Can Nintendo Survive Gaming's Brave New World?

Nerval's Lobster writes "Jon Brodkin talked to indie developers (including the creator of Super Mario Bros. Crossover), former Nintendo employees, and a number of others about where exactly Nintendo went wrong over the past few years. Their conclusions? Nintendo made a number of mistakes, including a lack of an indie-developer ecosystem, a refusal to license out core properties such as Super Mario to other gaming platforms (or even iOS and Android), and platforms that don't appeal to hardcore gamers. While the developers suggest Nintendo is taking steps to broaden its horizons, such as by reaching out to smaller studios, it's questionable whether such efforts will succeed in a world where the PS4 and Xbox One are about to enter the market, and iOS and Android are swallowing up mobile gamers' time and dollars. What do you think?"

Some basic stats...

[TheSimkin]

http://www.vgchartz.com/ [vgchartz.com] Nintendo sold over 4 million copies of Pokemon and 423 thousand 3DS the week of Oct 12. I see no reason to think they are going away any time soon.

Game Consoles are pretty lame.

[Z00L00K]

Game consoles are just stupid bricks that don't evolve. Looking at the speed that the PC industry has evolved it's easy to see that the game consoles are quickly left in the dead behind when it comes to performance.

Re: Nintendo is here to stay!

[LordKronos]

The Wii only achieved an odd form of success though. While lots of people bought it and Nintendo profited on the sales of the consoles, nowadays they're just sitting on people's shelves unused. Even with that kind of market saturation is it successful if the average Wii owner has, what, less than 5 games? Less than 2? I don't know the answer but if something is purchased but then rarely used it's only a partial success. They have to sell games too.

Actually, unlike Microsoft and Sony, all Nintendo has to do is sell the system and they've already made a profit, even on launch day.

As far as selling games goes, well let's take a look at the top selling games across all consoles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#All_Consoles [wikipedia.org]

If we disregard Wii Sports (since it was included for free) and all previous generation consoles, then we have the following:
Mario Kart Wii
Wii Sports Resort (some of these were included, but some were purchases separately
Wii Play
New Super Mario Bros Wii
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Wii Fit
Wii Fit Plus
GTA V

That's 5 or 6 top sellers for the Wii (depending on if you count Resort), and only 2 for the competition. Looks like they aren't hurting too bad. But what about just the overall total of all games sold for the console, worldwide?

http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Software/Global/ [vgchartz.com]

Wii: 901 million games
360: 826 million games
PS3: 749 million games

Yep, that is indeed an odd form of success. Most hardware sold (with none of it sold at a loss), and most games sold. What a total failure.

Oh, and since you said you didn't know the answer about the tie-ratio:
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie-Ratio/Global/ [vgchartz.com]

Wii: 8.99
360: 10.48
PS3: 9.35

So yeah, they are on the bottom of that metric, but still very respectable...only 4% lower than the PS3 and 15% lower than the 360. Not bad at all considering all those system supposedly sitting unused on shelves.

Re:Yes, They Can

[barlevg]

Not sure what you didn't like about Black & White, but X&Y feel like completely different games--the graphics are basically on the same level as Colosseum/XD (the Gamecube games), the mechanics improved quite a bit ("grinding" is easier and much less necessary, there have been several balancing adjustments to the type chart, "mega evolutions" may or may not be a gimmick--only time will tell--and Wi-Fi battling now allows for no restrictions flat-level battles--like in PBR and Gen IV and unlike in B&W), and it's hard *not* to love a game set in France (they re-created the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles with freakishly accurate detail, and you feed your mons friggin' macarons [laduree.com] ).

But, as always, YMMV.

Re:Nintendo is here to stay!

[tuffy]

The Wii sold almost 50% more games than the PS3 over its lifespan. This stereotype that everyone bought it for Wii Sports and then chucked it in a closet isn't reflected in the sales numbers at all.