What Has Nintendo Done Right Lately?

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Nintendo had the highest reviewed games last year. They sold the most hardware last year too. Telling them to abandon everything and say there games arent good is stupid.

Yes the WiiU beat two ageing consoles at the end of their production run who had their successors waiting in the wings, well done Nintendo. slow clap That's like beating two geriatrics in a 100m sprint in which you proceed to faceplant every ten metres or so.

And then the PS4 dropped in and bettered the WiiU numbers in less than four months. And that's with the PS4 yet to release in Japan, a major Sony stronghold.

If you meant handhelds only then yes Nintendo moved the most stock.

As for 'highest reviewed' that don't mean diddly, sales is what keeps a corporation afloat.

 

[hexFrank202]

Yo, Ben, you've done well in criticizing the oppressive nature of peoples' childhood memories, but I think you went a little too far here in one paragraph, where you make the flat statement that top-down adventuring and grid-based movement are inherently inferior to their full-3d and free-roaming counterparts. That's silly to say, even though it may be the case in the two games you mentioned.

 

[VG_Addict]

Didn't Yahtzee say in the aLBW video that going third party didn't work for Sega? And now he wants Nintendo to go third party like them?

Yahtzee contradicted himself.

 

[McMarbles]

Didn't Yahtzee say in the aLBW video that going third party didn't work for Sega? And now he wants Nintendo to go third party like them?

Yahtzee contradicted himself.

Or maybe the failure of one attempt does not invalidate others attempting the same under different circumstances?

Yeah, I mean, we could always look to Atari's example...

...wait...

Oh, hey, Hudson's still successful!

...oh, right...

 

[VG_Addict]

Didn't Yahtzee say in the aLBW video that going third party didn't work for Sega? And now he wants Nintendo to go third party like them?

Yahtzee contradicted himself.

Or maybe the failure of one attempt does not invalidate others attempting the same under different circumstances?

Going third party also didn't work for Atari or SNK. I think it's fair to say it wouldn't work for Nintendo.

Why do people want Nintendo to go third party after ONE failed console? It took Sega and Atari several consecutive failures to drop out of hardware.

 

[Something Amyss]

What?So just because I think quality games aren't those who have game breaking bugs that are not patched I must have low standards?

A game simply not having bugs being "high quality" is definitely a low standard.

I think he means in terms of software stability. In that way, they're very much superior to pretty much everyone else (one game-breaking bug in two games is hardly equal to the dozens of game-breaking bugs in other high-profile games).

But again, that's so broad as to be meaningless. Most major games are released without game-breaking bugs. If you are to offer examples like SimCity and Battlefield, those are the minority and should not be portrayed as the norm.

So if that's the mark of quality., it brings me back to the question I've been beating around: so what? If it's something so easily achieved, it no longer has any beneficial meaning. So while I'll concede I can't name a Nintendo-published title in the last decade or so that's as broken as SimCity was, I have to ask, so what? Aside from Steam's marketplace, I'm hard pressed to name five games like that, period.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Arbitrage is a consumer right, so yes, it's anti-consumer.

Arbitrage is a behavior of Supply, not Demand. So no, it isn't.

It's also anti-consumer to lock people out when they don't localize titles.

Only if you assume Free Market rules, which don't apply when you have disparity between markets.

EDIT: Only because I don't want to bump this again...
*sigh*

What does the first sentence have to do with the second? Arbitrage is a RIGHT of the consumer to resell their own property.

Arbitrage is where a "middle man" buys out a weaker, cheap market en masse, and resells it in a stronger, more expensive market. It has nothing to do with consumers' rights; it's just a behavior that exploits disparity between markets and it's performed, overwhelmingly, by suppliers.

(individual consumers rarely carry the clout to perform arbitrage at a larger economic scale. In practice, in a multiple-market scenario, consumers are only concerned with their own market; it's almost always a firm or other supplier that performs arbitrage at that scale where possible; usually a competitor)

Region locking is not designed just as a restriction for consumers; it's a restriction for other suppliers.

If the markets aren't free, then by definition they're not optimal for the consumer.

With multiple markets, "Optimal" is different for the consumers in each market. You can't treat a multi-market scenario as being "one consumer population" because there isn't just one.

Eventually, due to unchecked arbitrage, the consumers in the weaker economy have no "consumer's rights" to speak of because their market effectively won't exist. Because some middle man will have bought it out and resold it elsewhere.

Which is why a moral argument citing arbitrage as some sort of consumer's right is not only completely ignorant of the concept, but condemnation for its prevention is downright foolish.

If a supplier knows they can make a profit (however small) in a given market as long as arbitrage doesn't take it away, that's an overall benefit for the market as a whole.

Bottom line: Arbitrage is BAD for the market as a whole, because it fucks with both Supply and Demand.

 

[VG_Addict]

Could someone tell me, from a business perspective, how going third party would make Nintendo more money? It didn't make Atari or Sega more money.

 

[Something Amyss]

Didn't Yahtzee say in the aLBW video that going third party didn't work for Sega? And now he wants Nintendo to go third party like them?

