jj984jj said:
You can spin it that way, but I'm not asking for anything unreasonable given Nintendo's output here for the past year in comparison.
You're asking them to eschew any strategical nature to releasing a game just so you can play it
now. I'd say that's pretty unreasonable for a company whose goal should be to make money.
If they can flush money down the toilet to make those games for the Japanese market in order to have the software to satisfy all their audiences there,
You assume that they released these games to "satisfy their audiences". Although I'd agree that that's an effect of these games' releases, I'd want to clarify that Nintendo's hopes for these games was to
make money. That is, Nintendo hasn't developed Another Code Wii because it wants to give something nice back to the fans, but because it believed that it would be financially feasible to do so. You seem to imply that Nintendo goes out of its way to lose money - I
highly doubt this is the case.
even the niche ones, then it's not entirely unreasonable to ask that they attempt to release these titles without sales potential in North America as well.
Such a conclusion assumes that Nintendo has
wanted to release games that have failed to make a profit.
I'm not going to deny that Nintendo can afford to turn in a loss on these games. But what do they gain by doing so? Nothing. Their sales of SMG 2 won't magically increase because the gamers who would buy it anyway had the opportunity to then buy another, different, title. Ultimately, Nintendo can afford to take a loss on lots of things. They could drop the price of the Wii by $100 tomorrow and they'd still make a profit. And yet they don't do these things because their goal as a company is to make the most money possible.
Why exactly are you defending Nintendo's bottom line?
Defending it in what way? On the one hand, I don't seek to deny that Nintendo's localisation has been pretty shitty recently. We've seen fewer games released that
could be released than we have in past years and past generations. Not to speak for him (and I hope I haven't misread him), but even Stumpokapow (the most ardent of the anti-Nintendo's-localisation-policy brigade) has agreed in the past that Nintendo's motivations for releasing these games
wouldn't be that they would turn a profit. The idea that Nintendo is missing out on lots of revenue seems pretty ludicrous.
Rather, my point is why we expect a money-driven company to do any different. Nintendo will always release new, quirky titles in the hopes that the games will find success and in order to give their development teams some creative freedom. And when these games fail to sell well, Nintendo moves on and tries to learn from their mistakes. When throwing wet tissue at the ceiling you focus on the balls that stick, and don't continually throw the ones that fall back down again and again. And this isn't even something unique to Nintendo. I know that there was a great GAF outcry, for example, when SEGA announced that Yakuza 3 wouldn't be making it overseas. But this was reasonable, too. Overall, it's a geographical fact that because Nintendo is a a Japanese company, its development arms will develop for the Japanese market first and foremost, and so most of its failures will be stuck there.
The moral of the story: shit happens. It's neither good nor bad.
