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Nintendo Won't Pull A Sega

Posted by Zonk on from the first-party-all-the-way dept.

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."

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious... by Ailure · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I never saw a sega saturn in shops as kid, and I only seen one shop with dreamcast around here. Nintendo is nowhere like that currently... I see Gamecube in every shop I goto. And DS have swept the floor with PSP, in both in terms of sales and money earnt...

    And I remember when people told me that PSP would kill DS... lovely trolls. Not that i'm against the PSP, I even have considered to buy it too as soon it drop in price.

  2. Nintendo is part of our culture by defkkon · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Not to exaggerate, but Nintendo has become a part of our culture - not just video games, but society in general. Most people know Donkey Kong, Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, etc.

    As long as Nintendo can maintain this "awareness" that the general public has of them as being a major part of video games and entertainment in general, I can't see them fading away.

    1. Re:Nintendo is part of our culture by barc0001 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean much either as staying power goes. I'd venture to say Sonic the Hedgehog is almost as popular as Mario. Didn't help Sega too much.

      Also I used to get a huge kick out of the old modem sales ads in the early to mid 90s where "Hayes command sets" and "Hayes communication standards" were prominent in the ads as the Gold Standard of good modems. Y'see because while all that was happening, Hayes was busy going bankrupt. All the brand recognition and mindshare in the world couldn't save them.

      Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying brand recognition or 'mindshare' is a bad thing to have, far from it! Just that it shouldn't really be used as a bellwether of a company's survival.

  3. Re:Good news by hoggoth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Though Nintendo hasn't done very well compared to the PS2

    The whole point of TFA is that Nintendo HAS done well, better than SONY and Microsoft combined when your measurement is profit. Nintendo has made ONE BILLION dollars in profit in the past year, Sony has made 400 MILLION dollars in profit, and Microsoft has LOST 550 MILLION dollars.

    If you measure by market share or third party support or sales volume or even income then Nintendo doesn't win, but if you measure who is making (and keeping) the most money, Nintendo wins hands down.

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  4. Re:Good news by antifoidulus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IIRC, Nintendo has only had 1 quarter in it's entire history(which goes back quite a bit to when they were a Japanese card manufacturer) which was unprofitable. And even the reason behind losting money wasn't lackluster sales so much as Nintendo didn't play the currency game correctly and ended up getting burned on a weak dollar.

    --
    Monstar L
  5. Not only that, but... by LePrince · · Score: 2, Interesting
    You know, when my mom, my grand-dad, whatever, means to tell me "you've been playing too many videogames", what do they say ? "You've been playing that Nintendo too much"... It's like we don't say "tissues" but "Kleenex" most of the time; for most folks, the "baby-boomer" generation (people who are 40-60 today), video games = Nintendo, even if they SEE in PLAIN SIGHT that I'm playing on a PS2 or something...

    Of course I don't have those problems now, being that I own my own house and my mom doesn't live with me, but hey, when I go over to her place and she sees I'm tired... ;-)