo are the most "exclusive" of any of the players in the game industry. 

Lol, you make Nintendo sound like some sort of saint. Ah well, that's a convo for another thread. 

It's still all about the games tho. Today we buy a game, and after 3-6 months may or may not get some DLC for said game. You don't have to buy the DLC, you can just play the game you bought and be done with it. If you feel you want to invest more into the game you already bought, thats on you. But as I said, the market has changed. Do you really think if we had as good a network structure as we do now back in the PS2 era we won't also have had DLC back then?

Do you think Nintendo will never release dlc for any of their games ever? If you do, you will be in for a rude awakening. 

And gaming is more open than it has ever been too. But as I said more focused. Let's not forget that as far as gaming goes we just don't have consoles and PCs anymore. We have consoles,handheld, PC, smartphones, tablets, web browser, hell even Facebook!!! If that's not being more open I don't know what is. 

But this also means that there are now more specific type of gamers. There are consoles gamers, PC gamers, smartphone/mobile gamers. browser gamers.....etc. I strongly doubt that you can put all these gamers in one pool and expect them to play nice. I don't think recognizing their unique differences and habits is a bad thing. 

In truth, Nintendo not being able to recognize and capitalize on exactly what their straight is is the cause of all their grief. You really think someone that thinks farmville on face book is hardcore is going to even know what to do with a PS4/XB1 controller much less spend $300-$400 on said console? 

I don't know how anyone cant see or expect the industry to become more focused or contract as they put it. Once upon a time, to play a game like temple run would have meant you had to buy a PS1/PS2 for you or your kids. Even if that ends uo being the only game you/they ever play. Now you can get that game on the same device you use to make calls and carry everywhere with you. So of course you won't have to buy a console anymore just to get that one game. Cause now you can get exactly what you want and only what you want somewhere else. 

I think you missed his point, all hes saying is that Nintendo tried to open up console gaming to everybody with the Wii (kids, teenagers, adults, seniors, boys, girls, men, women, families) while Sony/Microsoft and the major 3rd party publishers have primarily focused on the "hardcore" gamer which is primarily teenage/adult males.

The less individual demographics there are on consoles, the more niche of a market it will become.

He's right, though.  DRM, lock-out chips, using expensive proprietary formats to fight piracy, region-locking, using difficult to developer for achitecture in order to keep publishers from porting to other devices, these are all practices Nintendo made popular in the video-game industry.  They didn't fight for anything, they just made a business decision to go after a different audience, which was both successful and unsuccessful.

No one "jacked up the cost of anything". HD gaming is just generally more expensive. And thats cause it needs more expensive talent. The day nintendo makes a zelda that looks like the wither 3 or horizon or FF15 (not just in scale or scope but also in fidelity) let's have a chat with them and see if they were able to accomplish it with anything under $50M and in anytime under 2 years. 

I also don't agree with the anti consumer claims, but I respect that everyone has where they draw their own lines. For me, the only anti consumer thing I can see now are games on PSN still costing $60 when on Amazon or GameStop the physical copy of the game can be had for as little as $30-$40. And maybe I would have looked at having to pay for online as anti consumer if that was the reason I actually pays for a PS4+ subscription. But generally I feel if you have the option of choice, then it's not anti consumer. 

But they are expanding the market, just not how they typically do so. Now its more of a waiting game.

firstly, the PS3 showed that the subsidized model just doesn't work anymore. New tech is simply too expensive and when in competition with people willing to come in at lower prices, you are just making things unnecessarily hard for yourself. 

so make a console that is priced right but good enough and get those that are willing to jump in in at the time. The PS4/XB1 selling better than any PlayStation/Xbox respectively is proof that this is the better strategy to take. 

Then expand by adopting an iterative model. When the Neo/scorpio is released, most people that own a PS4/XB1 today will upgrade. And sell their perfectly fine consoles for as little as $200 in some cases, or even less. The cost of the current PS4/XB1 could even at the time be at around $250/$300 new. The lower price points of the used and new "8th gen" consoles puts them in the hands of people that wouldn't typically have spent $400/$500 for a console. While those that are willing to spend that much can jump into the "9th gen" iterations of those consoles. 

In one move, you expand by reducing the general cost of entry while also providing more expensive versions for the hardcore crowd. You keep everyone happy so to speak. 

New business models are not inherently terrible and there have been a lot of improvements in gaming over the years.

DLC, in my opinion, has been a net positive.  I've enjoyed some pieces immensely.  Outside Capcom and a few others, DLC now is almost always original content that would not exist at all under the previous model.  DRM has been around since the NES, as Nintendo always had measures to combat bootleggers.  SNES games used to check hardware before playing.  Gaming as a service has, so far, been simply a concurrent approach and options are never bad.

I'm not even going to complain much about subscriptions for multi-player, considering that gaming is now cheaper than ever, even though games themselves generally have far more content than previously.

I'd also argue that brand loyalty is no worse than the Sega vs. Nintendo days, or when Playstation first entered the market.

I've been gaming for a long time and I feel pretty good about where things are at relative to the past.

Intrinsic said:

Thats the thing though, we hsve to think bigger. The problem isnt brand loyalty, the prpblem is that the gaming industry is still so competitive that we even still have brands. Look at steam, on the PC scape you have Nvidia, and and Intel. These are all companies striving to provide the means for gamers to do the same thing; play their games. Yet we don't see brutal fanboy wars over which GPU you choose, or which store you buy your games from.