Nintendo Posts Yet Another Loss, Despite Mario Kart 8

redletterdave (2493036) writes Nintendo posted its third loss in four quarters on Wednesday. Even though Mario Kart 8, its big first-party game released in May, shipped more than 2.82 million copies by the end of June, the Mario-themed racing game was not enough to help Nintendo's struggling Wii U console perform in this particular quarter. The company said it lost $97 million between March and June. Nintendo shipped 510,000 units of the Wii U in the June quarter, bringing the total to 6.68 million consoles sold — it's a big jump from the 160,000 units it sold in the same quarter a year ago and a small improvement over the 310,000 units it sold in the March quarter. Still, the Wii U is still lagging behind the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, and Nintendo must also contend with mobile games available on Apple and Google's app stores, which cost but a fraction of a Nintendo game.

Comments

Here's an idea!

[EzInKy]

Open up your platform so that anybody who wishes to can program for it, that way you aren't dependent on just a few titles.

Re:Here's an idea!

[blackraven14250]

Shame so many of them chose death over sharing, isn't it?

The last time sharing was the norm, it caused the entire industry to collapse. There's a reason it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and not console. Nintendo, as it turns out, were the ones who led the industry's recovery, largely by instituting strict third party licensing. Sid Meier considers the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" one of the three most important innovations in gaming history because of the impact that it had.

Coming from that background, you can understand why Nintendo isn't going to take the decision to open up the platform as lightly as some open source keyboard warriors on Slashdot.

Re:Here's an idea!

[blackraven14250]

It's 1983. Atari just settled a lawsuit over Activision's ability to create games for the 2600, and did not get a restraining order against the practice. Shovelware is running rampant, and many of the companies creating the shovelware are small startups. Games are not selling because they were overall fucking terrible. Stores lose a ton of money on having merchandise they couldn't sell. Many of both the distributors and developers are going of business. The distributors that are diversified and survive, like Toys 'R Us, refuse to use inventory space on games. It's a business decision they're making based on what happens when games are completely shitty.

In comes Nintendo with a way to ensure that truly shitty games don't make it onto their console, and they rejuvenate an industry that almost killed itself entirely with too much openness.

Again, this isn't some hypothetical bullshit argument about whether open source is superior on moral grounds from someone who holds no real stake in the outcome. It's what actually happened in the industry.

Re:Here's an idea!

[blackraven14250]

Lazy.

Re:Here's an idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's not 1983 any more. Shelf space is not really an issue. An abundance of crappy games does no harm in the age of the internet since they can easily be ignored.
Back then gems would not find their way into stores because they got drowned in all the crappy games. Now with all the information at our fingertips this won't be an issue. Opening up a platform now will make it more successfull and it will result in tons of great games which can easily be recognized.

Re:Here's an idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried browsing in the iStore, Google Play, or to a lesser extent, Steam. If you just want to see what is there, you have to wade through pages of flappy bird clones, runners, and all the other crap just to see anything interesting. Don't count on ratings either, many of the good games get bogged down with "Overrated - 1 Star" and "Doesn't fold my laundry - 1 star" while the horrible shit games get enough 5 star reviews (usually by the developer and their friends) to at least look legitimate.

Re:Here's an idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some details about modern and historical game markets that make the "Nintendo's monopolistic licensing saved the industry" story less like settled history and more like propaganda:

  * European PS2 and worldwide Wii markets were absolutely flooded with shovelware and those systems did not suffer for it anywhere near the shovelware-laden Atari market did.
  * Atari itself was abandoning quality control even faster than the third-party software distributors.
  * The games market was not anywhere close to mature; as an offshoot of the fad-driven toy market, people left videogames because they assumed the fad was over.
  * Personal computer platforms did not see the same kind of massive games crash that console platforms did, despite being explicitly designed for unlicensed third-party development *and* having even more crapware than Atari ever did.
  * Nintendo's licensing program did not improve software quality. There were plenty of licensed Nintendo games which were absolute garbage. While Nintendo may have started the program specifically to avoid another Atari crash, they were sure happy to license everything LJN put out, despite said games being barely-functional licensed titles of at-best mediocre quality. The main purpose of the licensing program was to monopolize third-party software and skim a royalty fee off the top of everything.

Nintendo primarily won on the strength of their own first-party software, not because they had a stricter licensing program.

Re:Here's an idea!

[hairyfeet]

Riiight, because LJN didn't exist on the NES, there weren't games like Friday the 13th and Dark Tower on the NES. I think there is somebody you ought to meet, seeing as how he makes his living reviewing shitty NES games.

Oh and just FYI, from somebody that was actually working in retail during the crash? The "prevailing wisdom" is a big steaming pile of horseshit. gather around childrens and let this old greybeard tell ya what REALLY caused the crash!

