Nintendo sales can't be compared to other companies as they aren't sold as a loss leader and licensing deals are different.
If each new release of your product sells less than the prior one and that continues for 20 years, sooner or later, it'll catch up with you.
You say before the Wii they were heading down? Their profit and loss statements say they were a very healthy company with a stable ever so slightly increasing trend of profit even before it.
Yes, they were. Don't confuse short term numbers with long term prospects. Short term they carried on with Game Cube based on their name, history, and first party titles, but that only lasts for so long before they are all milked to death.
It is also worth noting that their profits back then were largely based on the GameBoy and DS handheld lines, not TV based consoles. But the future is bleak for DS style handhelds, phones and tablets can now replace much of that market.
The Wii was a positive anomaly but don't confuse that as the company's saving grace. Until 2012 they were doing just fine, even pre-Wii.
Are you under the impression that Nintendo is in any place to launch another console? Would anyone buy it at this point?
What is the future of their handheld business?
Frankly, the whole thing seems rather bleak to me, their real value is in their IP. They really do make some really nice first party games. Sonic was nice enough, but Sega never had the kind of IP that Nintendo has. If Nintendo were to start releasing their catalog on various systems, I think they would be just fine. If they try and launch another console, it may sink the company.
Nintendo has been riding the GameBoy and DS for a long time. The bulk of their profits have been from the handheld markets.
I'm not sure their consoles have really made money since the SNES, other than Wii.
Did N64 or GC really make money? My memory says no, in fact N64 didn't really even last that long, it kinda faded after a few years when PlayStation just walked all over the market with CD based games. But my memory could be fuzzy.
Sony has problems way beyond PlayStation. In fact, if PlayStation were a standalone business, it would be fine in general. They missed with the PS3, too expensive and too complex, but it did have the benefit of pushing Blu-Ray.
Microsoft has poured billions into XBox, but they can afford to and there are benefits to being front-and-center to the world beyond profits. Sony as well.
That is part of Nintendo's problem long term, they are trying to JUST make money from consoles, compared to MS and Sony who don't actually have to make any money from consoles.
It can be hard to compete with someone who can pour $4 billion into a console and make no profit and just keep chugging right along.
Simply saying "all your old games work on this and the new games are much prettier" was nowhere near sufficient to convince most owners to go put down $250-300 on a new system.
Have you considered that the Wii U might be a solution in search of a problem?
Just because you make it doesn't mean the world wants it.:)
The WiiU brought some neat new "next generation" titles, with some neat new capabilities. I think Nintendo dropped the ball on emphasizing them.
Yes, but that is the problem with being different. It works sometimes, and not others. The gamepad with LCD display for example, it could be a good idea, but how do you develop games for that? Anything that requires it won't really work on any other console, and any game that doesn't need it really won't use it for much.
LEGO City Undercover is a good example, fun game, uses the game pad's LCD screen well, but it was a platform exclusive paid for by Nintendo. That game is why I bought a Wii U in the first place, for my kids. Fun, but at some point, meh. Too many other games to play, including LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (crazy fun) and The LEGO Movie (also fun) and they work on every platform.
So the problem with this neat new feature is that it largely goes unused except for platform exclusives, and Wii U doesn't have the sales to justify those beyond 1st party titles from Nintendo.
It reminds me of the old Sega Genesis ads = 'we do what Nintendon't'. Only this time they provided the "don't" themselves and nobody else needed to attack it.
Yep, but that was another time... There does come a point where the market and the world has changed enough that you have to move on.
Genesis worked because it marketed itself as a more "mature system", for "mature gamers". Those who had NES but didn't want another kiddie system, here is your teenage system. We have blood! (Nintendon't!) Those were the days of Mortal Kombat and Super Street Fighter II.
There also were largely only two players in the game, Sega and Nintendo. Yea, Turbo Grapfx exited, along with Neo Geo, but not really. Today you have Microsoft and Sony, there isn't a place for Nintendo anymore, not in the console market.
And really, we do not want a large number of unemployed young males with a lot of time on their hands? No - we don't.
A basic income would go a long way towards addressing that concern...
They can work 10-15 hours a week serving the state, cleaning roads, learning a trade, whatever... The rest of the time, they can play video games...
That is clearly where it is going in the long run, as robots end up being able to make everything we all need. The trade off will be government controls on who can breed, which will not make everyone happy, but we'll have to have that to go along with a basic income.
I wish business folks and conservative pundits would stop pretending that the minimum wage going up/down is somehow motivating owners to automate.
It pushes them to do it sooner.
If Bernie was elected and got a $15/min wage put into place overnight, you'd see a mad scramble to push automation forward more quickly.
Yes, it will happen everywhere, our current economic system won't survive that, but that's ok, maybe it shouldn't. The transition won't be pleasant however as the existing people in power hold very tightly to that power and won't let go easily.
Which is why I laugh when liberals want to give up their guns. You'll need them to change the economic system, I don't think it'll happen without a civil war. I would be pleased to be proven wrong, but I think it'll come to that before it changes.
No, we do actually get it. Mr Puzler is not responsible. You are 100 percent correct.
You were so on track here, then it went off the rails...
ther really cool thing is, if in a hypothetical situation, everyone gets rid of all their employees, and the whole industry collapses, no one at all is responsible, Innocent as teh day they were born.
A good gig if you can get it.
That is indeed a possible problem, but it is one for society to solve, not Mr. Puzder.
Seriously, we understand 100 percent that you don't hold him responsible for shortsighted and unltimately self destructive actions.
They are not short-sighted for HIM or his COMPANY... Perhaps society, but that is not his problem to fix, nor is he in any position to do anything about it.
Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them.
Henry Ford lived in another time, a lot of what he wanted to do wouldn't work today.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution. But to do it will require that all the major companies do it. It has to be built into Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc.
