27th August 2009, 2:41 PM
(This post was last modified: 27th August 2009, 2:58 PM by A Black Falcon.)
First: the NES had 700-800 US releases or so. Add all the Japanese exclusives, etc, though, and yeah it's in the thousands.
Second...
Yeah, exactly. I should have said this in my previous post as well, but i just ignored the whole "shovelware" part because it's really completely irrelevant, as you say. Every successful console gets lots of it. The fact that Wii has it is no news, and means nothing.
The fact that Wii has far too few major third party releases is a good point against it, though. The system has far fewer major third-party titles on it than you would expect consider how successful it is... most of the more successful third-party stuff is borderline shovelware minigame collections, and that's really too bad. Why do most Wii games look like PS2 games at best, looking even worse a lot of the time than your average Gamecube game? How does this make sense? So yeah, I would agree with some criticisms of the Wii... but still, it IS winning, because of its massive success in the casual/nongamer markets, and Nintendo has made games that hit straight at that market. They've been less successful with their other goal of also making things to satisfy the hardcore, last year in particular where they had pretty much nothing after SSBB in the spring, but that's the fault of third parties as well as I said... and this year they announced a good number of games for everyone, including NSMB Wii, Mario Galaxy 2, Zelda (sometime), Metroid, etc. Third parties are not matching that, and it is too bad... but even so Wii is a good console, with a massive game library including a reasonable if somewhat too small number of good to great games.
Of course, a lot of this is because the 360 (and to a lesser degree PS3) have captured the hardcore gamer market, while the NES of course controlled the entire market, so pretty much all games would be on the system, not just ones for a specific market group. But is there any sign of the 360 catching up to and passing the Wii in sales or success? No, I think not. Natal's their effort at that, but I don't think it'll be enough to catch Nintendo, Nintendo is too far ahead... and WILL come up with ways to reverse the slow slide they've been in for some months now. They did some of that already, with their announcements earlier this year... we'll see how things go as the year goes on and we get towards the holiday season, when the most money is made.
Oh, Sony and MS are definitely both pressing them right now, with their price drops. Eventually Nintendo will probably be forced to drop their price as well. Will the Sony and MS price drops just announced be enough to do that? Likely not, but eventually they'll have to do it, and it'll obviously increase sales, as will the black system, etc. But even just as they are they really are in good shape, Sony and MS are cutting prices because they're trying to compete better, but Nintendo's the one they're chasing. As the leader they don't necessarily have to change much until/unless they actually feel threatened, which I think they are not really right now.
I do think that Nintendo would be helped a lot by a price cut this year, though. They might not do it... but they should.
Second...
Weltall Wrote:No, the NES days weren't like 1995, because Nintendo had the market all to itself. Nintendo was able to dictate the terms of videogaming almost entirely. They basically owned everything, and if you wanted to publish a game, you went along with Nintendo's predatory licensing structure. You had basically no alternative but the Sega Master System and the approximately 35 people who owned one.
Sony did not have any such luxury at first because they did something that no other console developer ever managed to pull off successfully--take on both Sega AND Nintendo at the same time. That's why, in those early days, Sony made a number of wise moves: making the console relatively inexpensive, attractive to developers with easy programming and low licensing fees, and aggressive courting of basically everyone out there who wanted to make a video game. This did result in a flood of garbage, but it had to happen. If Sony played by the established rules, they never would have gotten off the ground.
Yeah, exactly. I should have said this in my previous post as well, but i just ignored the whole "shovelware" part because it's really completely irrelevant, as you say. Every successful console gets lots of it. The fact that Wii has it is no news, and means nothing.
The fact that Wii has far too few major third party releases is a good point against it, though. The system has far fewer major third-party titles on it than you would expect consider how successful it is... most of the more successful third-party stuff is borderline shovelware minigame collections, and that's really too bad. Why do most Wii games look like PS2 games at best, looking even worse a lot of the time than your average Gamecube game? How does this make sense? So yeah, I would agree with some criticisms of the Wii... but still, it IS winning, because of its massive success in the casual/nongamer markets, and Nintendo has made games that hit straight at that market. They've been less successful with their other goal of also making things to satisfy the hardcore, last year in particular where they had pretty much nothing after SSBB in the spring, but that's the fault of third parties as well as I said... and this year they announced a good number of games for everyone, including NSMB Wii, Mario Galaxy 2, Zelda (sometime), Metroid, etc. Third parties are not matching that, and it is too bad... but even so Wii is a good console, with a massive game library including a reasonable if somewhat too small number of good to great games.
Of course, a lot of this is because the 360 (and to a lesser degree PS3) have captured the hardcore gamer market, while the NES of course controlled the entire market, so pretty much all games would be on the system, not just ones for a specific market group. But is there any sign of the 360 catching up to and passing the Wii in sales or success? No, I think not. Natal's their effort at that, but I don't think it'll be enough to catch Nintendo, Nintendo is too far ahead... and WILL come up with ways to reverse the slow slide they've been in for some months now. They did some of that already, with their announcements earlier this year... we'll see how things go as the year goes on and we get towards the holiday season, when the most money is made.
Oh, Sony and MS are definitely both pressing them right now, with their price drops. Eventually Nintendo will probably be forced to drop their price as well. Will the Sony and MS price drops just announced be enough to do that? Likely not, but eventually they'll have to do it, and it'll obviously increase sales, as will the black system, etc. But even just as they are they really are in good shape, Sony and MS are cutting prices because they're trying to compete better, but Nintendo's the one they're chasing. As the leader they don't necessarily have to change much until/unless they actually feel threatened, which I think they are not really right now.
I do think that Nintendo would be helped a lot by a price cut this year, though. They might not do it... but they should.
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