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Nintendo Q4 FYE 3/15 Results - Beats Market Expectations, FY15 Guidance Announced
- Thread starter vinnygambini
- Start date
Arc Christelle
Member
Needs more doom.
I agree, Doom 4 should come to Nintendo consoles!
Papacheeks
Banned
I never said Nintendo needs to go third party?
And it's not a sign that they won't sell on a platform like PSN or XBox live, steam.
Those are fairly big markets and maybe a better place to sell smaller mobile games. Hell a lot of mobile games are getting ported over to steam with fairly decent success.
TheXfactor
Member
what does that even mean? halo sold crazy well and became one of the biggest franchises in gaming with combat evolved. comparing mario kart and super smash to halo would be a massive complement
Arc Christelle
Member
I knew someone would get it!
the thing is, i think you're looking at this as though this is a situation that's happening solely to nintendo.
no one still in the industry still making physical platforms sold more hardware than they did last gen. and no one is selling more hardware this generation than they did last gen.
it's a shrinking space, and instead of circling the wagons, nintendo would be better off securing their future in the very real and growing digital space. there's still room for hardware, and they can probably profit from it, but i think next gen will be a transition for most, and a last hurrah for others.
to be quite honest, what you suggest ignores many factors. aside from the obvious decrease in creative freedom and obvious decrease in the amount of money they would earn in software (coupled with the obvious increase in development cost going from 3ds/wii u development to ps4 or god forbid ps5 development), there's also no guarantee that their audience was secretly on the ps4 the entire time.
Bomber Bob
Banned
Amiboo
evilromero
Member
No. Doom 64.
the thing is, i think you're looking at this as though this is a situation that's happening solely to nintendo.
What does this graph show? Unit sales? Revenue?
Gimme the sequel that never came!
Good that Nintendo is back on track making profits!
Videogame hardware sales by generation.
Unit sales of hardware is my guess.
Nintendo is surprisingly stable when you take out wii's psychotic success.
It doesn't make sense if it's hardware unit sales.
Scale is all wrong and it's all out of proportion.
Doom 128 or bust.
He is including handhelds (but maybe not GG and the awesome WonderSwan).
The most confusing thing is that he split GB and GBC sales.
The split is actually unknown I believe, only GB/C total is known.
Gamer @ Heart
Member
Ehh. I wouldn't call you tube videos like crazy. If they actually spend a decent amount on television ads, I would call that throwing some serious support, but I doubt they would throw good money after bad. They can't expect much.
the y-axis is millions of hardware unit sales.
scale is not wrong either. it's hardware sales, not console hardware sales.
That still doesn't make sense.
Look at Gen 8 for example, it should be no higher than ~110m but it's at more than double that.
oh, if gen 8 is the concern, i should have clarified that it's my projection. working with 50m for microsoft, 114m for sony, and 74m for nintendo.
this is the current look at gen 8:
Ah, sorry. My fault then.
I got confused because I didn't realise you were including handhelds and were projecting gen 8.
Doom U sounds a lot cooler.
airmangataosenai
Member
This may help you understand why hardware is important to Nintendo.
You do realize that the only amount which would change for Nintendo is the $12 on your chart going to the console maker (If it in fact is even that much), right? In exchange they would gain access to a userbase more than 3x the size of what they currently have access to, it's a good trade-off. Console sales in particular are way below what other major publishers such as Activision enjoy. CoD alone annually will account for more than half of what Nintendo sells in the console space annually even on a bad year for them.
You sell by volume, and the problem is that their customer base has shrunk down dramatically, and is likely to get even smaller next gen.
oh, if gen 8 is the concern, i should have clarified that it's my projection. working with 50m for microsoft, 114m for sony, and 74m for nintendo.
this is the current look at gen 8:
I think you're being overly generous to all 3 console makers to some degree.
Please provide proof that Nintendo family friendly output games would sell to those "3x" audiences. I'll start you off: Sales of Sonic All Star Racing (a game that's high quality, with an established brand similar to that of Nintendo's Mario Kart). You can even combine sales of PS360 like many do, erroneously, if you'd like.
airmangataosenai
Member
the thing is, i think you're looking at this as though this is a situation that's happening solely to nintendo.
no one still in the industry still making physical platforms sold more hardware than they did last gen. and no one is selling more hardware this generation than they did last gen.
it's a shrinking space, and instead of circling the wagons, nintendo would be better off securing their future in the very real and growing digital space. there's still room for hardware, and they can probably profit from it, but i think next gen will be a transition for most, and a last hurrah for others.
to be quite honest, what you suggest ignores many factors. aside from the obvious decrease in creative freedom and obvious decrease in the amount of money they would earn in software (coupled with the obvious increase in development cost going from 3ds/wii u development to ps4 or god forbid ps5 development), there's also no guarantee that their audience was secretly on the ps4 the entire time.