It also has to be built into Yahoo Mail, GMail, Outlook Mail, etc.
There is a big difference, though. With all the examples you gave - which are very good examples I will add - the consoles were all trying to compete for the same market. They each had exclusive titles, of course, but they were trying to compete for the same "gamer" market.
That is a fair point... The SNES and Genesis were the XBox and PlayStation of their day...
The Wii U clearly is not...
Microsoft and Sony are both competing for one market; if you look at game sales numbers this is abundantly clear as both companies see the majority of all games sold for their consoles are from the FPS genre.
Well, FPS and TPS (third person), I would lump those together). Sports is a big market as well, bigger than I think a lot of people give it credit for. The "other category" isn't small either, but it is smaller than those two markets.
Nintendo doesn't make any effort to attract FPS titles to the Wii or Wii U. They go for a different demographic entirely. Unfortunately, Nintendo never launched a competent marketing campaign for the WiiU that explained to Wii owners why they should upgrade; a large segment of the gaming public thought the Wii U was just a tablet add-on for the Wii and because of that never paid any attention to it.
Meh, even if they had, I don't know that it would have mattered.
When the Wii launched, the BlackBerry was the "big thing". Tablets didn't exist, and XBox 360/PS3 were expensive (seriously, launching at $599, what was Sony thinking?)
When the Wii U launched, the iPhone and iPad were "big deals" for causal and kid friendly gaming, and the XBox One/PS4 were launched at much more reasonable prices.
Those above two data points I think would have really hurt any serious marketing campaign. It is also worth noting that a LOT of people who bought the Wii played with it for awhile, sometimes for years, but never bought a lot of games. By the time Wii U came along, many of them were put into the closet or simply hadn't been turned on in awhile, so a new box was not likely to sell to those people.
There's a key difference between phones and tablets though: phones are subsidized by providers.
They *used to be*... All 4 major carriers have moved away from that model, a few don't offer it at all, a few do in limited ways.
Some providers will lower your bill, but not all of them
They all do now... Verizon and AT&T both give you about a $25 bill credit for not taking the discounted phone, which works out to be a better deal over 2 years all things considered...
I was paying right at $200 a month for a pair of Galaxy S4 phones, I upgraded to a pair of iPhone 6 Plus 128GB models, paid zero up front, 100% financed over 24 months, my bill went to $220. But, and this is key... My bill will drop to $140 once the phones are paid off and I keep using them.
To be fair, they tried with Mac product line for over 30 years.
Yea, but that was then... The world has changed...
A large number of people using their computers are using them in ways that matter less what OS is being run. There are exceptions, and those exceptions keep Windows going to some extent. The low price of PCs is the other.
Keep in mind that with OS X running on x86-64, that is miles different from most of those 30 years.
The Mac small market penetration is not from a lack of trying by Apple. Apple tried.
Meh, not really... there have been moments, but few and far between and nothing since the early 2000s.
The first iMac made waves and did get some interest, but the modern ones cost WAY too much for what they are.
It has been since the 90s since you could buy a reasonable desktop Mac that came in an actual desktop case. Everything has changed since then.
Now I'll grant you, that display is really nice. But meh, so what? Do you need it? Not really, it is way, way overkill for 27" of screen space. I wouldn't turn it down for free, but it is an example of what is wrong with Apple, providing things that people don't need.
The AMD RR9 M380 is nice, but lets be honest, that is a notebook GPU, it has 768 streaming cores, which is nice, but nothing flashy.
That has almost exactly the same performance as the iMac's GPU.
So our total is:
$449 + $495 + $105 = $1,349
So we're $300 less than the iMac, and I'm putting an overkill monitor on there. Frankly, a 1080p or 1440p monitor would be "fine" for most people.
KEY POINT - You can keep that 4k monitor for multiple computers, the iMac you cannot. You also don't HAVE to buy the video card, the Skylake HD 530 GPU is actually pretty good these days, it'll game at 1080p on medium detail in many games.
Remove the video card and give it a nice 1080p display:
So for $628, you get a perfectly good computer with a very good quad core Intel chip and a very nice usable 27" screen. The iMac isn't even remotely in that league.
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Now some people might point to the Mac Mini, but meh, it isn't remotely close in performance to the above ASUS computer, it costs more, does less, isn't expandable, etc.
However, Apple pay is a success and so is Apple TV, iTunes and Apple Market. Apple is doing okay in terms of product diversification.
Apple Pay? Success? Give it 5 or 10 years and we'll see.
Apple TV? I know exactly no one who has one. I know a half a dozen people with a Roku or Fire TV. Apple has said that iTunes doesn't actually make them a lot of profit.
Apple makes almost all their money from exactly one product, the iPhone. More than 50% of their total sales and profit are that one thing. The iPad is number two and everything else is scraps.
It wasn't that much luck. It was a calculated move.
Meh, maybe... it might be that... or it could just be luck, that happens too.
That's Nintendo distancing it self from the other player and trying something new.
Yea, but that doesn't work over and over, as the sales of the Wii U clearly indicate.
Now Nintendo has a lot of money, a lot of history, they aren't vanishing tomorrow. However, Sega used to be #2 in the game and they are more or less gone. Radio Shack used to be on every corner, and they are gone.
Nintendo isn't "owed" a future, they have to earn it. They have simply made too many mistakes over the years. N64 being cartridge. SNES and the addon developed with Sony, which they passed on and that produced PlayStation. Game Cube being a funny disk size.
Gamers grew up and Mario only does so much. I own a Wii U, the two new Mario games are indeed amazing, but really, at the end of the day, not anything all that new, the concepts are refined and the game play is wonderful, but that alone won't sell $300 consoles.
