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Third Place Is Fine By Nintendo
anaesthetica writes "The New Yorker writes that Nintendo is fine with third place. Between Sony and Microsoft both trying to build the most comprehensively next-generation console, and barely breaking even in their efforts [Zonk: Though that's changing for Microsoft], Nintendo has decided to go a different route. Wii doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it focuses on simple fun playing games — a strategy which turns out to be much better for Nintendo's bottom line and stock prices. From the article: 'A recent survey of the evidence on market share... found that companies that adopt what they call "competitor-oriented objectives" actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focuses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do.'"
because Nintendo is the one console I don't see as a competetor for 3rd place in this race, N will get 1st or 2nd I suspect.
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You mean giving customers what they want will help sell your product?
I'm shocked! Shocked I say!
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
I find the same to be generally true among humans.
All I see are articles talking about how fun Wii is, the new way of interacting with games.
But is this new game play interaction something that can keep the wii going in the longterm?
I have tried it, so I honestly don't if tilt controllers are something to build a console around.
Also, with PS/3 being a fully functional computer with a keyboard/mouse/blueray, its more than just a console. And Xbox live with internet access to media is more than a console. The Wii is a console and priced like it.
Essentially, Nintendo makes its consoles and games and that is the company. They really have nothing else to gain from other things like XBox live, hard drives in consoles, and Sonys Blu Ray. Microsoft and Sony are thinking broader, but still focused on the companies bottom line. If you want to do just the game division, that is fine, but when and if that works that company would find it hard to take that success and apply it to other divisions. The PS3 without Blu Ray is cheaper and maybe easier to make, but if Blu Ray is a success because of the PS3 and/or vice versa, well lets just say Sony will get the last laugh as they dominate to huge markets.
Of course there is more to this and the OP's arguement has merits, but in this dogfight, Sony and Microsoft have FAR FAR more at stake than the success of its gaming division.
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Sony and Microsoft have comparable products. Nintendo is going it's own way. If you want a traditional console with high definition graphics, you'll be choosing an Xbox 360 or a PS3. If you want Nintendo's motion sensing game console, you'll buy a Wii. I consider the purchase of a Wii to be independent of the purchase of either of the other systems. If you can afford a PS3, you can certainly afford to purchase a Wii as well. Because of the Wii's unique control scheme most of it's games will be Wii exclusive. If you want those games, you'll need to buy a Wii. Most of the games on the other two consoles will be ported to both. So someone who wants to buy an Xbox 360 could change their mind and buy a PS3. And vice versa.
It remains to be seen how well the Nintendo Wii will sell once there is sufficient supply. Three quarters of the people who purchased the Wii also purchased Zelda. Did they purchase a Wii because they want a Wii or because they wanted Zelda? The comment I have about non-gamers picking up the Wii is: The Lord of the Rings movies were very popular among non-nerds, but does that mean that those same non-nerds will play D&D every week? People may play the Wii at someone's house and think it's fun, it doesn't mean that they'll go out and purchase one. High definition televisions are coming down in price which will drive people to want high definition content for them. I think the Wii will do fine, I'll just be a devil's advocate to the Nintendo fanboys. Honestly, I don't think the Wii will be third, it will be competing for first with the Xbox 360. The PS3 will be in last place because it has equivalent graphics to the Xbox 360 for a higher price. 1UP has an article called "PS3: What the Cell is Going On?" (with examples), but I can't directly link to it.
Nintendo and Microsoft's consoles are currently profitable per unit (Microsoft's manufacturing costs have decreased dramatically). Sony is in a bad way with the PS3. Short supply with huge losses per unit. If Sony cuts the price, it's competitors can easily match and exceed that cut. A price war between Microsoft and Nintendo would be an unprecedented disaster for Sony. Imagine the reaction of the Big 3 American auto makers if Toyota and Honda had a price war in the U.S.
Excellent point. I often have seen the same said of open source. It's not about beating Microsoft. As long as the software we make is useful to us, we can't lose.
Its that simple. Nintendo cant compete on the hardware level. Nintendo barely even makes their own games these days.
:)
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That's why the Gamecube (which was considered to be roughly as powerful as the XBox) was able to be released at the same time as the XBox, cost $100 less than the XBox and (unlike the XBox) was sold at a profit. Nintendo could have produced a system that was more powerful than the competition and charged less than the competition but would likely have lost market share; they needed something drastically different in order to attract gamers, and they needed something drastically less expensive to develop for to attract developers.
