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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.
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.
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.
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
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.