It did work back at the time of the first console crash (Hey we're not like them, we are selling toys !). It did work with the Wii, too (Hey don't like playing classical console games? We've got you covered too with casual games!)
Re: NES, that was the only way to get retailers to buy them, they were sold as toys, and "robotic toys" to boot, remember R.O.B.?
As for Wii, yes, it worked, and it will work, once a generation or so. But a success once every 20 years isn't enough.
Tapping the casual player market was a double edged sword.
Yep, and what didn't exist when the Wii came out, but DOES exist for the Wii U? - Smart Phones and Tablets... for casual gamers, hundreds of millions of them now have those to play with.
Same. We have a "New" iPad, a.k.a. iPad 3. Still chugging.
Have you tried a new one?
Last year we replaced a iPad 3 and iPad 4 (kids and ours) with a pair of iPad Air 2 models and frankly, they are indeed a lot faster.
The 4 is actually fine still, but we had a 16GB model which is really limited these days.
Phones need better cameras. You add more and more junk to it. You need a newer phone. with the iPad, our usage has been pretty much web browsing and the occasional game. Nothing too taxing.
My iPhone 6 Plus has a 1080p camera. The iPhone 6s has a 4k camera, but frankly I'm not going to upgrade for that (and the lens and sensor is really small for that resolution!).
The primary reason we upgraded our iPads was to get the 128GB model, the kid's model was getting slow (the 3 is really showing its age in that dept), but the 4 was fine.
The new Airs are indeed lighter and nice.:)
I don't plan to replace my iPhone 6 Plus until the iPhone 8 at the soonest, we'll see what comes, but there isn't anything more than longer battery life that I'd care about.
Almost everyone who wants an iPad now has now, the product has moved into a longer term replacement cycle, rather than a first purchase cycle.
I purchased the iPad in 2010, then the iPad 2 next year, then the 3 the year after that. After that, I did buy a 4, and passed the 3 down to my kids.
We kept the combination of the 3 and 4 for awhile, only replacing them last year with a pair of iPad Air 2 units with 128GB each. Expensive, but they'll be good for a LONG time now... My hope is to get 4 years out of them before they need replacing, time will tell how that works out.
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Keep in mind the iPhone is next in line for this. The iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/ 6s Plus are both "fine". We have a pair of 6 Plus models that we have no intention of replacing with a 6s, or even a 7 for that matter. Probably will wait past the 7s as well and see what the 8 offers.
These devices have been going through massive improvements year over year, but at some point they get "good enough" for everything you want to do with a phone.
They can't make them bigger while keeping them phones, so the size limit has been reached. The CPU is plenty fast for anything we do on them.
Watch the next 2 years, the iPhone will see the same slowdown in sales.
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It has been a huge mistake on Apple's part to so completely depend on these two products for sales. They have (or had) a window to move the Mac line along and provide another option besides Windows, but they will never be anything but a small corner of the market with their current Mac product line. Shame, because I've love some competition there.
Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million SNES - 49 million N64 - 33 million GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for 3.5 years, at this pace it will end up with a lower total sales volume than Game Cube.
The installed base isn't enough to justify spending millions of dollars developing titles for it, other than perhaps a few key 1st party Nintendo titles... Launch support was better than average from EA, Activation, etc. but dropped off REALLY fast when it didn't sell well in the first 3-6 months. The hardware was simply too slow to cross platform games between XB1, PS4, and WiiU. So lots of custom work was required, and titles didn't sell enough.
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Consider Wii U launched Nov 2012, PS4 launched a year later Nov 2013. PS4 has sold nearly triple the units of Wii U, about 36 million, while costing more the entire time.
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There simply isn't room for 3 consoles. There never really was. Look back in time at:
Atari 7800 - competing with NES and Sega Master System TurboGrafx 16 - Competing with SNES and Genesis Sega Saturn - Competing with N64 and PlayStation Dreamcast - Competing with XBox and PlayStation 2
The above isn't all the consoles released during each generation, just a sample. Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo Geo were all nice, but never had a chance.
XBox and PlayStation have it all wrapped up in the console department, at least when it comes to Nintendo. Even they are facing a lot of threats from iPads, Phones, and other things.
Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million SNES - 49 million N64 - 33 million GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for almost 4 years, at this pace it will end up with a lower total sales volume than Game Cube.
The installed base isn't enough to justify spending millions of dollars developing titles for it, other than perhaps a few key 1st party Nintendo titles...
Launch support was better than average from EA, Activation, etc. but dropped off REALLY fast when it didn't sell well in the first 3-6 months.
The hardware was simply too slow to cross platform games between XB1, PS4, and WiiU. So lots of custom work was required, and titles didn't sell enough.
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Consider Wii U launched Nov 2012, PS4 launched a year later Nov 2013. PS4 has sold nearly triple the units of Wii U, about 36 million, while costing more the entire time.
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There simply isn't room for 3 consoles. There never really was. Look back in time at:
Atari 7800 - competing with NES and Sega Master System
TurboGrafx 16 - Competing with SNES and Genesis
Sega Saturn - Competing with N64 and PlayStation
Dreamcast - Competing with XBox and PlayStation 2
XBox and PlayStation have it all wrapped up in the console department, at least when it comes to Nintendo. Even they are facing a lot of threats from iPads, Phones, and other things.
Maybe it's because I'm older now but I don't think I'll ever buy a console again (Nintendo or otherwise). I'm a PC-gamer, if anything, so there's no room for a console in my opinion.
I didn't either, until I had kids... that changes it.:)
We own a PS3, a PS4, and a Wii U, but the Wii U doesn't get played all that much. We do have a selection of games for it, but frankly, there is just too much pulling at the kids to make it work.
The iPad gets more play time than the Wii U does, for example. The PS4 gets used the most out of the consoles and only the extensive game collection keeps the PS3 around.