Yahtzee contradicted himself.

The bit about Sega was a retread of the video. Not exactly contradicting himself. Since he still promoted the idea.

 

[VG_Addict]

Didn't Yahtzee say in the aLBW video that going third party didn't work for Sega? And now he wants Nintendo to go third party like them?

Yahtzee contradicted himself.

The bit about Sega was a retread of the video. Not exactly contradicting himself. Since he still promoted the idea.

No, he clearly said that going software only didn't save Sega when he said that Sonic's gotten worse and they made Colonial Marines.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Arbitrage is a consumer right, so yes, it's anti-consumer.

Arbitrage is a behavior of Supply, not Demand. So no, it isn't.

What does the first sentence have to do with the second? Arbitrage is a RIGHT of the consumer to resell their own property.

It's also anti-consumer to lock people out when they don't localize titles.

Only if you assume Free Market rules, which don't apply when you have disparity between markets.

If the markets aren't free, then by definition they're not optimal for the consumer.

Could someone tell me, from a business perspective, how going third party would make Nintendo more money? It didn't make Atari or Sega more money.

Sega would be bankrupt right now if they didn't go third party, so I'd say wherever they are now made more money than they would have.

 

[Something Amyss]

No, he clearly said that going software only didn't save Sega when he said that Sonic's gotten worse and they made Colonial Marines.

Yes, and a zinger after an argument doesn't mean that he didn't make the argument.

 

[Something Amyss]

Could someone tell me, from a business perspective, how going third party would make Nintendo more money? It didn't make Atari or Sega more money.

Sega, who was already dying, and Atari, who had been bought out by the time they went third party and were also facing failures already?

Yeah, it kinda did make them more money. By the virtue of continuing to exist.

Or do you think they're less successful than, say, THQ?

 

[VG_Addict]

Could someone tell me, from a business perspective, how going third party would make Nintendo more money? It didn't make Atari or Sega more money.

Sega, who was already dying, and Atari, who had been bought out by the time they went third party and were also facing failures already?

Yeah, it kinda did make them more money. By the virtue of continuing to exist.

Or do you think they're less successful than, say, THQ?

Do you think that could happen to Nintendo after this gen?

Did Atari and Sega make money immediately after going third party?

 

[Something Amyss]

Do you think that could happen to Nintendo after this gen?

Did Atari and Sega make money immediately after going third party?

Do I think it could happen immediately? Well, depends on what you mean by could. Technically, but I think it's unlikely to happen in its immediacy.

Sega and Atari managed to keep afloat, which still elevated their status. And as someone has already mentioned, Atari didn't even own its own IPs at that point, which makes it even less an apt comparison.

 

[VG_Addict]

Do you think that could happen to Nintendo after this gen?

Did Atari and Sega make money immediately after going third party?

Do I think it could happen immediately? Well, depends on what you mean by could. Technically, but I think it's unlikely to happen in its immediacy.

Sega and Atari managed to keep afloat, which still elevated their status. And as someone has already mentioned, Atari didn't even own its own IPs at that point, which makes it even less an apt comparison.

Then, do you think Nintendo could lose enough money off the Wii U to cause them to go third party next gen?

What do you mean, "technically"?

 

[Something Amyss]

Then, do you think Nintendo could lose enough money off the Wii U to cause them to go third party next gen?

What do you mean, "technically"?

Virtually anything can happen. It's a matter of probabilities. Whether something is possible is useless. It's possible Microsoft and Sony bail and Nintendo is hit by a meteor and there is no next gen. Is it likely? Nah.

So here's the thing: we don't have data for a reliable prediction of the market. We don't know how long the Wii U will stay out. We don't know how long this gen will last. We do know Nintendo's trying to turn things around, but we don't know if it'll work. We only know so far it hasn't. Well, that's to be expected, honestly. There's no reason to expect any company to fix every problem virtually overnight. I expect in the short term, they're going to take hits. They may even get pummeled fiscally for this full generation. The Wii U is already worse hardware and lacks support in part because of that. If they can move enough games, great. They might be able to swing things around.

But here's the thing: I've seen a lot of PS3 comparisons and people were all "Well, everyone called the PS3 a failure and look what it did!" And that's sort of right. Look what it did. It took five years and drained the games division before it really started to work. It probably had the long-term goal of pushing BD over HDDVD, so it's certainly not a failure overall. But it turned things around at a heavy, heavy cost. It also put Sony's games division in what people are now calling do-or-die, make-or-break.

And part of why Sony can afford to get hammered like that is they have a lot of branches. Hell, at that time, most of them were still doing decent. Shift forward to now, and maybe they couldn't insulate a failure so well. Nintendo only really has two revenue streams (in a simplistic sense): games and merchandise. They can't afford to be losing money in their primary field, no matter what they're sitting on. At some point, they will feel the pressure to take some larger action. If the problem is their hardware is an obstacle, then ditching the hardware is logic.

But does that mean that's the path they take? I don't know. And I'm not Michael Pachter, so I'm not going to make wild guesses and call them predictions.