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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."
> 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.
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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.
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."