I well understand mario, I own the WiiU... But look at the games that have any success on mobile devices, all free to play and short level durations.
I think that is starting to change as the market matures...
There are only so many coins and strawberries that you can sell before people grow tired of the idea...
Our house played a lot of that stuff over the past few years, but in 2016 we made a decision to cut off most of the "F2P games", since most are simply "P2W games". Oh sure, Frozen Free Fall can be won without a dime, but it gets old and clearly at some point you're supposed to pay.
I'd much rather just pay $5-10 for that game and remove IAP forever.
I've made a point to only play stuff that I can buy and own, not "rent" like IAP games.
Try signing up for a 75 Mbps plan somewhere where Comcast doesn't have competition.
^ Quoted for truth...
I have three high speed service options here, two fiber and one cable, and service is good and reasonably priced (300 meg up and down for $80 a month, gigabit for $105).
I shudder to think of living somewhere without options!
That is a completely trivial expense, measured in the fractions of a penny.
MS collected 30% when the titles were sold, they are simply considering offering 1/3 of that back in the form of store credit, to try and generate new sales.
I said that, twice. Twice I said if mail clients don't basically do it automatically, people won't do it manually. So I'm not sure how you can say I miss that point.
Well, then I must have misread you. I apologize.
What I find interesting about that is that everyone WILL find and Sally's email address, sally.krendircksoen9283@hotmail.com. Yet almost -nobody-, not even the most privacy preaching, Rand Paul voting Slashtotters, will click on the key link right next to the email address.
That is what I said, so clearly I was completely misreading your post.
How do I know what you "publish" is really from *you*?
How do I know what is posted on some web site is not injected with man-in-the-middle attacks replacing the key with someone else's?
And where do I find such a "freely published key?" Random poking around?
Step 2; there is no step 2 as anyone can now send me encrypted mail that I can decrypt using my private key.
As Apple has so clearly shown, if it isn't default and automatic, people won't use it. Apple now sets all phones to be encrypted by default. Without that option, people wouldn't use it.
Unless the key exchange is completely automatic requiring zero effort to either "publish" a key or to "use a key", then it will never happen.
Manual options have existed for a very long time, but the bulk of everyone will never use them.
We are all going to simply have to trust someone to hold keys. I trust Google well enough, at least in so far as I don't think Google Chrome is going to steal my bank password or my money. I trust Bank of America with my info (and money), I don't worry that they are criminals (at least not in the "steal your money directly" sort).
Just because you are ignorant of the massive card fees merchants pay doesn't mean you don't pay them.
I have taken credit cards for many years. In person I pay between 1.15% and 2.89%, depending on the card and if it is swiped or entered manually.
Web sales cost more, again depending on the card used.
Some of that runs the payment network. Some of it goes to the bank that issued the card. Some of it goes to Visa/MC/Discover/Amex to run their business, and some of it goes to loss/fraud.
Keep in mind that those fees are what pay the "cash back" rewards that customers love so much, and it is a well known fact that people paying with cards spend more than people paying with cash. So frankly, it doesn't cost anything to use the cards, all things considered. I get between 1 and 3% cash back with my cards, so it is really darn close to even for me vs. paying with cash and getting a "cash discount".
You pay for stolen cards. You pay in higher prices at the merchant and they give your money to the banks. It is truly shocking what the cards take.
Not really, I've owned my own business for more than 20 years, took my first credit cards in 1996, it really isn't as bad as you claim it is.
The Galaxy S4 will do over 3 gigaflops, faster than the Cray Y-MP!:)
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Consider the Cray came with up to 512MB of RAM (original model D), the Galaxy S4 comes with 2GB of RAM.
There is also the issue that the Galaxy S4 is *slightly* lighter and easier to carry around than the Cray Y-MP was.:)
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As for "graphics is cheating!", it might be, but only just... if you have an application that can run on OpenCL and will run on AMD graphics cards, consider that the AMD R9 295x2 has over 11 teraflops of compute performance.
Consider that ASIC Red was powered by more than 9,000 CPUs, cost over $50 million, and only ended up with a max of 2.38 teraflops.
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Anyway, wrist-slap taken. Next time I'll do a little due diligence...
Aww, I didn't mean it that harshly, I also get that there is more to the overall performance of a machine that just raw compute. I/O speed, RAM, storage, OS, etc. all play their parts.
And lets be honest, if you really tried to run a Galaxy S4 24/7 at full speed, it would probably melt.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo sales can't be compared to other companies as they aren't sold as a loss leader and licensing deals are different.
If each new release of your product sells less than the prior one and that continues for 20 years, sooner or later, it'll catch up with you.
You say before the Wii they were heading down? Their profit and loss statements say they were a very healthy company with a stable ever so slightly increasing trend of profit even before it.
Yes, they were. Don't confuse short term numbers with long term prospects. Short term they carried on with Game Cube based on their name, history, and first party titles, but that only lasts for so long before they are all milked to death.
It is also worth noting that their profits back then were largely based on the GameBoy and DS handheld lines, not TV based consoles. But the future is bleak for DS style handhelds, phones and tablets can now replace much of that market.
The Wii was a positive anomaly but don't confuse that as the company's saving grace. Until 2012 they were doing just fine, even pre-Wii.
Are you under the impression that Nintendo is in any place to launch another console? Would anyone buy it at this point?
What is the future of their handheld business?
Frankly, the whole thing seems rather bleak to me, their real value is in their IP. They really do make some really nice first party games. Sonic was nice enough, but Sega never had the kind of IP that Nintendo has. If Nintendo were to start releasing their catalog on various systems, I think they would be just fine. If they try and launch another console, it may sink the company.
Time will tell... :)
Nintendo has been riding the GameBoy and DS for a long time. The bulk of their profits have been from the handheld markets.
