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: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:2005-07-07
Exactly. This report has zippo to do with their hardware (or at least not the way you think), and everything to do with the quality of their games this year - no Mario (except later), no Metroid, no Zelda (well, actually I they have one of those too - later in the year) - I didn't even hear much buzz about pokemon, etc. They did have a bunch of hardware will no killer games - They have simply not had much in the way of games this period. It's the software. Nintendo has demonstrated that it's the software that matters time and time again. Why do so many forget that so quickly.
Member since:2006-01-06
You're kidding yourself. The Wii was a fad. Nintendo oversaturated the market. There's no one left to sell to. And, I will predict that next year will offer similar financial results for Nintendo. They may be able to grow income from new titles, but not sales of Wii hardware. That horse has already left the barn.
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.