Between the years 2002-2006 it seemed to many people that Nintendo was doomed to fail as a hardware developer and would become a 3rd party developer just like Sega. Now we all know that not only is that not the case, but Nintendo is actually doing the exact opposite of those predictions and is now the market leader. If anything, it is now Sony who is in danger of being driven out of the hardware arena.
So I just thought it would be fun if we had a thread where we could post all those failed predictions by Sony and others about how Nintendo had failed, and then we could point at those quotes and laugh at them.
Here are some I could find on Google to help get the ball rolling:
“I think obviously our competition, the handheld devices from Nintendo and specifically in the case of the DS, we really feel like they’re appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms… They’re potentially losing some of their core audience and they’re not really expanding beyond that and we think we’re expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation. And we’ll do just what we did on PlayStation; we’ll dip down to the younger consumer eventually and we’ll ultimately appeal to that vastly Earth wide audience we carved out with the original PlayStation.” - Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Executive VP Jack Tretton
I wonder what Mr. Tretton would say now that the DS is consistently outselling every other piece of hardware (sometimes even all the 3 Playstations combined!). Come on, did he seriously believe that the DS was such a failure when he said that? How in the hell did he manage to become the Executive VP??? With him in charge, I guess we shouldn't be surprised Sony is in the shape its in now.
"The idea of a handheld rivalry with Nintendo is an irrelevance. Those formats don't appear in our planning. It's not a fair comparison; not fair on them, I should stress. That sounds arrogant, maybe, but it's the truth." - Phil Harrison
Arrogance? Truth? *shakes head*
"With the DS, it's fair to say that Nintendo stepped out of the technical race and went for a feature differentiation with the touch screen. But I fear that it won't have a lasting impact beyond that of a gimmick - so the long-lasting appeal of the platform is at peril as a direct result of that."
That was by Phil Harrison again.
"We don't care,"
Ken Kutaragi, when asked what he thought about competition from the 360 and Wii.
And here is one of my favorite failed predictions:
By 2011, though, the Yankee Group report predicts that Sony will have sold 30 million PlayStation 3s, controlling 44 percent of the market, compared with an estimated 27 million Xbox 360 units, which would account for 40 percent of the market.
Nintendo is expected to stay in third place with 11 million Wiis sold, claiming 16 percent of the console buying market.
It is only 2009 and the Wii has already sold over 3 times as much as Yankee Group predicted they would by 2011. I wonder how much money Sony paid them to come out with this report, lol. I hope whoever came up with the report was fired.
If anyone has any more quotes about Nintendo's "failure", please post them here so we can have a few good laughs about how wrong those predictions were.
Topic: Failed Quotes That Predicted Nintendo's Failure (Read 3802 times)
