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.
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Member since:2007-01-22
Member since:2006-01-06
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.
Member since:2006-02-25
No, i think you both are missing the point. The main reason why nintendo is seeing profit losses is mainly because they didn't roll as many blockbuster games as last year, for both their platforms. Keep in mind that nintendo may have been behind sony in the past, but overall, the DS _is_ the most succesful platform this generation, the one everyone has and the one that solds the most games (nintendogs, new super mario bros, mario kart DS, etc still sell several orders more than the best selling 360 or PS3 titles), same with dragon quest series in Japan, though for some reason most analysts completely ignore it. In any case, i personally find strange that after the large amount of first party titles nintendo released until mid-2008, they've been pretty quiet since.. and are only announcing sequels (to zelda DS, new super mario bros, on wii, another zelda on wii, another galaxy, etc), so my guess is that they are already developing for next-gen.
Member since:
2005-09-27
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.