Nintendo: Petitions "Don't Affect What We Do"

[orangeapples]

Answer is simple: any game that doesn't look like a huge success becomes a digital downnload.

 

[Drummodino]

...People didn't realize this? It's basic business, if they don't think the level of interest is high enough to turn a profit, they won't make a PC port/localize the game etc.

Even if there is a petition of 100 000 signatures, they will have sales expectations (probably factoring in petitions but many other elements as well). They will then compare that to the estimated costs of whatever it is they're doing. If the difference is not deemed profitable enough they won't proceed.

If it was deemed to be likely to be profitable, do you think they wouldn't do it just to piss you off? That just does not make any sense whatsoever. Companies exist to make money people.

I hate to take the corporations side here, but this time they're actually talking sense.

 

[Alcom1]

Counterpoint: 100,000 signatures does not imply less than 100,000 sales.

 

[FalloutJack]

Well, so far your cold, hard strategies have led you to lose to Microsoft, buttmonkey of the year. Maybe you should rethink that.

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

Counterpoint: 100,000 signatures does not imply less than 100,000 sales.

This is technically true, but only in the sense that a petition barely means anything at all, since the effort to sign a petition is essentially zero, while spending $60 to buy a game requires a substantial commitment.

It's kind of weird to me that people are complaining about this. Literally any game developer (hell, any business) will behave the same way. Before doing a thing, any business needs to ask "how much will this cost us, and will we then make enough on it to turn a profit?" Examples of businesses not doing this (or at the very least doing it wrong) include the latest Tomb Raider game, which sold more than double what could be reasonably expected, and flopped because they were expecting it to sell more than that.

Yes, Xenoblade ended up being a success in the US. But Nintendo didn't really have any way of knowing that with certainty before they released it and it was a success.

 

[Covarr]

Submitting to a petition with 100,000 signatures may not result in 100,000 sales, but ignoring a petition with 100,000 signatures definitely results in 0 sales.

This is why they do a cost-benefit analysis. Believe it or not, producing a retail game in a new region costs money, even if the translation work has already been done as was the case with Xenoblade Chronicles. There's (minimal) cost in converting the game from PAL back to NTFS (or in applying the UK translation to the Japanese NTFS version), there's a minimum number of units they can manufacture in a single run, and they need to be sure that it will sell enough to pay for pressing the discs, as well as packing and shipping all of them. Even instruction booklets can get costy.

This is actually why Ace Attorney 5 only got a digital release; Capcom was able to completely forego any manufacturing costs. They still took some financial risk by investing in translating the game, but considerably less than a physical retail release.

That said, there's virtually no cost at all in releasing Virtual Console games, or in making US versions of JP games with next to no text. I guarantee a translated digital manual can be done for under $1000, and a high-quality scan of a physical manual (for games that already got US releases on the SNES/NES/Gameboy/etc) can be done for under $100 in man-hours and equipment. They have so much opportunity to get us to pay for things that cost them virtually nothing to produce, and they're totally squandering it.

P.S. Thanks

 

[subtlefuge]

And this is why Nintendo continues to lose more and more its core fanbase on a daily basis.

Did you read the article? Your comment doesn't make sense. I'm not going to defend Nintendo's general actions as of late, because I don't really agree with many of them. That said, I definitely believe that if they made business decisions based on things that the internet wanted them to do, they wouldn't stay in business for more than a week.

Counterpoint: 100,000 signatures does not imply less than 100,000 sales.

Completely true. 100,000 signatures could imply 10 or 10,000,000 sales. It requires so little effort or investment to sign a petition that it's almost impossible to judge anything.

From what I can tell, I would guess that Miiverse is actually the best "petition" for Nintendo. When they did the Earthbound VC announcement, they showed all the Miiverse posts of people asking for it. It requires some effort, and can only be done by actual potential customers. Not that you would want to make decisions based on that, but if someone puts effort into asking for something, you can probably count them as an actual sale.

 

[michael87cn]

I wish reports of what big-wigs say would stop happening, because you simply can't trust what they say to be true. They can, and will, lie to improve their image. For all we know, in the background, Nintendo could actually be desperately clinging to what customers petition for.

Who freaking knows. One thing is for sure, I don't (and never will) give a rats bum what some big-wig says.

Especially if they make their career off of profiting from children... :/ but still!

 

[Fijiman]

And this is one of the reasons I generally don't sign petitions. While you might support what the petition is aiming to do, unless that petition has money tied to it large companies don't give a shit. For example, Needing to have a Google+ account to comment on YouTube; unless you can wave around a big fat check or just simply stop commenting Google isn't going to care how many people sign a petition.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well, now I can just laugh at N fanboys when they say that Nintendo actually cares about the fans. Nope, its all about the cold hard yen for them

They may not care about their customers, I don't know. But it's rather foolish to listen to fan petitions in the first place.

 

[EyeReaper]

I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I mean, remember that petition a while back that said "No gta 5 for pc" that got like, a crapton of signatures or whatever? You'd all be up in arms f rockstar said "Well, 10,000 signatures don't lie, no pc port."
Basically what I'm saying is, I wouldn't put too much thought into these petitions either, I mean, when has taking the opinion of a thousand anonymous faces on the internet ever been the smart business practice?

 

[Terminate421]

There is the petition to bring Reggie as a character into the next smash brothers.

 

[Yopaz]

And this is one of the reasons I generally don't sign petitions. While you might support what the petition is aiming to do, unless that petition has money tied to it large companies don't give a shit. For example, Needing to have a Google+ account to comment on YouTube; unless you can wave around a big fat check or just simply stop commenting Google isn't going to care how many people sign a petition.

