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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."
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.
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.
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.
You also get an excellent idea of which device sells for $100 more than the other and still sells at a substantial loss.
Also, you seem to count processing power and innovation as the same thing. While I'm not sure which device will provide more fun in the long run (I have one of each), the DS is by far the more ambitious and innovative in its design.
Nintendo's claim for several years is that innovation is not technology alone.
And if you want a company that was "driving new technology" look at the Game Gear, 32X, Sega CD, Saturn, and Dreamcast. And hey, I'll throw in the Virtual Boy, too, so you can yell at Nintendo some more.
You are either a masterful troll or have odd ideas of "innovation."
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
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.
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... ;-)
Yeah, you're missing the whole damn point of the article.
Nintendo does not live or die on the marketshare of the gamecube compared to the PS2 and Xbox. Just like the sales of Revolution consoles compared to the PS3 and Xbox360 won't entirely determine their future.
Did Nintendo lose market share over the current generation of consoles. Yes. Is that threatening their viability as a video game company? Not as much as you'd think.
A couple points that you should have gotten out of the article. First, even without the Gameboy and DS stuff, just the Gamecube, Nintendo would've been profitable. That's the number one thing you have to do to stay in business.
Second, selling a zillion of something isn't necessarily a good thing if you lose money on each one. The Xbox is sort of a special case here, because MS is taking a longer term view of things, and has a ginormous pile of money the subsidize their video game losses.
Third, Nintendo can't afford to operate that way, and so they don't. They're not playing the marketshare at all costs game. They realize that, while bragging about how you sold more consoles than the other guy is fun to say, it doesn't necessarily do squat to your bank account. Giving Nintendo a hard time for not playing that game is to miss the point of their business plan, similar to how you missed the point of this article.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Calling their handhelds their equivalent to XP(Windows) for Microsoft is kind of accurate, but it's not entirely accurate in this case. The thing is, that even without their portable line, and just the Gamecube, Nintendo would probably be surviving. They've made money off of the gamecube, even if it is third place in terms of sales. The GBA isn't really subsidizing the gamecube, it's just something else that Nintendo does, which happens to make them lots of money.
Microsoft lost over $500 million dollars selling Xboxes. There aren't many companies in the world that could afford to do business like that. It's really quite amazing. They are, of course, taking a longer view of things, hoping to build a marketshare that will eventually lead to profit down the line. I think that's a very questionable strategy, it reminds me a lot of the dot com era.
I think the way that Sony was so quickly able to dominate Nintendo with the original Playstation is a good indication of how fickle gamers can be. Marketshare from one generation of consoles does not guarantee success in the next. Sony didn't kick ass with the PS2 because of more raw power. Its games don't look that much better than the N64. It won because of things it did differently (innovation). Integrated DVD player, optical media, backwards compaitibility, etc.
When you cut through all the marketing and whatnot, the Xbox360 and the PS3 are basically the same, consoles with a whole bunch more power than the current generation. The games are what's going to differentiate them, and it sounds like games for both systems are going to be kind of complicated and expensive to develop for. Nintendo's still being pretty vague with
their plans for the revolution, so I'm not going to comment on it too much.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
" PS2 fans tend to call that unfair, citing reasons such as the GBA costing way less and providing way less."
"Your honor, I object!"
"Why?"
"It's devastating to my case!!"
"Derp de derp."
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.
Nintendo makes a billion dollars of profit compared to Sony's 400 million, and that's a 'bullshit statistic'?
"... but with the threat of the entrance of Sony into handheld, and perhaps cel-phone type gaming platforms, Nintendo is in serious trouble."
You mean like Nintendo was in trouble SNK, Nec, Tiger, Sega (twice), and a bunch of no-name companies entered the market?
This has been pointed out before, but I figure it's worth reminding you again: You're coming from an ignorant point of view.
a.) Nintendo doesn't make money from selling consoles. (Just like Sony and Microsoft don't.) They make it from games, just like Sony and Microsoft do. The big difference is that Nintendo is a FIRST PARTY game developer. In other words, when they release a million+ seller, they reap a shitload of money over it. BTW, they do this quite regularly.
b.) Nintendo didn't 'cheat' by having high portable sales. They're not 'afloat' with portable sales because it's an untapped market. They're making ridiculous profits over it because they're the only company who has demonstrated that they know what they're doing in this market. They've made lightning strike TWICE here. (Original Game Boy, and GBA.) Sega's tried twice and failed. SNK enjoyed a little success, but couldn't keep up. Atari, NEC, and Sega released really powerful portable systems, but that wasn't enough to give them any real market share.
In other words, there's no guarantees that Sony will disrupt Nintendo in the portable market. They may actually manage to get some market share out of it, but there's still the problem that Nintendo is a damn good game developer.
You can cry bullshit all you want, but you really should be mindful that you're narrowing your view way too much to make Nintendo look bad and Sony look good.
"Derp de derp."