Grouping handhelds with consoles to showcase decline is absurd, everyone freely accepts that traditional handhelds are a dead medium. The fact that people ignore iOS and Android in these discussions as competitors to the model but treat handhelds and consoles as a single entity is similarly silly, especially in Sony's case when they in fact develop Andoid-based hardware. Including those platforms in your chart would show that the userbase for games has in fact jumped to potentially over a billion. Publishers/devs are enjoying a sort of second Renaissance right now, this is the most profitable period in the history of game development.
airmangataosenai
Member
I do have to agree with this post.
They should be separated into console, handheld, mobile, PC. Or just put all together.
Doesn't change that it's about dedicated Gaming Hardware.
Even if Handhelds are a dying Medium, it's still a existing Medium, wich alone should be reason enough to include it
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
Handhelds and consoles are both electronic devices whose primary reason to exist is to serve as a platform to play games on.
Mobiles and tablets are consumer electronic devices whose primary reason to exist is communication, and general purpose computing respectively, that also happen to play games.
It makes more sense to group consoles and handhelds together to look at the state of the "hardcore gaming" market (read: the market for devices whose raison d'etre is to play videogames) than it is to group playstation and mobile because sony also make mobile phones.
More than 63% of gamers who buy lots of games on console also buy games on mobile and spend more than 10 hours a week playing them. So what is hardcore gaming?
Also there are ways to track just mobile gaming spend/sales/downloads.
airmangataosenai
Member
For anyone that's followed the game industry for the past 20+ years, I assure you this line of thought is nothing new. Even as far back as the PS1, we saw people claim that it wasn't a true "Dedicated" gaming platform because it functioned as a CD player and therefore wasn't a part of the same category as systems like the N64. It plays games and a lot of people use it to play games, what the fuck does is matter that people also use it for Netflix?
It was a silly argument then, and it remains silly now.
MS, look how Nintendo announced numbers for Wii U. Where's for Xbone, Microsoft?
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
I don't particularly like the term "hardcore" / "core" / "dedicated" / whatever as it implies usage habits, but for the purposes of this discussion: people who enjoy gaming as a hobby enough to purchase dedicated hardware devoted to it.
There is evidence that that group is shrinking.
You're looking at the wrong numbers. That was what they forecasted/expected to sell.
The actual numbers are 3.38m for Wii U and 8.73m for 3DS which are lower than their guidance.
the thing is, i think you're looking at this as though this is a situation that's happening solely to nintendo.
no one still in the industry still making physical platforms sold more hardware than they did last gen. and no one is selling more hardware this generation than they did last gen.
it's a shrinking space, and instead of circling the wagons, nintendo would be better off securing their future in the very real and growing digital space. there's still room for hardware, and they can probably profit from it, but i think next gen will be a transition for most, and a last hurrah for others.
to be quite honest, what you suggest ignores many factors. aside from the obvious decrease in creative freedom and obvious decrease in the amount of money they would earn in software (coupled with the obvious increase in development cost going from 3ds/wii u development to ps4 or god forbid ps5 development), there's also no guarantee that their audience was secretly on the ps4 the entire time.
You do realize that the people that now game on Wii U wouldn't just drop out of gaming if the system ceases to exist, right? Excluding the tiny percentage of nutcases that are actually so involved in the console war that they'd stop gaming if Nintendo left the hardware space everyone else would migrate to a new platform that offers the Nintendo games.
Your obvious decrease in amount of money they would earn in software is way less obvious then you're making it out to be, you're just ignoring the massively larger audience they'd be able to sell to and the massively larger effects that price differentiating methods would have on that audience. And I already said that Nintendo's games mainly live on artstyle instead of the highest fidelity graphics, they don't need to create extremely detailed textures or massively intricate lighting engines for their games to work, a Mario Kart 8 with a bumped up resolution would easily work on the other systems and I'd highly doubt that that'd increase development cost by much. Besides do you think Nintendo's own next system isn't going to boast higher process power? Development costs for Nintendo are going to rise either way.
