Their forecasts are so consistently wrong (and always in the same direction) that you have to assume they do it on purpose.
Nintendo full year financial results [23.2B yen loss, 3.6M Wii U/12M 3DS forecast]
- Thread starter zomgbbqftw
- Start date
Mysterious
Banned
Nintendo considers them so.
metalslimer
Member
I honestly can't tell anymore if Nintendo's believes their forecasts.
RoninChaos
Member
I know for years people have tried to defend nintendo when it comes to hardware but I think we're at a point now where, at least for a home console, Nintendo has to compete. They will not get third party support without comparable hardware. A console that plays just Nintendo games is not enough anymore.
And they HAVE to get their infrastructure together. Their online system is really comical in this day and age.
Really, Nintendo needs to act like they're in a competition again and I think they can turn this around. If they keep wandering off and pretending they're in this by themselves eventually NIntendo is going to find a cliff and fall off it.
Still sucks to see them in such bad shape.
And they HAVE to get their infrastructure together. Their online system is really comical in this day and age.
Really, Nintendo needs to act like they're in a competition again and I think they can turn this around. If they keep wandering off and pretending they're in this by themselves eventually NIntendo is going to find a cliff and fall off it.
Still sucks to see them in such bad shape.
Yeah I agree. Nintendo fanboys for some reason always argue that Nintendo can't be innovative AND compete on hardware power at the same time, like they are somehow mutually exclusive. That is patently false and is illogical.
Being comparable in hardware power gives 3rd parties no reason not to port games to your console, and Nintendo can still try to invent whatever the next big gimmick is. Add to that you still have their best-in-industry 1st party games, these games don't somehow become less than they are just because you put in a graphics card, ram, and cpu comparable to what the PS4 and Xbone are currently running.
You know there was a time when Nintendo actually made hardware that wasn't a full generation behind in power and the games released on those consoles are some of the best ever.
Caffeine
Gold Member
technically they were the same system in regards to ds and dsi the enhancements of the system was really only for color. sure they both had exclusive games gbc and dsi but not that many.
a lot of games were branded gbc but they still worked on the original gameboy pokemon gold and silver is an example.
They also blew that game out for $9.99 for most of the holidays. I'd be interested to see how many of those sales were at full price vs. a significant discount.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
Technically but the GBC had a colour screen and a faster CPU. That's a pretty significant difference.
If 3D was added to the DS and the specs slight improved then... yeah...
RoninChaos
Member
Agreed.
Really, at this point the entire INDUSTRY has shifted, and Nintendo has not. Nintendo has failed to make any good decisions in regards to the Wii U, and it could be argued that they're in the same position when it comes to the 3DS.
They still might be able to beat their own drum on the handheld front, but even the 3ds appears to have been a mistake as far as the hardware goes. Nintendo relied on the 3d gimmick in the same way that the Wii U has relied on the gamepad. Those gimmicks were treated like they were the reason people would buy the system, and they just aren't. Neither gimmick is compelling enough for most people to buy their respective device if you look at the sales figures. I don't personally play with the 3D on for any game, and on my wii U I prefer using a classic controller. There hasn't been any game that's made me say "3D or the Gamepad are a MUST". Neither have developers apparently.
The Xbone is having the same issue with the Kinect. Everybody is like "Why the fuck am I paying 100 dollars more for hardware that I won't even use and that no developer seems to want to work with?"
So Nintendo isn't alone in this. But it doesn't change the fact that it's a shitty place to be and that Nintendo did it to themselves.
This is impossible. No one can guarantee a winning strategy in advance. A winning strategy also isn't necessarily strong. GBA could be said to be a 'winning' strategy but it was also weak. DS was a strong action and turned out to be a winning strategy(with most of GAF certain it would be destroyed by the PSP.)
