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Nintendo Won't Pull A Sega
AztecL0B0 writes "Nintendo Insider takes a look at the reasons why Nintendo is not leaving the console race anytime soon. From the article: 'To have a successful system, you must not only sell a lot of the system, but make money off it, too. You can sell all the systems you want, but if you don't turn a profit, you'll go down the drain as a company.' This is the second part of a three part series. The first article discusses the background to this round of console fighting."
This is good news for all gamers, not just Nintendo fans. Nintendo will force other gaming companies to keep on their toes and continue to innovate. Though Nintendo hasn't done very well compared to the PS2, they have a strong hold on the portable gaming market.
This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
If you sell a billion consoles, yet lose money on them, you're still in the hole financially.
Now if you sell 150,000 of them and make money on each, financially you're ahead of the game.
The article doesn't argue console sales numbers explicitly, it argues that Nintendo is making a god-awful lot of money, which is what they're in business to begin with.
They'd have to have like six failed consoles before they've pulled a "Sega". I say this as a proud Dreamcast owner, by the way.
Sega CD: Buggy, crashy, still only 64 colors, looked like crap compared to SNES. Sega USA helped kill it with tons of terrible Full Motion Video games that nobody liked. Sound CPU still sounded like a singing greeting card.
32X: Developed by Sega of America at the same time as the Saturn was being developed in Japan because sega of japan DIDN'T TELL SEGA USA THEY WERE MAKING A NEW CONSOLE. Never well supported, died with a handful of games.
Saturn: not a 3D system, Playstation came out, say goodbye to Saturn. Dual CPU, too hard to develop for due to lack of standard dev tools for SMP programming.
Dreamcast: Good, but too little too late. PS2 helped kill a year in advance by simply lying about how great the PS2 was going to be. Several game batches on release were bad and had to be recalled, sending sega into the hole even further.
I don't know about anyone else, but After the Sega CD, I didn't even consider Sega consoles because I knew they'd be failures. I realize this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but they really weren't that good, at least until the Dreamcast. I still have my Dreamcast, and I still love it. I miss Sega, but only since the Dreamcast, and for the Genesis, which had some great games.
Nintendo has had some failures, but they were never flagship products, and it seems they cut their losses at the right time, because no one tends to remember the Nintendo failures.