Analysts Fear For Nintendo

[freebiewitz]

well common sense dictates that they wouldve seen somthing like this coming and as such have a store of cash stashed away somwhere uuh metaphorically but then again nintendo could go for the daring make tons of money strategy and stuff but hey who knows?

Either that or they'll just fail.

 

[Kubanator]

Moar stuff

Stuff

Ok, lets make it more like the actual market - neither you nor anyone on your team have any knowledge, or desire, to make a sim game. Now, are we going to sell to the market with a total potential of 41.3 million (actual figure last time I checked) with a likely adoption rate of 5%, or a market with 36.6 million, with a potential adoption rate of .02%?

I assume the Wii is the 41.3 million.

I assume that you are wrong.

So essentially, you're saying that the population that looks at reviews, feedback from forums (that nitpick about every mistake) and generally looks into a game before buying it, would sell more then a population of casual soccer moms, that judge the quality of a game by how many different colours it has on the box?

 

[Nazulu]

I fear that I won't get any more use out of my wii, since they made the switch to more casual gamers (even tho they we're fairly casual to begin with) I haven't bought a single game for the wii. I just want another Zelda or Metroid level game.

There's some good stuff coming for the Wii... you're going to get your wish. And you alwas have "No More Heroes" to tide you over, which is outstanding (despite what Yahtzee says).

I can't imagine what, I was expecting Brawl and Mario Kart to last me for years but here I am. This casual gamers only thing sucks! I have bought more classic games than Wii games.

 

[Skrapt]

Actually, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. Game companies aren't making as much money these days (and I'm talking about your average developer, not large publishers) because the cost of doing next-gen games is ENORMOUS. Games for the last gen systems typically were around 2 years and 4 million to develop a AAA title. Now, they're looking at 3-4 years and 20 million, easy in dev costs (a lot more in the case of games like GTA IV). The Wii is extremely easy and cheap to develop games on, which is one of the reasons for all the shovelware. I think that Wii development will become more attractive to the big boys because of it.

When did the Wii last receive a high profile release that wasn't done in house by Nintendo itself? (And by high profile, I'm including good sales). The Wii may be selling very well, but the fact is it is still extremely difficult for small developers to make it anywhere near the system, perhaps even more so then it is for them to go with the Xbox 360/PS3 due to the power constraints. And if I recall more indie developers have in fact made more successful games for the Xbox 360 and PS3, because whereas Nintendo rarely, if ever publishes a game that isn't in house work, Sony and Microsoft publish for many small developers that are not their own.

 

[Darkong]

Considering the current position in the market, and huge brand appeal, I doubt that Nintendo will be in any sort of trouble during this bad economic period, not to mention that they'll have reserve cash put away for just such an occasion. If worst comes to it they'll just do what any other business will have to, tighten their belts, operate as efficiently as possible and ride it out.

From the console perspective the one that could have some serious problems in the next year or two is the PS3 thanks to that high price tag, the Xbox 360 Elite may suffer as well but with the other models the 360 will keep ploughing on.

Hey, I can do this analysis crap too, I can haz job please analysis firm?

 

[SecretTacoNinja]

They must have enough money to buy Africa twice over by now, I don't see why I should care...

 

[the captain]

i think this entire argument is flawed. with the economic crisis people aren't able to go out and do the same things they used before it to for a reasonable price. hell, these days it costs over $50 dollars to take a family of 4 to see a movie and that is only an hour or two worth of entertainment. now if you have to same family of 4 and you buy one of these family oriented casual games, you get soo much more practical use out of it. this is just the same thing that you here every few months from analysts saying why nintendo is going to fail, but the thing is, they haven't and i really don't thing they're going to. they provided a product people want for a price people want and they openned themselves up to an audience that the other systems didn't think mattered.

 

[Jursa]

Nintendo has withstood through anything the world can throw at it and even made profit from it. And since Nintendo isn't even situated in the core of the economic crysis it has nothing to fear. I'd be more scared for Sony because as great as their hardware may be, it's expensive.