All they did was buy motion sensing technology and designed a controller. They should just release it for PS3 and 360, and sell it for $200
With the exception of Guitar Hero and DDR I can't think of a single add on that was actually purchased by anyone
It's funny to see some people calling the XBox360 and the PS3 "just the same old warmed-over stuff with high-resolution graphics", talking up the Wii's "innovativeness", while others refer to the Wii as yesterday's technology with an extra gimmick or two, instead of what PS3/XBox360 are doing...
In the past, "innovative" controllers have been released for Nintendo consoles (Power Glove, U-Force, Power Pad, ROB the robot), but none of those ever had more than a couple of games at most that were really designed for the controller, because releasing it as a new controller for an existing system made it a gimmick. The Wiimote possibly could have been a GameCube add-on. It's probably not the technological focus of the console. But it is the philosophical focus of the Wii. Almost all Wii games are designed specifically for the Wii controller. At this point the controller can no longer be considered a gimmick, since it's really an integral part of the whole console. The console would have to be the gimmick, and time will tell. There seems to be an awful lot of reviewers out there that write about how playing games on the Wii is "just plain fun", and they can't stop smiling while they play. At this point it's still hard to buy a Wii at any retail store because they're selling out, just like the PS3. I'd say the Wii is not going to be just a gimmick.
From what I understand it's about twice as capable as a GameCube. Obviously it doesn't have the graphical power of the PS3 or the XBox360, but as it has been said many many times, that's not what they're going for. I'm guessing that a lot of the focus on the earliest game development has been on making the controller work well with games. I'm sure that once developers get more familiar with the Wii, they'll be more prepared to make use of the added power the Wii has over the GameCube, just like developers will do over time for the new generations of the other consoles.
Wii Sports is included with the console (for now), and games in general seem to peak out at around $50, with some going as low as $30.
Raw computational/graphical power? admittedly. Profitability, earning/cost ratio? probably not, we will see. Fun factor? Definitely NOT!
but the fact that you can install Linux on these systems, could do a lot for their market share
I sincerely hope you were just joking right? You couldn't seriously think that this magical "install Linux on a Console" market has the potential to do anything for the market share.. Do you? Oh gosh.. you do..
So many injustices..so little time..
Well yeah, exactly. With the Wii being sold at a price point that is already profitable, I don't think Nintendo is in a position that it has to give a crap if you buy a Wii in addition to something else. Whereas the big offsetting factor for consoles that lose money is that you'll buy the games, you'll buy the online services, and so on. In the world of XBox, for example, since they need the revenue from the ongoing purchase of games and services just to make back their losses and turn a profit, it has to matter to them if you also buy a Wii because that means you have less dollars to spend on their own add-on service(s) and games.
But if every Wii turns a profit, then those add-on services they sell are gravy, not vital tactics to "winning". From the point of view of Nintendo, I'd argue that the fact that you (or others) consider the Wii a "healthy addition" is wonderful for Nintendo because they'll still make a profit even if you only see it as an addition to the more...serious console purchase. But from the point of view of Sony and MS, buying that "additional system" is totally anathema.
Every dollar you spend on Wii is a dollar not spent on something they desperately need to sell you to make up the cash they're giving away with that loss leader HD system they sold you.
Intriguingly, in the Nintendo model, for all the fluffy marketing talk about gameplay and revolution, the business side doesn't care one tiny little bit what your heart feels about the Wii, as long as you buy one. Insofar as you love it and give them more gravy, they do not have to care. Other than whatever enjoyment they get in making more money.
Whereas for the other two--for all the talk about the game platforms as hardcore, better, more technically accomplished true blue and the perception of their philosophies as supposedly more mature, hard nosed, cutthroat and, let's be honest, American and masculine--the other two need you, yes you, to love them; need you to believe it in your heartso that you never hesitate to keep your dollars right there, with them, where they are more needed and rightfully belong.
Nintendo's little faerie machine liberates the more old-fashioned, hard-nosed business model from messy sticky feelings and gives it a very pretty black bottom line to look at. Is the Wii really a limp wristed sissybox for weirdo degenerates? Or the phalanx of a 21st century global corporate Captain Of Industry?
And let us not set aside that tone in which the Wii is described by detractors--throwing around terms that first degrade homosexuality and/or femininity, then apply those degraded conceptualizations to the Wii in contrast to the normative (generally, heterosexual male) features of the other platforms. There's a lot of masculine defensiveness tied up in the XBox and PS3.