I'm not sure their consoles have really made money since the SNES, other than Wii.
Did N64 or GC really make money? My memory says no, in fact N64 didn't really even last that long, it kinda faded after a few years when PlayStation just walked all over the market with CD based games. But my memory could be fuzzy.
Sony has problems way beyond PlayStation. In fact, if PlayStation were a standalone business, it would be fine in general. They missed with the PS3, too expensive and too complex, but it did have the benefit of pushing Blu-Ray.
Microsoft has poured billions into XBox, but they can afford to and there are benefits to being front-and-center to the world beyond profits. Sony as well.
That is part of Nintendo's problem long term, they are trying to JUST make money from consoles, compared to MS and Sony who don't actually have to make any money from consoles.
It can be hard to compete with someone who can pour $4 billion into a console and make no profit and just keep chugging right along.
Simply saying "all your old games work on this and the new games are much prettier" was nowhere near sufficient to convince most owners to go put down $250-300 on a new system.
Have you considered that the Wii U might be a solution in search of a problem?
Just because you make it doesn't mean the world wants it. :)
The WiiU brought some neat new "next generation" titles, with some neat new capabilities. I think Nintendo dropped the ball on emphasizing them.
Yes, but that is the problem with being different. It works sometimes, and not others. The gamepad with LCD display for example, it could be a good idea, but how do you develop games for that? Anything that requires it won't really work on any other console, and any game that doesn't need it really won't use it for much.
LEGO City Undercover is a good example, fun game, uses the game pad's LCD screen well, but it was a platform exclusive paid for by Nintendo. That game is why I bought a Wii U in the first place, for my kids. Fun, but at some point, meh. Too many other games to play, including LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (crazy fun) and The LEGO Movie (also fun) and they work on every platform.
So the problem with this neat new feature is that it largely goes unused except for platform exclusives, and Wii U doesn't have the sales to justify those beyond 1st party titles from Nintendo.
It reminds me of the old Sega Genesis ads = 'we do what Nintendon't'. Only this time they provided the "don't" themselves and nobody else needed to attack it.
Yep, but that was another time... There does come a point where the market and the world has changed enough that you have to move on.
Genesis worked because it marketed itself as a more "mature system", for "mature gamers". Those who had NES but didn't want another kiddie system, here is your teenage system. We have blood! (Nintendon't!) Those were the days of Mortal Kombat and Super Street Fighter II.
There also were largely only two players in the game, Sega and Nintendo. Yea, Turbo Grapfx exited, along with Neo Geo, but not really. Today you have Microsoft and Sony, there isn't a place for Nintendo anymore, not in the console market.
And really, we do not want a large number of unemployed young males with a lot of time on their hands? No - we don't.
A basic income would go a long way towards addressing that concern...
They can work 10-15 hours a week serving the state, cleaning roads, learning a trade, whatever... The rest of the time, they can play video games...
That is clearly where it is going in the long run, as robots end up being able to make everything we all need. The trade off will be government controls on who can breed, which will not make everyone happy, but we'll have to have that to go along with a basic income.
I wish business folks and conservative pundits would stop pretending that the minimum wage going up/down is somehow motivating owners to automate.
It pushes them to do it sooner.
If Bernie was elected and got a $15/min wage put into place overnight, you'd see a mad scramble to push automation forward more quickly.
Yes, it will happen everywhere, our current economic system won't survive that, but that's ok, maybe it shouldn't. The transition won't be pleasant however as the existing people in power hold very tightly to that power and won't let go easily.
Which is why I laugh when liberals want to give up their guns. You'll need them to change the economic system, I don't think it'll happen without a civil war. I would be pleased to be proven wrong, but I think it'll come to that before it changes.
No, we do actually get it. Mr Puzler is not responsible. You are 100 percent correct.
You were so on track here, then it went off the rails...
ther really cool thing is, if in a hypothetical situation, everyone gets rid of all their employees, and the whole industry collapses, no one at all is responsible, Innocent as teh day they were born.
A good gig if you can get it.
That is indeed a possible problem, but it is one for society to solve, not Mr. Puzder.
Seriously, we understand 100 percent that you don't hold him responsible for shortsighted and unltimately self destructive actions.
They are not short-sighted for HIM or his COMPANY... Perhaps society, but that is not his problem to fix, nor is he in any position to do anything about it.
Old Heny Ford had a lot of strange ideas, but the idea of having employees who could buy stuff wasn't one of them.
Henry Ford lived in another time, a lot of what he wanted to do wouldn't work today.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution. But to do it will require that all the major companies do it. It has to be built into Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc.
It also has to be built into Yahoo Mail, GMail, Outlook Mail, etc.
But yes, I support that solution.
There is a big difference, though. With all the examples you gave - which are very good examples I will add - the consoles were all trying to compete for the same market. They each had exclusive titles, of course, but they were trying to compete for the same "gamer" market.
That is a fair point... The SNES and Genesis were the XBox and PlayStation of their day...
The Wii U clearly is not...
Microsoft and Sony are both competing for one market; if you look at game sales numbers this is abundantly clear as both companies see the majority of all games sold for their consoles are from the FPS genre.
Well, FPS and TPS (third person), I would lump those together). Sports is a big market as well, bigger than I think a lot of people give it credit for. The "other category" isn't small either, but it is smaller than those two markets.
Nintendo doesn't make any effort to attract FPS titles to the Wii or Wii U. They go for a different demographic entirely. Unfortunately, Nintendo never launched a competent marketing campaign for the WiiU that explained to Wii owners why they should upgrade; a large segment of the gaming public thought the Wii U was just a tablet add-on for the Wii and because of that never paid any attention to it.
Meh, even if they had, I don't know that it would have mattered.