Ya see little childrens the industry had back then what was called a "stock and swap" business model going and here is how it worked...you are a retailer, and the distributor wants you to sell games, but you don't know anything about games and are leery...what to do? "Simple" says Mr Distributor, "all you have to do is hand me any unsold games and I'll give you brand NEW games in return until they DO sell, you can't lose!"....Now I bet all you can see the big gaping flaw in this model, can't you kids? By taking out any risk it caused retailers to overstock to the extreme because it was like money in the bank, right? Every one that doesn't sell will be replaced for a new title until it sells and with each sale I make a nice profit so I should have a TON of games so I can have a TON of profits...yay!

And THIS boys and girls NOT the Atarti case, is what caused the crash. Even at the little Magic Mart I was working part time at in the middle of a town with only 10k people at the time there was 7 different game systems and over 1000 titles because it was like money in the bank, right? Well the distributors started to take any game for any system made by any company just to get new products they could flip, the markets became completely saturated with systems and games and all it took was a couple of the middlemen to go under for the whole thing to collapse. the retailers panicked when they couldn't just turn in old carts and systems for new, started dumping product in the channel trying to get out, and the whole thing went to shit.

So there it is boys and girls, the same thing that caused so many other crashes, gambling in the market caused by shady systems and promises of easy money without risk. By the middle of 84 I was walking out of Magic Mart with over a thousand bucks worth of games and systems for my $50 check and needless to say I wasn't buying any full price games when I was getting 4 Coleco games for a buck or 10 Atari which just made the few companies left cash starved as their new product had to compete with 10c games.....is it any wonder so many went tits up?

Re:They lost their market

[Fallen Kell]

They have been holding out for at least 3-4 games that people want to play. Right now, there are maybe 2 games that people want. That isn't enough to warrant a console purchase. When there is a Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, and maybe a couple others out, people might finally pickup a Wii U. Otherwise, it just doesn't have anything worth getting that you can't get a better version/experience of on the other consoles.

Re:The market is getting tighter and tighter

[mandginguero]

The leap from SNES to N64 controller definitely took some brain rewiring, but the move to analog thumb controlled joysticks is a move that the other game developer consoles made as well. It freed up additional fingers for more buttons. I get what you're saying with regard to the inability to access every button without changing up hand configurations, a problem Xbox and Playstation never had with their models. Newly positioned buttons and motion sensors don't have to be distractions once you've reprogrammed your premotor cortex and cerebellum to deal with them. I think there is an aspect of timing that was integral for many older system games that may be less important for some games now. When you look at the feature space of games in the 8 bit era, there were very limited interactions you could have. You were relegated to 2 dimensional environments and games like side scrolling action were quite common and relied on incredibly precise timing to pull off. How many people made it past the damn rocket sleds on Battletoads consistently? But newer games with immersive 3D sandboxes to explore don't have to rely on tight timing to hook a gamer. These tight timing aspects are probably what attracted many gamers to action games, and continue to make first person shooters so appealing.

As a researcher in brain computer interfaces (BCI), I have to disagree with the more literal interpretation of your statement that the best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to gameplay. I think you're getting at very quick sensorimotor contingencies, where you get 'in the zone' but there is a huge amount of somatosensory/tactile feedback that goes into these sorts of interactions that are currently missing with direct brainwave interfaces. Let alone the fact that even the best BCI algorithms can classify a handful at most different responses, you have access to more combinations of discrete input with your fingers for now than reading brainwaves.

Re:I owned a WiiU for 1 month.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to point out the WiiU changed significantly after the launch. The procedure nowadays is:

1. Grab Tablet.
2. Press home, click game from menu (in *under one second* if it's one of your eight most recent picks or the disc in the drive - Even many smartphones are slower than that).
3. Modest load time (shorter than what it was at launch, comparing Nintendoland then versus Nintendoland now), and play.

Pointedly, Nintendo's quick-in element is something that the PS4 and XBox One cannot emulate (since it relies to no small part on the screen on the controller, which can turn on faster than most modern TVs).

That said, it's not like the PS4's short on good stuff either. Overpriced demo though it may be, Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is quite lovely.

Re:Nintendo Has an R&D Problem

[phantomfive]

FWIW the biggest problem in porting isn't the CPU architecture. It's not like you can share binaries between the platforms, and most of the code is not written in assembly anyway. The biggest time-suck tends to be different APIs

Re:They should stop making consoles

[evilviper]

With the Wii they realized they couldn't keep up with the PS and Xbox.

They don't try (at all) to keep up on raw benchmark-type specs. That helps them sell their consoles at a profit instead of a loss. And yet the Wii really caught on, and looked like it was going to take over the world. The pundits were talking non-stop about how genius Nintendo was... until the Kinect and Move were rushed to market in response, and took the wind out of Nintendo's sales.

Instead of trying to get people to buy their consoles for their games they should switch to just making games.

Because that has worked out so incredibly well for Sega over the past decade???

You might as well say that all 3 should pack it in, and just make games for PCs and smartphones/tablets.

I'm buying games, not consoles

[ArcadeMan]

If there's both Zelda and Metroid made for the Wii U, I'll strongly consider buying it.