This is just rhetoric really. How exactly would you have wanted them to adapt? Wii has already had a price cut in the first year. He's announced they want to release games that show the value of the controller. What exactly would you want different and when? How would that be quicker, stronger and better than a QOL launching in 2015 that could increase the sales of the company by 50%?
The declining publisher and development community isn't much use. They wouldn't be able to steal COD/Fifa/Madden anyway. Retailers will go with whatever's hot so that doesn't matter too much either. They're projecting a profit next year on pretty modest sales(since we're entering the back half of the cycle). And yes they do have 50 years in which they will likely release between 10-30 different hardware platforms. A single platform in the Wii U is not a big deal. Why ruin the reputation of all those platforms by panicking for a couple of years about one platform?
LegendofLex
Member
This is patently wrong. Where are the PS3/360 ports on Wii U?
the nes was based on pretty old stuff iirc. i'm not sure how the famicom translated into the nes, but the famicom was 1983 tech and it lasted nintendo for seven years. in that time, sega came and went with 3-4 different consoles until finally getting the mega drive out in 1988. the super famicom released two years later.
similarly, the n64 released two years after the saturn and playstation, and the gamecube released 18+ months after the dreamcast and playstation 2. sure the tech was comparable, but it was also really late every time. i think part of it was not having games ready, but part of it was also getting costs down.
one thing i think they might be concerned about doing is that if they make a system like the xbox or playstation, they'd basically be ceding that the market they're trying to cultivate really is lost forever. they'd be contributing to building an industry they don't see themselves being a part of.
Yup, releasing a hardware-comparable system 2 years too late means they have a LOT of work to catch up.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
TBF the tech was at least stronger in many respects for the GC and N64 it's not as if they released PS1 or PS2 specs over a year later.
Caffeine
Gold Member
ah but the dsi had more ram and a faster cpu compared to the ds/dslite.
RoninChaos
Member
Yeah but this isn't the 80s or the 90s. The ENTIRE entertainment landscape has changed. We have the Internet, Netflix, smartphones, etc. Nintendo needs to stop acting as if it is the 80s. Kids today are more drawn towards Minecraft than Mario. They've done nothing to cultivate a new audience or build toward the future. Nintendo has willing sat out of any competition and it's finally coming back to really bite them in the ass.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
But the Colour is a far more significant selling point. The average buyer wouldn't even know about that, but colour is a system selling feature.
Caffeine
Gold Member
i know but to nintendo its not thats why they consider it the same.
They will compete - against smart devices. Their unified software platform is the first step towards that. Like I said earlier, don't expect them to compete on Microsoft and Sony's terms. Nintendo are feeling much more threatened by the rise of smartphone and tablets than their status in the traditional console market.
that's something you can also afford by sitting on tech for a year or two.
The only thing I see big from the past few months is their stake in online platform Dwango, but that was publicized.
AdmiralMikey
Member
It's even better when they try to lump GB, GBC and GBA all together into a single number, "The Game Boy series has sold over 200 million units!"
Principate
Saint Titanfall
Sony combines PSP and PSV sales. How Nintendo decides to list the system sales in financials isn't really my point.
It was that in a comparison graph of sales I've consider GBC a different system.
The DSi's selling point was the camera. Had a ton of people come in to gamestop when I worked there so they could get that 'new DS with the camera'. They also supported DSiWare, entire subset of games that were NOT playable on the DS.
Principate
Saint Titanfall
A camera is a nice addition it's not something you could market the entire system as. If Nintendo had significantly bumped the specs of the GBC no one would have batted an eye lid. Because there was a fairly stark difference between it and the GB. A colour screen and games running in colour. GB, GB Colour GB Advance. Notice the difference between it's name and the name of the actual successor. There's barely any.
That's not the point there's nothing stopping you from releasing slightly weaker specs at the same time as PS systems release. If they only cared about price they wouldn't have bothered with even that bump. e.g the Wii U
Herb Alpert
Banned
a device to protect Iwata from the anger of the shareholders?