When the Wii launched, the BlackBerry was the "big thing". Tablets didn't exist, and XBox 360/PS3 were expensive (seriously, launching at $599, what was Sony thinking?)
When the Wii U launched, the iPhone and iPad were "big deals" for causal and kid friendly gaming, and the XBox One/PS4 were launched at much more reasonable prices.
Those above two data points I think would have really hurt any serious marketing campaign. It is also worth noting that a LOT of people who bought the Wii played with it for awhile, sometimes for years, but never bought a lot of games. By the time Wii U came along, many of them were put into the closet or simply hadn't been turned on in awhile, so a new box was not likely to sell to those people.
There's a key difference between phones and tablets though: phones are subsidized by providers.
They *used to be*... All 4 major carriers have moved away from that model, a few don't offer it at all, a few do in limited ways.
Some providers will lower your bill, but not all of them
They all do now... Verizon and AT&T both give you about a $25 bill credit for not taking the discounted phone, which works out to be a better deal over 2 years all things considered...
I was paying right at $200 a month for a pair of Galaxy S4 phones, I upgraded to a pair of iPhone 6 Plus 128GB models, paid zero up front, 100% financed over 24 months, my bill went to $220. But, and this is key... My bill will drop to $140 once the phones are paid off and I keep using them.
To be fair, they tried with Mac product line for over 30 years.
Yea, but that was then... The world has changed...
A large number of people using their computers are using them in ways that matter less what OS is being run. There are exceptions, and those exceptions keep Windows going to some extent. The low price of PCs is the other.
Keep in mind that with OS X running on x86-64, that is miles different from most of those 30 years.
The Mac small market penetration is not from a lack of trying by Apple. Apple tried.
Meh, not really... there have been moments, but few and far between and nothing since the early 2000s.
The first iMac made waves and did get some interest, but the modern ones cost WAY too much for what they are.
It has been since the 90s since you could buy a reasonable desktop Mac that came in an actual desktop case. Everything has changed since then.
Allow me to provide examples:
Apple iMac 5K Desktop - $1,649
http://amzn.to/1RxxAEV
3.2GHz Intel i5 Quad Core - Turbo 3.6GHz
8GB RAM
1TB HDD - 7,200 RPM
AMD R9 M380 2GB GPU
27" 5K Retina display
Now I'll grant you, that display is really nice. But meh, so what? Do you need it? Not really, it is way, way overkill for 27" of screen space. I wouldn't turn it down for free, but it is an example of what is wrong with Apple, providing things that people don't need.
The AMD RR9 M380 is nice, but lets be honest, that is a notebook GPU, it has 768 streaming cores, which is nice, but nothing flashy.
Lets see what the other options are:
ASUS M32CD Desktop - $449
http://amzn.to/21GnKGj
2.7GHz Intel i5 Quad Core - Turbo 3.3GHz
8GB RAM
1TB HDD - 7,200 RPM
24x DVD Burner
Intel HD 530 GPU
802.11AC WiFi
Windows 10 64-bit
Now add to that computer a nice 27" monitor such as this one:
Samsung UE590 Ultra HD 4k 28" - $495
http://amzn.to/1Rxy1in
Since someone will complain that the iMac has a "better" GPU, we'll fix that with this:
AMD R7 360 2GB - $105
http://amzn.to/21Go08n
That has almost exactly the same performance as the iMac's GPU.
So our total is:
$449 + $495 + $105 = $1,349
So we're $300 less than the iMac, and I'm putting an overkill monitor on there. Frankly, a 1080p or 1440p monitor would be "fine" for most people.
KEY POINT - You can keep that 4k monitor for multiple computers, the iMac you cannot. You also don't HAVE to buy the video card, the Skylake HD 530 GPU is actually pretty good these days, it'll game at 1080p on medium detail in many games.
Remove the video card and give it a nice 1080p display:
Acer 27" 1080p - $179
http://amzn.to/1UjFqca
$449 + $179 = $628
So for $628, you get a perfectly good computer with a very good quad core Intel chip and a very nice usable 27" screen. The iMac isn't even remotely in that league.
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Now some people might point to the Mac Mini, but meh, it isn't remotely close in performance to the above ASUS computer, it costs more, does less, isn't expandable, etc.
However, Apple pay is a success and so is Apple TV, iTunes and Apple Market. Apple is doing okay in terms of product diversification.
Apple Pay? Success? Give it 5 or 10 years and we'll see.
Apple TV? I know exactly no one who has one. I know a half a dozen people with a Roku or Fire TV. Apple has said that iTunes doesn't actually make them a lot of profit.
Apple makes almost all their money from exactly one product, the iPhone. More than 50% of their total sales and profit are that one thing. The iPad is number two and everything else is scraps.
It wasn't that much luck. It was a calculated move.
Meh, maybe... it might be that... or it could just be luck, that happens too.
That's Nintendo distancing it self from the other player and trying something new.
Yea, but that doesn't work over and over, as the sales of the Wii U clearly indicate.
Now Nintendo has a lot of money, a lot of history, they aren't vanishing tomorrow. However, Sega used to be #2 in the game and they are more or less gone. Radio Shack used to be on every corner, and they are gone.
Nintendo isn't "owed" a future, they have to earn it. They have simply made too many mistakes over the years. N64 being cartridge. SNES and the addon developed with Sony, which they passed on and that produced PlayStation. Game Cube being a funny disk size.
Gamers grew up and Mario only does so much. I own a Wii U, the two new Mario games are indeed amazing, but really, at the end of the day, not anything all that new, the concepts are refined and the game play is wonderful, but that alone won't sell $300 consoles.
It did work back at the time of the first console crash (Hey we're not like them, we are selling toys !). It did work with the Wii, too (Hey don't like playing classical console games? We've got you covered too with casual games!)
