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| Nintendo isn't stupid by Horrible Gelatinous Blob 05/02/2012, 6:59pm PDT | ||||
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| Like jeep mentioned earlier, this years loss was kind of a perfect storm: the earlier than anticipated 3DS price cut, Wii sales and software sales falling off a cliff because the platform is dead, slow 3DS software sales because the current quality of the 3DS software library is lagging behind the DS's library at the same point in its lifecycle, and of course smartphone games sucking all of the air out of the portable gaming sphere.
Much like Apple will never license OS X apart from Apple hardware, Nintendo will never allow their characters off of Nintendo hardware. That's why I find it baffling that all of these analysts are beating their chests and pontificating on how Nintendo needs to bring its IP to iOS and Android. That's a short-term, kill the golden goose mentality. Why would anyone ever buy a Nintendo handheld again if you could play Zelda on your iPhone? Nintendo remains a familiar port in a storm if nothing else; buy your kid (or someone else's kid) a Mario or Pokemon game and you don't have to worry about the kid lowering a chainsaw into someone's neck or pressing X to rape. Pokemon alone remains HUGE among kids (and will probably be responsible for a surge in OCD behaviors in ten years). Why willingly cut Apple or Google a slice of that money? Smartphone gaming is still in its infancy. Panic reactions have never been Nintendo's MO, and they're not going to adjust their strategy until the smoke clears and a clear, stable framework for success in smartphone gaming emerges. And don't discount the lack of quality control on smartphones as a important factor in the success of the platform. Ask Atari what happens if there's so much shovelware that the customer can't reliably find quality software. If they had their druthers, I imagine that Nintendo wouldn't have launched the 3DS when it did. I think because things worked out when they killed the GBA early in favor of the DS, they thought they could do it again. The difference is that the DS was far more successful than the GBA and when you have a big hardware success like that, customers become entrenched and it becomes difficult to move them onto different hardware. I think they probably would have milked the DS for another year or two and let the smartphone wave crash against an already diminished DS shore, as opposed to having it show up right when you're trying to establish a new device. But they have time and they have patience and they have Pokemon. Zynga would brutally murder every employee they have as well as their families and offer their blood as a sacrifice to have a game as "social" as Pokemon. Re: home consoles - Nintendo has traditionally made a profit or at least broken even on their console costs from Day 1. That's why the Wii U is going to be slightly less powerful than the 360/PS3; it needs to be cheaper and Nintendo isn't going to take a loss on every unit sold, MS/Sony/Sega style. Nintendo is conservative in every sense of the word, which is why Wii shortages lasted for more than a year (refused to substantially ramp up manufacturing capability because they didn't want to overproduce and have unsold inventory sitting around) and why their online "strategy" is so haphazard and underbaked. If anything, that's where Nintendo is leaving money on the table: they have all of these properties aching to be deployed online in various kid-safe MMO categories that would print money, and no one over there wants to get their balls up and take the risk. Nintendo can look at the GameCube numbers and figure that, worst case scenario, that's how many Wii Us they'll sell over five years and it'll be pretty accurate because there is a segment of the gaming population who will always have a Nintendo machine for Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, StarFox, Metroid, etc. As long as Nintendo first party games maintain their reputation for quality and as long as a Nintendo machine is the only place you can play a Nintendo first party game, they'll have little trouble in figure out a way to remain profitable long term. |
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