Literal flameshield. Guy swore it worked, and was on sale for only 100,000,000, 90% off it's original retail value.
theprodigy
Member
3DS will pass the NES eventually, right?
....right?
....right?
That's Interesting. $100 million is a pretty big spend by Nintendo standards...unless they infringed a patent and thought buying the tech was a cheaper option.
Version 3.0
Member
Nintendo is too slow to get a console out on time. The Wii U should've been on the market 2 years earlier. The Wii should've been out a year earlier. The Gamecube should've been out a year earlier. The N64 was supposed to be out a year earlier.
Wii U successor announced next year, scheduled for 2016, released 2017.
The only thing nintendo can do at this point is to hope to beat the NEXT gen to the punch by releasing a powerful system a year before the competition. It has to be approximate in power to the competition's next gen. Some half-gen system won't cut it. It has to lure 3rd parties in with a powerful system, and it has to come out early so it has the install base to be lead platform for 3rd parties.
Almost all of those do not seem like something nintendo can do, especially with their current relationship with 3rd parties and the fact that they've never been ones for cutting edge technology. Nintendo seems to know this, which is why they're likely approaching 'entertianment' through more means than just video games.
JinjoUnchained
Member
This is disconcerting news. I hope they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and reverse course on their current software strategy. They produced a ton of excellent content for two platforms last year which weren't (for the most part) watered down by gimmicky/casual crap. You can see the fruits of their internal expansion and consolidation efforts on the software side.
The real issue is on the hardware side. Two straight consoles that were poorly conceived: overpriced, underpowered, long droughts. They turned around the first one but not the second one. The games are there. Super Mario 3D World should be a 8-10 million seller were it not weighed down by a console with a bad value proposition.
I just hope they don't look at these results and say "hey, let's stop making content-rich, challenging AAA 16-bit style games and focus solely on shitty $5 microtransaction titles." Get your hardware in order first, Nintendo.
The real issue is on the hardware side. Two straight consoles that were poorly conceived: overpriced, underpowered, long droughts. They turned around the first one but not the second one. The games are there. Super Mario 3D World should be a 8-10 million seller were it not weighed down by a console with a bad value proposition.
I just hope they don't look at these results and say "hey, let's stop making content-rich, challenging AAA 16-bit style games and focus solely on shitty $5 microtransaction titles." Get your hardware in order first, Nintendo.
Nintendo needs to be less worried about power consumption and making the console small and just release a powerful machine. N64 or GameCube that shit. Those failed not because they were powerful, but because of different media formats, branding and marketing. Make it easy to develop for.
Make the thing as giant as an Xbox One, as you can see with its sales, gamers don't care too much about the size of the console but they do care about specs.
Make the thing as giant as an Xbox One, as you can see with its sales, gamers don't care too much about the size of the console but they do care about specs.
nintendo thought they were about to regain some footing by doing the disc-based thing with the gamecube. iwata famously expected 50 million consoles sold for that platform. when the system failed, they sought another way out, so they wouldn't have to compete as fiercely and keep their corporate culture largely the same.
edit: i may be talking about two different things here.
SuperSonic1305
Member
Even with all the advantages of being a handheld it still couldn't beat the PS2.
Father_Brain
Banned
Specs are not a cure-all.
Specs won't address Nintendo's dated online infrastructure, their terrible third-party relations, their poor brand perception with core gamers, or their complete lack of Western-targeted first-party development. Nintendo could come out with a system three times as powerful as PS4, and unless they could address those things (spoiler: they can't in just a few years), it'd only be marginally more attractive to the core market than Wii U is.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
That expansion will have a recurring cost as any investment in people, facilities, and tools is not a one time financial hit, but something you spend money on every single day.