Re: NES, that was the only way to get retailers to buy them, they were sold as toys, and "robotic toys" to boot, remember R.O.B.?
As for Wii, yes, it worked, and it will work, once a generation or so. But a success once every 20 years isn't enough.
Tapping the casual player market was a double edged sword.
Yep, and what didn't exist when the Wii came out, but DOES exist for the Wii U? - Smart Phones and Tablets... for casual gamers, hundreds of millions of them now have those to play with.
iPad Pro destroyed Surface in Q415 the highest sales quarter of the year, the holiday sales period.
Apple sold 2 million iPad Pro computers, compared to 1.6 million Surface tablets.
Destroyed?
We might have different definitions of that word. Granted, the iPad Pro outsold Surface, but not by THAT much.
Also, what was the revenue? Is the ASP of the Surface higher or lower than iPad Pro?
I am surprised it doesn't have an advert for how awesome the Surface Pro 4 is.
The Surface Pro 4 *IS* awesome, but it costs too much...
Yes, it is a nice light full Windows machine, but unless you have money coming out the wazoo, it just costs too much for the vast majority of people.
$499 for an iPad is a reasonable price for a high end device, the Surface Pro is twice that.
I don't think they are selling THAT many iPad Pros, are they?
Same. We have a "New" iPad, a.k.a. iPad 3. Still chugging.
Have you tried a new one?
Last year we replaced a iPad 3 and iPad 4 (kids and ours) with a pair of iPad Air 2 models and frankly, they are indeed a lot faster.
The 4 is actually fine still, but we had a 16GB model which is really limited these days.
Phones need better cameras. You add more and more junk to it. You need a newer phone. with the iPad, our usage has been pretty much web browsing and the occasional game. Nothing too taxing.
My iPhone 6 Plus has a 1080p camera. The iPhone 6s has a 4k camera, but frankly I'm not going to upgrade for that (and the lens and sensor is really small for that resolution!).
The primary reason we upgraded our iPads was to get the 128GB model, the kid's model was getting slow (the 3 is really showing its age in that dept), but the 4 was fine.
The new Airs are indeed lighter and nice. :)
I don't plan to replace my iPhone 6 Plus until the iPhone 8 at the soonest, we'll see what comes, but there isn't anything more than longer battery life that I'd care about.
The problem is expectations, not the product.
Almost everyone who wants an iPad now has now, the product has moved into a longer term replacement cycle, rather than a first purchase cycle.
I purchased the iPad in 2010, then the iPad 2 next year, then the 3 the year after that. After that, I did buy a 4, and passed the 3 down to my kids.
We kept the combination of the 3 and 4 for awhile, only replacing them last year with a pair of iPad Air 2 units with 128GB each. Expensive, but they'll be good for a LONG time now... My hope is to get 4 years out of them before they need replacing, time will tell how that works out.
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Keep in mind the iPhone is next in line for this. The iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/ 6s Plus are both "fine". We have a pair of 6 Plus models that we have no intention of replacing with a 6s, or even a 7 for that matter. Probably will wait past the 7s as well and see what the 8 offers.
These devices have been going through massive improvements year over year, but at some point they get "good enough" for everything you want to do with a phone.
They can't make them bigger while keeping them phones, so the size limit has been reached. The CPU is plenty fast for anything we do on them.
Watch the next 2 years, the iPhone will see the same slowdown in sales.
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It has been a huge mistake on Apple's part to so completely depend on these two products for sales. They have (or had) a window to move the Mac line along and provide another option besides Windows, but they will never be anything but a small corner of the market with their current Mac product line. Shame, because I've love some competition there.
Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million
SNES - 49 million
N64 - 33 million
GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for 3.5 years, at this pace it will end up with a lower total sales volume than Game Cube.
The installed base isn't enough to justify spending millions of dollars developing titles for it, other than perhaps a few key 1st party Nintendo titles... Launch support was better than average from EA, Activation, etc. but dropped off REALLY fast when it didn't sell well in the first 3-6 months. The hardware was simply too slow to cross platform games between XB1, PS4, and WiiU. So lots of custom work was required, and titles didn't sell enough.
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Consider Wii U launched Nov 2012, PS4 launched a year later Nov 2013. PS4 has sold nearly triple the units of Wii U, about 36 million, while costing more the entire time.
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There simply isn't room for 3 consoles. There never really was. Look back in time at:
Atari 7800 - competing with NES and Sega Master System
TurboGrafx 16 - Competing with SNES and Genesis
Sega Saturn - Competing with N64 and PlayStation
Dreamcast - Competing with XBox and PlayStation 2
The above isn't all the consoles released during each generation, just a sample. Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo Geo were all nice, but never had a chance.
XBox and PlayStation have it all wrapped up in the console department, at least when it comes to Nintendo. Even they are facing a lot of threats from iPads, Phones, and other things.
Nintendo got really lucky with the Wii, they were headed on the way down for a long time before that.
NES - 62 million
SNES - 49 million
N64 - 33 million
GC - 22 million
That is nothing but down...
Wii - 102 million
Yea, that is nice, and they got really, really lucky. All the stars aligned with that one, but the attach rate still sucked. A whole lot of units were sold that played Wii Sports and Mario Kart and little else.
Wii U - 13 million so far...
It has been out for almost 4 years, at this pace it will end up with a lower total sales volume than Game Cube.
The installed base isn't enough to justify spending millions of dollars developing titles for it, other than perhaps a few key 1st party Nintendo titles...
Launch support was better than average from EA, Activation, etc. but dropped off REALLY fast when it didn't sell well in the first 3-6 months.
The hardware was simply too slow to cross platform games between XB1, PS4, and WiiU. So lots of custom work was required, and titles didn't sell enough.
---
Consider Wii U launched Nov 2012, PS4 launched a year later Nov 2013. PS4 has sold nearly triple the units of Wii U, about 36 million, while costing more the entire time.
