Star Nintendo Sees 52% Profit Drop
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 30th Oct 2009 17:04 UTC
Games Thanks to the massive success of the Wii and DS game consoles, Nintendo was able to turn the tide and once again become the number one game company in the world. As with any honeymoon, however, it must come to an end at some point. Nintendo reported its financial results for the first half of 2009 yesterday, and it didn't look good.
E-mail Print r 1   · Read More · 53 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/ham
Permalink for comment 392046
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: As a Nintendo fan...
by tomcat on Fri 30th Oct 2009 20:58 UTC in reply to "RE: As a Nintendo fan..."
tomcat
Member since:
2006-01-06

The problem is market saturation. Casual Gamers are the B Customers. Nintendo original successes was do the the fact that their B Customers were a hungry group. So they focused on getting them and making them their A customers. However the Casual Gamer isn't their best long term customers. They get the console and perhaps 1 or 2 games. Thats about it. The A Customers or hard core gammers will keep buying games and add ones for the life of the product thus making a more sustainable business. Nintendo should have put more effort in competing against the PS3 and XBox as well. The Graphics for the WII is a decade old, and a lot of games made for the wii were designed as an after taught and creating horrible game play.


I think you completely nailed it. A lot of the fuss over the Wii was due to the breadth of the market. Old people who never played a videogame were buying the Wii, exercising by playing Wii Sports, etc. BUT ... those same people aren't going to keep buying games. They're going to stick with what they've already got, it may not even occur to them that they would want/need additional games and, eventually, the machine is going to gather dust and rot. Now, compare that with the hardcore gamer market: the kind of people who cruise the web looking for information on every cool game that comes out; preoccupation with the underlying graphics technology, how many triangles/sec can it render, blah, blah, blah. Which customer would you rather have? This is Nintendo's big weakness and, while a hit Mario title will help, it's not the longterm solution to Nintendo's problem.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2