I'm just not sure the market has enough room for three traditional consoles. Big third parties have already stated pipeline restraints as being a reason they didn't make Wii U versions of last-gen games like DOOM 3 BFG and Borderlands 2 -- they just didn't have the manpower to make yet another version of those games on top of PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. They may have had that manpower back during the Gamecube era but game development was less expensive back then. No telling what the switch to x86 means for this. Having comparable hardware would help with western third party support, and I do agree Nintendo needs to give up on the idea of making a low-wattage console for the Japanese market (which is what drove them down this route in the first place), but it wouldn't be a guarantee of third party support. Far from it.
People in this thread have already said Nintendo now sees Apple, Google, and Amazon as its main competition. I'm just saying, it wouldn't be entirely insane for Nintendo to do a new handheld and console sharing the same architecture with a unified software ecosystem. It could work if Nintendo does two or three things: 1) Don't fuck up the OS and user interface. 2) Don't fuck up the service/pricing model. 3) Actually reach out to third parties, particularly Japanese developers, indies, and some of the higher-tier mobile developers.
People in this thread have already said Nintendo now sees Apple, Google, and Amazon as its main competition. I'm just saying, it wouldn't be entirely insane for Nintendo to do a new handheld and console sharing the same architecture with a unified software ecosystem. It could work if Nintendo does two or three things: 1) Don't fuck up the OS and user interface. 2) Don't fuck up the service/pricing model. 3) Actually reach out to third parties, particularly Japanese developers, indies, and some of the higher-tier mobile developers.
It's not that they can't; they just don't care about beating Sony and Microsoft to the punch. For better or worse, Nintendo simply does not believe in the long-term sustainability of the established traditional console model.
GenericUser
Member
Nintendo needs to rethink itself, harsh and immediate. Otherwise, Nintendo will have no relevance in a couple of years and will seize to exist in a few years more. I wish that they'll recover, fan or not, we all as gamers could use a nintendo in the industry.
J'aime Fils-Aime
Neo Member
No company would spend 50 years throwing money away like that. If the next console is a failure, I really doubt Nintendo would be happy to throw more more money at trying again. The same is with handhelds if they continue to shrink in sales.
Imperfected
Member
It's for the oxygen tent he sleeps in, that he believes gives him sexual powers.
It really isn't.
The Dreamcast was ahead of its time. The Wii U tried to cash in on the popularity and accessibility of tablets but was late to that party while fundamentally misunderstanding their appeal. It also released with extremely outdated tech. It will be remembered for a handful of decent games and mostly relegated to being a rarely talked about footnote in Nintendo's history.
Teletraan1
Banned
Funny enough, this was one of the things that pushed me to consider a Wii U. I hate handhelds and would like to experience some of the DS library at home. From looking at the release schedule of their other VC titles I don't have a lot of faith in the games I want actually appearing on the service.
...I'm gonna say for worse, considering how things are going for them.
Does Nintendo ever post its revenue/profits in terms of the other organizations it owns?
I'm specifically talking the Seattle Mariners. I'd be interested to see how much money they make/lose of the ball club and how much the team would theoretically sell for on the open market.
I'm specifically talking the Seattle Mariners. I'd be interested to see how much money they make/lose of the ball club and how much the team would theoretically sell for on the open market.
Teletraan1
Banned
Right now they are barely more than that and you have to buy their antiquated hardware. You rattled off a bunch of titles (outside of Pikmin3 which started its life as a Wii game, and the shitty farmed out Metroid) that they have not put any earnest effort into making for 7 years minimum as a platform holder and then suggest we won't see these titles again if they are not a platform holder. What a joke. If a game series is not selling, it doesnt deserve to be made. Full Stop.
Is it too difficult for companies to pare down development of certain titles and make those titles what they actually are?. Does Waverace constitute a full fledged $60 release? No way. It should be a sub $20 title released on the digital services that has the appropriate budget. Unfortunately it is 1 or 0 for this industry so they will live and die by 1 or 0.
gamergirly
Member
The Wii U forecast lives or dies with Mario Kart and Smash Brothers