Datschge said:
Eh? Given the choice and generalizing everything like you do, about whose state would one be more worried in the current environment: Nintendo or 3rd parties?
Again,
contra the general-purpose Nintendo-advocacy position, third parties are not an amorphous group of identical bogeymen; we can look at each of them individually. Am I worried about Capcom? Absolutely not, because even if they cancelled MH3 they'd still be well covered by the other systems.
Nintendo isn't "in trouble" in the rather extreme sense that they'll, like,
have to close up shop, but there's lots of room to see declining profitability.
One such in Nintendo's case are the Western releases of the Prof. Layton game, and it looks like Nintendo aims to do the same with Dragon Quest and possibly Monster Hunter 3 in the West.
These are exactly the sorts of decisions that I think are indeed beneficial to Nintendo, but there's still so much room to improve: note their incredibly slow turnaround on Layton 2, their failure to strike a good deal with SE on the DQ remakes (leading to their complete cratering at US retail), etc.
Dalthien said:
A proven track record of increased profitability? I haven't seen any proof whatsoever of this.
Well, first off, you keep trying to loop everything back to the argument "whatever the market leader does is good, whatever second-place does is bad," and that argument doesn't hold water. We have generations of experience to see that individual companies can succeed in certain areas without necessarily pulling together the overall picture; it's the most superficial and unhelpful form of analysis to dismiss the successes of companies in trailing positions, just as much here as it is to ignore how Nintendo's Gamecube strategy let them survive and even profit off of a failed console.
With that out of the way, dismissing the impact of third-party software is, when you're talking about a system with brutal droughts like the Wii, dismissing the impact of software itself, and dismissing the impact of software on hardware sales is
ignoring everything that's ever been learned about video game sales. If Nintendo were indeed able to churn out a Wii Fit-level hit every year and support around it with enough software to keep people from selling their consoles, you might have an argument, but it is pretty clear that they cannot.
(which I find to be a laughable statement given that the 360 isn't even the current 3rd-party system leader in North America)
Total volume is not really an ideal method on its own of determining the whole third party software picture. If Wii (hypothetically, since we don't have the information) sold more total software, but the mean title (or the average title excepting certain kinds of outliers, or whatever) sold 200k fewer copies, the picture gets muddier.
But more relevantly, the 360 is operating at a deficit: i.e., their third party strategy is having to make up for their system's sales underperformance that likely stems from its higher price, its less family-friendly library, etc. How much better can a system that actually had market-leading momentum do with a strategy like this? (I mean, the answer should be pretty clear: it'd do a little better than the PS2, both in terms of sales success and in terms of providing a rich and diverse library of titles to its owners.)
Nintendo has a huge advantage over Microsoft in that
way more people are interested in the Wii by default, so I don't understand why someone would suggest that squandering that interest is a better business strategy than taking aggressive advantage of it.
apujanata said:
Let's hear in more detail WHAT you think Nintendo should do regarding third party.
Now, or at the beginning of the generation? I've already spelled out my suggested strategy for launch-time. If I were going to pick developers to target, I'd have probably gone with Namco (Nintendo almost certainly could have picked up the equivalent of Tales of Vesperia had they acted quickly here), Capcom, and Square-Enix -- all of whom have had relatively successful recent partnerships with Nintendo and probably contain at least one team who could have been assigned to producing an early Wii exclusive in exchange for budget coverage and co-marketing. (Just off the top of my head here.) And then from there, probably try to suss out good small-developer pickup opportunities, like Level-5.
Now? I think Nintendo should push to have a stronger relationship with Level-5, given the success that Layton and Inazuma-11 have brought. I think they should push the exclusives they do have (ToG, MH3, etc.) very hard, and already be working with each of those publishers to secure future exclusives to go into production
now based on the
presumed success of the first games. I think they need to actually have someone in the company who works with Western developers. Better placement for third-party games on Nintendo's promotional services (like the Nintendo channel) wouldn't hurt either.
Flying_Phoenix said:
You have good points, but what's stopping from a new competitor taking on Nintendo (I.E. Apple)?
Launching a console requires a huge upfront investment of cash, an immense amount of infrastructure, a great deal of knowledge and industry connections, all on top of the ability to get your product into stores. The barrier to entry has grown increasingly high as time has passed, which in turn has shrank the number of possible contenders in a position to enter the market. Take Apple, for instance: I honestly don't think they have the knowledge of gaming required to create a successful gaming system, which would mean a rather significant ramp-up process to get into a place where they have people on board to manage the project for them.