And finally with you saying that they should secure their future in the digital space, assuming you're talking about streaming here, you're actually agreeing with me saying that they should stop making hardware.
So even worse. Poor Wii U.
Natureboy99
Banned
They just need to launch a major hardware revision and a new toy product every quarter from now on.
Doesn't this contradict your attempt at a gotcha earlier when you said that if Nintendo's games don't sell on mobile it blows up the idea that their games would sell on Ps4/X1 if they went third party. Is mobile a different market or not?
New new new NEW 3ds+++ Z edition
it's not really that silly. the 3ds is poised to sell about as much or more than the xbox one for this generation, which itself is a distant second to its nearest competitor. actually, if the xbox one sold 50m units for the generation and the ps4 sold 100m units, the xbox one's nearest competitor would be the wii u, but that might be besides the point. i'm not arguing that video games are dying, but that this old method of buying software that only runs on specific machines is in decline. i don't think you get to pick and choose examples and point to this model doing well when it's only one machine out of five that has the capability to outsell its predecessor.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
Do you believe that the majority of WiiU owners are:
1) People who already own other gaming systems and buy Nintendo products because it is the only way to play Nintendo games?
or
2) People who buy Nintendo systems because they offer something fundamentally different to what the PS4 / Xbone offer?
No, and yes, in that order.
this is more true than most people want to admit, and it doesn't just stop at handhelds.
This may help you understand why hardware is important to Nintendo.
The hardware licensing cost sounds bogus, and not what I have heard before on the subject.
Maybe I'm not understanding you if mobile and dedicated consoles are different markets how does what sells well on mobile affect what would sell well on dedicated consoles?
There's a lot more to it than just saying that there are 3x more people on other platforms so sales will increase.
Going third party willingly would produce a death spiral. If Nintendo stops selling their own hardware, then they would need to significantly reduce their workforce damaging employee morale. They would be viewed as a fallen company and thus investor confidence would be lost.
There is no reason for Nintendo to go third party unless they have no other choice. Once they go third party there is no going back. In addition, every single hardware maker that stopped selling hardware were either bought or went defunct.
Nintendo does not desire to be the next Atari or Sega.
LegendofDragoonLives
Member
Keep it going, we need them in a good financial position.
the audience for family games isn't on the ps4. sony hasn't done a good job of cultivating it. as such it would fall to nintendo to actually build this audience, which is sort of a super shitty deal.
a bigger audience doesn't always mean bigger sales. final fantasy xiii did better on the ps3 when the xbox 360 outsold the machine by over 60% in the us. virtue's last reward did the same on the vita and 3ds despite the 3ds having millions of users more. lego games do better on the wii u than other current generation platforms. audience size matters, sure, but the kind of audience matters too. this is a crucial element, because sony's best success in the family market since 2011's littlebigplanet 2 was 2013's knack, a launch title that might as well be the ps4's red steel.
the development structure would be different. nintendo had to change the entire pipeline when it came to wii u development, and that was when they had everything under their control. now they have to work on more advanced architecture not just for their console team, but their handheld team as well, and this time they have no control in what makes it easy on their side.
i will assume you never actually read my other posts detailing my thoughts on their future when i responded to you previously. i don't think they should stop making hardware as much as i think it is an inevitability that the traditional model is no longer going to be supported. i think next gen they should make hardware, but also future-proof themselves in a way that they're prepared for a dedicated hardwareless future. this doesn't mean i think they should stop being a first-party.
I don't get this comparison. The latter two companies were already in terrible financial shape by the time they got out of the hardware business.
Entirely irrelevant.
Splatoon is easily the most they're pushed a new IP in quite a long time. Yeah, a lot of it has been digital-based media, like their directs (it's had significant presence in almost all of their general Directs, which almost no other game has had), but it had a large presence at E3 last year as well as live events and a small amiibo line. It had a TV commercial recently, too. I have no idea what they're expecting at the end of the day, but considering today's Direct, which focused a lot on post-release content, I think it's not that big of a jump to think they're wanting Splatoon to stick.
Compare it to the exposure of, say, The Wonderful 101, and it's obvious they are putting quite a good deal behind it for a new IP.