Yeah remember nintendo before they went out of business following their closed hardware strategy?
Meanwhile Xbox is the dominant market leader having been the first to dump their own hardware and go multiplat.
Perhaps there’s an alternate dimension where the above is true but in this reality Nintendo is doing better than they ever have despite a closed console environment while MS still can’t make money from gaming and rely on diverting incomes from other business units to keep gaming going.
I don’t really care either way - Injust play the games where they are - but it’s not as simple as saying go multiplat and profit.
MS had to do something since they couldn’t go anywhere with Xbox - they’re just not a gaming company.
Nintendo however make games people want to play and they’ll buy the hardware to play them.
Sony is closer to Nintendo than MS. But it also should be remembered that Sony make more money from gaming than MS and Nintendo combined and they’re going for a middle ground - long term exclusives with other platforms getting the crumbs from the table much later.
Is that a good strategy? It’s not clear it will be at all….
It's not about whether or not a brand can survive on just console alone. It's about the growth of that brand and thus the company. PlayStation is Sony's biggest moneymaker and they want it to be even bigger. Higher revenue bringing in more money to make greater investments. Having a cushion in case they have a failure of a piece of hardware. Being in a position to quickly seize on any sudden market explosion or change. I mean, I pretty much described this in my original post. It had nothing to do with a company certainly closing down if they didn't do that or anything like that. Not sure how that escaped you.
As for Nintendo, I think people very much forget how badly Nintendo's home consoles were selling in general. With the odd exception of Wii, their consoles were selling fewer units as each generation went by. WIi U didn't even sell 15 million after over 4 years. That's a total failure in today's market. Their handheld business is what kept them up. Now, they sell a hybrid of the two. Its wild success owed largely to being in a very unique position in the industry with mobile gaming on the rise and them providing both experiences simultaneously. They no longer offer a solely traditional home console experience.
That said, they're still behind other major players and once the Activision/Microsoft deal goes through, they'll be even further behind. As in, a distant third to the other two. So what does that mean? It means you can sell over a hundred million consoles and still not bring in the money that a brand with half (at best) of your console install base has. The market is clearly moving away from, "He who sells the most consoles wins". Increasing platform engagement and having your games being available on more platforms are becoming just as important as selling consoles. Sony's MLB The Show is enjoying greater sales than it ever has now that it's multiplatform. Both Horizon and God of War, despite not releasing day-and-date on PC, in fact releasing years later, have sold millions more copies releasing on PC. Destiny 2, a multiplatform game, will add considerable yearly revenue once the Bungie deal goes through and Bungie's future games, confirmed multiplatform, will likely bring a lot as well.
This factors into Sony's live service ambitions where having as large of a potential userbase as possible is very important. You want as many people as you can get coming back and buying expansions, season passes, skins, in-game currency, etc. You can achieve high userbase on a singular platform, but you dramatically increase the odds of it catching on somewhere if you have it on other platforms as well. Sony could very well release a game that doesn't sell that well on console but somehow takes off on PC. Or, it takes off on both. Or, there are just enough owners on both platforms to keep it from failing. Many games are as successful as they are because they don't exist in only one place. Sure, having games on more platforms doesn't necessarily mean that it will sell much beyond what your core console base would have bought. However, restricting it to just that base means it will certainly never have the chance to.
Nintendo can sell all the consoles it wants but at the end of the day if Microsoft and Sony are walking away with two, three, or even four times the money because they took a broader approach to the industry, what does it matter?