Eh, it's not like it takes you more than a minute so there's really no loss. Namco seems to be one of the few who does pay attention to them. Dark Souls on PC, Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World and Tales of Vesperia reaching Europe are some examples. However I wouldn't be surprised if those were the only 3 cases where a petition has actually had any effect at all...

You are right though, it seems pointless to sign them so there's really no reason to bother with them.

 

[Someone Depressing]

Aside from being the fact that Earthbound only got a VC release about a year ago (probably less than that), Nintendo.. seriously.

The point of the entertainment industry is to ENTERTAIN, to get MONEY. If you hired a stripper, and s/he didn't do what you wanted to do, you wouldn't pay them full, or you'd complain. And people wouldn't hire that stripper.

That was a horrible metaphor that has surely scarred someone's brain, but the point is, Nintendo are idiots.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I think people are overreacting a bit. Now, I signed the petition for Operation Moonfall because I would LOVE a Majora's Mask remake either on 3DS or Wii U. Sure, Reggie said they don't take fan petitions that seriously. It sounds harsh, but it makes sense from a business standpoint. Even if Majora's Mask for example has gotten a lot more popular, they probably look at the original sales and realize it's a bigger risk. It could go either way, I know I would buy it day one, but how many other people are crazy about Majora's Mask? Ocarina of Time 3D was a no-brainer because of how popular the original was.

Let's face it folks, would you want to listen to the internet at large when making serious business decisions? I know I wouldn't. 100,000 signers not equaling 100,000 sales is a total simplification of a big issue, but it has some truth to it. It's easy to say "Take my money" when signing a petition, actually giving them your money takes a little more effort that many people may not follow through with.

 

[katsabas]

Nintendo, here's your corner. Jump into it after taking your pill. You don't listen to your customers and the last Metroid you made was 7 years ago.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

To be fair, some petitions are stupid. But often they are an indicator of a strong position. It's easier to not bother with a petition than to bother with it. 100 000 people agreeing isn't to be sneezed at.

 

[Azkar Almsivi]

Criticizing the basic concept of supply and demand...

If Nintendo wasted money trying to push a game almost nobody would buy in the grand scheme of things then I would be worried about them. All this thread does is put the 'entitlement is only a buzzword' stance back a year.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Petitions like Operation Rainfall only benefited the company and got the game on the map, exposing great games to thousands of potential (and realized) buyers.

Reggie should have rephrased that message. Yes, there are other factors involved...

... but Xenoblade sold more than it did in Europe or Japan, despite Wii owners getting the game years later and basically towards the very end of the Wii's lifecycle when nearly everyone had abandoned it.

... Xenoblade being released earlier, and selling well, could have kept Wii momentum going and shown that great games can still sell on the humble system, rather than Nintendo themselves displaying a shocking lack of faith in such a great game.

... Xenoblade sold more than Europe and Japan, despite being only available directly from Nintendo or Gamestop. No Amazon, no Wal-mart, no Best Buy... and yet it SOLD OUT. Every last single new copy of the game is gone, with demand outstripping supply, and jacking up prices of used copies to nearly $100 due to Nintendo's unwillingness to do a second printing, indicating both their gross underestimation of the game's appeal, as well as their indifference at capitalizing on its success.

... Nintendo of America claim that the issue was the cost of "localizing" the game and the time and money it would need to do so... and yet all they did was use the localization of the European version, who actually spent the money and effort to translate and dub the game into English. All Nintendo of America did was change the region setting and print a few copies. They put in the absolute, most bare-bones effort into bringing the game to our shores, and they only did so after YEARS of waiting.

... The game still sold out despite die-hard JRPG fans importing the game from Europe, with even major websites like Destructoid and Kotaku giving players steps on how to mod your Wii just so you could play the game.

Xenoblade is easily one of the best JRPGs of all time, and easily one of the best Wii games in its library, and the fact Nintendo acted like it wasn't their responsibility and that an American audience didn't exist, when it eventually became a success (and might have been MORE of one had it had a wide release and a second printing so more people could buy it), just shows how... clueless... Nintendo is about their actual audience.

In fact, the Xenoblade successor on Wii U is the ONLY game that interests me for the system. Sorry Mario. Sorry Pikmin. Sorry Smash Bros. The follow-up to the game Nintendo almost couldn't be bothered to release in America is the game that would make me buy a system I'm not particularly interested in otherwise.

Seriously, Nintendo... you're a game company. You have ONE job. Release great games. If a great game fails, that's all on you, not the audience of the game that you failed to attract. Starving JRPG players proved that by making all three of those JRPGs you ignored successes once you actually put in the smallest modicum of effort to make them available.

I agree with absolutely everything here. The amount of effort to release the game in North America would have been trivial, and would have probably even paid for itself if only a couple thousand people had bought it, let alone the 100 thousand that signed the petition. How much money could it have really cost besides shipping? Really, their resistance to that confuses the hell out of me. They were only losing money and customer satisfaction if they didn't release it.

Also agreeing with you on the Wii U's X game. It's the only reason I'm even entertaining the idea of a Wii U, and as such I'm really hoping that it finds some way to another console release.

That ex-sony executive was completely on the ball when he said that Nintendo is pretty much done as a hardware manufacturer. The only reason that anyone would even consider buying their console is for their exclusives. In fact, buying their console is acting as a deterrence to buying their games. I feel like everyone would end up happier and richer if Nintendo just released their games for all consoles and left the hardware market entirely. Except for the 3DS, that's still doing decently

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

And this is why Nintendo continues to lose more and more its core fanbase on a daily basis.

Still make lotsa money though, so that evens out.