---
There simply isn't room for 3 consoles. There never really was. Look back in time at:
Atari 7800 - competing with NES and Sega Master System
TurboGrafx 16 - Competing with SNES and Genesis
Sega Saturn - Competing with N64 and PlayStation
Dreamcast - Competing with XBox and PlayStation 2
XBox and PlayStation have it all wrapped up in the console department, at least when it comes to Nintendo. Even they are facing a lot of threats from iPads, Phones, and other things.
Maybe it's because I'm older now but I don't think I'll ever buy a console again (Nintendo or otherwise). I'm a PC-gamer, if anything, so there's no room for a console in my opinion.
I didn't either, until I had kids... that changes it. :)
We own a PS3, a PS4, and a Wii U, but the Wii U doesn't get played all that much. We do have a selection of games for it, but frankly, there is just too much pulling at the kids to make it work.
The iPad gets more play time than the Wii U does, for example. The PS4 gets used the most out of the consoles and only the extensive game collection keeps the PS3 around.
I well understand mario, I own the WiiU... But look at the games that have any success on mobile devices, all free to play and short level durations.
I think that is starting to change as the market matures...
There are only so many coins and strawberries that you can sell before people grow tired of the idea...
Our house played a lot of that stuff over the past few years, but in 2016 we made a decision to cut off most of the "F2P games", since most are simply "P2W games". Oh sure, Frozen Free Fall can be won without a dime, but it gets old and clearly at some point you're supposed to pay.
I'd much rather just pay $5-10 for that game and remove IAP forever.
I've made a point to only play stuff that I can buy and own, not "rent" like IAP games.
Try signing up for a 75 Mbps plan somewhere where Comcast doesn't have competition.
^ Quoted for truth...
I have three high speed service options here, two fiber and one cable, and service is good and reasonably priced (300 meg up and down for $80 a month, gigabit for $105).
I shudder to think of living somewhere without options!
That is a completely trivial expense, measured in the fractions of a penny.
MS collected 30% when the titles were sold, they are simply considering offering 1/3 of that back in the form of store credit, to try and generate new sales.
Nothing more or less.
I said that, twice. Twice I said if mail clients don't basically do it automatically, people won't do it manually. So I'm not sure how you can say I miss that point.
Well, then I must have misread you. I apologize.
What I find interesting about that is that everyone WILL find and Sally's email address, sally.krendircksoen9283@hotmail.com. Yet almost -nobody-, not even the most privacy preaching, Rand Paul voting Slashtotters, will click on the key link right next to the email address.
That is what I said, so clearly I was completely misreading your post.
Sorry about that.
You seem to not understand encryption.
I understand it perfectly well.
Freely publish a public key.
How do I know what you "publish" is really from *you*?
How do I know what is posted on some web site is not injected with man-in-the-middle attacks replacing the key with someone else's?
And where do I find such a "freely published key?" Random poking around?
Step 2; there is no step 2 as anyone can now send me encrypted mail that I can decrypt using my private key.
As Apple has so clearly shown, if it isn't default and automatic, people won't use it. Apple now sets all phones to be encrypted by default. Without that option, people wouldn't use it.
Unless the key exchange is completely automatic requiring zero effort to either "publish" a key or to "use a key", then it will never happen.
Manual options have existed for a very long time, but the bulk of everyone will never use them.
We are all going to simply have to trust someone to hold keys. I trust Google well enough, at least in so far as I don't think Google Chrome is going to steal my bank password or my money. I trust Bank of America with my info (and money), I don't worry that they are criminals (at least not in the "steal your money directly" sort).
Just because you are ignorant of the massive card fees merchants pay doesn't mean you don't pay them.
I have taken credit cards for many years. In person I pay between 1.15% and 2.89%, depending on the card and if it is swiped or entered manually.
Web sales cost more, again depending on the card used.
Some of that runs the payment network. Some of it goes to the bank that issued the card. Some of it goes to Visa/MC/Discover/Amex to run their business, and some of it goes to loss/fraud.
Keep in mind that those fees are what pay the "cash back" rewards that customers love so much, and it is a well known fact that people paying with cards spend more than people paying with cash. So frankly, it doesn't cost anything to use the cards, all things considered. I get between 1 and 3% cash back with my cards, so it is really darn close to even for me vs. paying with cash and getting a "cash discount".
You pay for stolen cards. You pay in higher prices at the merchant and they give your money to the banks. It is truly shocking what the cards take.
Not really, I've owned my own business for more than 20 years, took my first credit cards in 1996, it really isn't as bad as you claim it is.
Ok in fairness, a Samsung Galaxy S4 isn't exactly a $100 phone, or it didn't used to be.
Is $150 close enough? Brand new S4!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsun...
The Galaxy S4 will do over 3 gigaflops, faster than the Cray Y-MP! :)
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Consider the Cray came with up to 512MB of RAM (original model D), the Galaxy S4 comes with 2GB of RAM.
There is also the issue that the Galaxy S4 is *slightly* lighter and easier to carry around than the Cray Y-MP was. :)
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As for "graphics is cheating!", it might be, but only just... if you have an application that can run on OpenCL and will run on AMD graphics cards, consider that the AMD R9 295x2 has over 11 teraflops of compute performance.
Consider that ASIC Red was powered by more than 9,000 CPUs, cost over $50 million, and only ended up with a max of 2.38 teraflops.
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Anyway, wrist-slap taken. Next time I'll do a little due diligence...
Aww, I didn't mean it that harshly, I also get that there is more to the overall performance of a machine that just raw compute. I/O speed, RAM, storage, OS, etc. all play their parts.
And lets be honest, if you really tried to run a Galaxy S4 24/7 at full speed, it would probably melt. :)