Which one is a more healthy view? In the context of critiquing a game you also attack women and homosexuals in order to defend systems whose makers ultimately need you to fall in love with them? (or to be fair to the Joystiq article linked above, your roommate, who is not so much "critiquing" as standing in for a fairly wide swath of the gaming community) Or you make a game system that makes money and, by virtue of a neutrally functioning business model doesn't give a shit if you're straight, gay, male, female, young or old? Whose word of mouth representatives can depend less on diminishment of something or someone else.
If I owned stock in Sony and MS I'd be forced to ask, are you putting our money into a product that depends on how people feel in order for you to actually make money on it? And then are
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
Let's look at past "console wars" 1. original nintendo vs. atari -original nintendo won for having better games and a more intuitive controller, plus it was packaged with a robot which really saved the industry. 2. Super Nintendo vs. Sega - Similar graphical power, SNES won for having the most good games and third party support. 3. Nintendo 64 vs. PS1 - 64 had superior graphical power, but Sony won for bringing in the use of cd's instead of cartridges. 4. xbox vs. ps2 vs. gamecube - GC and Xbox had superior graphical power, but sony won for having the most 3rd party support. For the record, I say won loosely. It's not an exclusive market. Most of the "hardcore gamers" will own more than one console. This round, I predict Nintendo to do the best simply because they brought in a new concept. Developers seem excited about it, which will garner it more 3rd party support. And it's all at a much lower price than it's competitors. Frankly, I don't care if you can run the entire earth on your console. If Pong's more fun, I'm playing Pong.
It is my belief that the PS3-Linux connection is likely to do more damage than good. The PS3 is a very powerful computer at it's *ahem* core. However, the crowd that's likely to run Linux on it is the crowd that's not likely to run out and buy a whole lot of video games or Blu-Ray movies. My figures may not be accurate, but I'd understood that Sony is losing something like ~$200 per console. This means that, for every console they sell to someone that doesn't buy at least $200 worth of additional product, they are taking damage.
Heck, I'm tempted to buy one and turn it into a Linux box so that I can deliberately damage Sony. I've been finding myself increasingly angry with them over the past few years, and quite frankly I think it's time for them to get spanked for their behavior. However, I'm not tempted enough to shell out $600 to do it. heheheheheheh
I don't know why so many people seem to think there is some vast inchoate yearning on the part of the general public to run Linux.
If there was such a vast demand for Linux, you'd see people running it NOW all over the place on their desktop computers, not waiting for an underpowered living room machine to run it on. Yes, I said underpowered. From the point of view of Linux, it is basically a PowerPC with 7 DSPs that are useless for most things that you do on a typical computer, and with 256 MB of RAM, and no accelerated video. If you can't get the SPEs cranking, it's a run-of-the mill single core, single threaded processor. It will be handily beaten in nearly everything by a typical desktop machine, and completely blown out of the water by a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo.
And don't think getting the SPEs going just involves recompiling your kernel and applications to be multithreaded. The SPEs use a different instruction set from the PPE, and they do not have direct access to system memory. You basically have to set up specialized programs on them, DMA your data to them, let them operate, and DMA the results back out. To take advantage of them, you have to write your application from the start to use them.
The place where they will get some measurable market share outside of gaming is among people who want a Blu-Ray player. They've got a real price advantage there. (Although, when drives are plentiful enough to let Sony meet demand, maybe stand-alone Blu-Ray players will have come down, so even this market is not a sure thing).
And Linux can't even win the desktop, what makes you think the average consumer will care about installing Linux on the PS3?
Average consumers don't care about Linux. They don't care about any OS. The fact that they are faced with a system that can play games, or are faced with a similar system that can play games, surf the net, do real word processing, or make spreadsheets, will play a real roll. As I tried to point out in the original post, the price is definitely going to be a problem for them, and could make the personal computer side of the system a non-factor.
Obviously I don't have real figures, but I have the strong suspicion that consoles loose money the way movies loose money... in the accounting office. Even if they loose some money on each console, there is great value in having sold a lot of units. We live in a team society. Whether it is voting for the presidential candidate that you think will win, to placing your value as a person on what football team you like, people are worried about picking a looser, even it it meets their needs. If Sony can sell twice as many units the first year as MS, their second year will be better. Price is a problem though...