 

[thiosk]

i love how things turn into an argument on the merits of the systems every time they are brought up Nintendo and other game companies are going to do fine through a recessionary environment, even if they take a couple scrapes and bruises on the way up. Sony may have more to lose as a straight up hardware manufacturer, talkin' TVs and stereos here. If people don't buy new PCs because they love vista so much, they could suffer more, but nintendo sells inexpensive hardware... and a lot of it.

bUT I'LL tell you what, even if I lost my (very stable) job, I'd probably still game. A lot. I'd be happy to cancel cable, cell phone, all other expenditures, but gaming would be the last to go. And thats why game companies seem recession-proof.

 

[AceDiamond]

So wait, the company actually turning a profit on each console sale is the one most susceptible to financial hardship? What?

Who are these analysts and how did they get jobs?

I can understand their logic that the new influx of casual gamers would be the people least likely to keep buying games, but at the same time something just seems off about that projection.

 

[Logan Westbrook]

While Nintendo does make a profit on each Wii sold and are currently selling them by the bucketload, the huge numbers sold to date indicate that they are selling them to an audience beyond the traditional gamer demographic.

If these more casual gamers stop buying games because of the credit crunch/recession, which is a very feasable scenario, then Nintendo are going to suffer a lot more than Microsoft or Sony.

It's worth mentioning as well, that Wii sales are slowing down.

 

[AceDiamond]

While Nintendo does make a profit on each Wii sold and are currently selling them by the bucketload, the huge numbers sold to date indicate that they are selling them to an audience beyond the traditional gamer demographic.

If these more casual gamers stop buying games because of the credit crunch/recession, which is a very feasable scenario, then Nintendo are going to suffer a lot more than Microsoft or Sony.

It's worth mentioning as well, that Wii sales are slowing down.

Isn't that more an effect of Nintendos unnnatural disposition towards artifically increasing demand by never making enough Wiis?

Look if life were like an RTS we could just drop a bunch of Wii production factories and it'd all be good, but they can't, so that doesn't happen.

Also even if they're doing it on purpose they're hardly the first people to purposely misrepresent their production numbers (*cough*Sony with the PS2 and PS3 launches*cough*). Ok to be fair the former case was due to some anomalous shortage of chips. My point is that Sony should've known better the second time around and since they decided to pull (surprise) a dick move, people got shot as a result.

Ugh I have no idea where I was going with that. My point is as thus: Nintendo has been targeted at one time or another as the company to fail and it hasn't happened yet.

 

[Blank__]

You can find "analysts" for any industry that will prophesy doom and gloom for specific companies or the industry overall. You can also find analysts who predict the exact opposite. What's the big deal over these two guys representing two groups no one has heard of?

@Indigo Dingo: What does Nintendo "artificially" inflating demand have to do with them selling craploads of Wiis? There's no way they could prop up demand for two years after the release -- the things are just popular and selling like hot cakes. Is that so hard to admit? I don't see any reason to still be attacking them for making a console that outsells the competition.

 

[Logan Westbrook]

Ugh I have no idea where I was going with that. My point is as thus: Nintendo has been targeted at one time or another as the company to fail and it hasn't happened yet.

I don't think that anyone is saying that Nintendo will fold because of this, more that the policy that has been so advantageous when the economy was doing well might become a hindrance now that things have changed.

 

[Asehujiko]

The Wii is built out of spare Gamecube parts. Back when the GC was being slapped arround by the PS2, the market wsn't as big as it is now. Hench the parts are made in smaller factories. Nobody expected that they had to use the same factories for 7 years because their R&D team came up with nothing more then "stick waggling" and "guilt-trick people into playing crap because it's healthy" whereas Sony fought(and won) the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war and Microsoft took a valuable lesson about how to not weld parts together.

Yes, they might be selling more consoles at the time. But what happens when they reach market saturation? They will be dead in the water while Microsoft and Sony slowly trudge along, fighting between themselves. The Wii severely lacks staying power and there's only X ammount of plastic toys people will buy, so they have to come with something new at one point in the future, and at the moment, they don't show any signs that they are preparing for that. Sony decided to entrench themselves and sit out the 8th generation, something that doesn't seem to work as of now. Meanwhile, Microsoft will have to decide where their loyalty lies, Windows 7 or their emergency response to the looming collosus at the horizon called Sony, a collosus that at a closer look, appears to have faceplanted in the dirt. With no competition(Sony incapable and Nintendo uninterested), there is no need to further develop the console market and all resources will most likely be shifted back to the pc.