Topic: Nintendo Profits, Sales Down for Q3 2009

[Kairon]

I thik there are still plenty of people who don't have HDTVs, like me, but I do think that's it's starting to get adopted more and more. Of course, this is a moot point, since Iwata's already said that their next system will prob be HD capable.

HOWEVER, the question is whether Nintendo can just rest on their laurels and release a console that's a "Super Wii." I don't think Iwata's in the mindset to do that, I think he's looking for the next differentiator, or angle, to "justify" or "disrupt" the way things are.

That said, I think he's got time. The Wii's probably got another good year or two in it, what with a slew of further Nintendo games for the system in the near future, still waiting for DQX, maturing Motion Plus and Balance Board use, and a whole lotta room for price drops. Let's not forget, the wii is at $200 still. Next price drop will bring it into crazy land.

[KDR_11k]

A console upgrade is a major step and the console must provide a similarly major advantage over the old one.

What will be more of a problem for Nintendo is finding a reason for people to buy a new console. Just making it have HD console graphics won't make it an automatic seller as Sony and Microsoft already found out the hard way this generation.

I think the sheer fact that the PS3 and X360 exist and crush the Wii in graphics capabilities is enough justification for a new Wii.  The Wii doesn't support HDTVs and that makes it out-of-date.  Just keeping up-to-date is a pretty good reason to upgrade.  A lot of people own HDTVs now and I'm sure a lot of them would like to be able to play Wii Sports 3 in HD.

Like to and pay to are different. The Wii succeeded by making a step ahead that people were willing to pay for moreso than HD, a Wii HD would by itself not be enough to convince many people to buy.

And Motion+ demonstrates the ability for the remote to go further so at the very least we'll get a better controller.  And I figure since new hardware would allow for easy porting between all three consoles the third party support would greatly improve.  So maybe people just noticing the Wii 2 having more games than the Wii ever did would be sufficient enough.

Motion + can enhance it but do people genuinely care about those enhancements? Do they even understand what those enhancements do?
 

The Wii is also trendy technology and the same idiots who update their iPod and cellphone every year would probably also be all over the idea of upgrading their Wii.  It isn't about what it does for them, it's the status of having the newest trendy gadget.  The Wii has the world's attention now so a new Wii will grab their interest.  Hell Nintendo has just introduced the DSi and what the HELL does that really do to justify a purchase?  Doesn't matter.  The DS is trendy so they just have to make a minor change and people will fork over the dough to have the latest model.

The main market here is people who don't care about being on the bleeding edge. DS revisions sell but they are minor revisions and the majority does NOT upgrade to the latest revision. If you made a new console would you be happy with getting those people who would buy any revision only? How would you handle the software support there? WiiHD-only games would leave out all the Wii owners and without major steps ahead the Wii owners won't bother to pay hundreds of dollars again.

 

And when you come down to it the Wii sold because it had that game everyone wanted in Wii Sports.  So they just need a new game that has that sort of appeal.

Easier said than done, especially in a way that demonstrates why this new doodad is better than the old one. If the result could have been done on the Wii (with a controller add-on maybe) it wouldn't be convincing. Overall it sounds like a needless uphill battle for no real reason. If the next system really only had better graphics that would leave Nintendo vulnerable to a competitor offering a more substantial upgrade and people going with that instead.
 

Plus, you know, you just STOP MAKING REGULAR WII games and force everyone to upgrade if they want to play new games.  It's how the whole console model works.  If the Wii audience wants to continue playing videogames they'll buy the next Wii.  And if that audience doesn't want to continue playing videogames then the whole thing was just a fad and Nintendo failed.  The Wii userbase should want to continue playing videogames and thus jump through the hoops required to keep doing so.

The Wii userbase seems fairly content to continue playing the videogames they already own if there's nothing new of interest coming up. You don't want to end up in a Sony situation where the last gen system is more popular than the current one. Sony had a ton of users with Singstar and Buzz but they couldn't make those transition to the PS3 because the games didn't benefit from the PS3.

[Chozo Ghost]

If the Wii audience wants to continue playing videogames they'll buy the next Wii.

You mean if they want to continue playing new and current video games. Bear in mind, there are many people out there still playing their NES, SNES, N64, etc. and haven't made the leap to modern gaming. Maybe they haven't because they can't afford it, or maybe they just don't give a ****. I don't know how many times I've went to someone's house and the only gaming console they had was an SNES or Genesis or something like that. The Wii could very easily end up the same way, and when you consider its appeal to non-gamers like the elderly and so forth who usually don't even buy games I suspect that will make it even more true.

You have to agree there are some Wii owners out there who bought the system with Wii Sports, and/or possibly Wii Play and Wii Fit and that's it for them. These people will probably never buy hardcore games, and they may not bother buying other casual games either because they are content with the ones they have. A new generation of consoles won't change anything. Even if these people have HD tvs they aren't playing games where graphics mean anything, so why would they want to make the upgrade?

For many people out there the Wii is the only system they own, and possibly the only system they will EVER own for the rest of their lives.

[Ian Sane]

Even if they did release its successor and stopped supporting it (which would be insane), it sells so well that third parties would continue to support it.

What third parties?  The ones that treat the Wii like a joke and then wonder why all their games bomb?  The Wii will continue to sell entirely based on these games, HOW?  Nintendo carries the Wii on it's back.  They cease to support it it will dry up.  All these Wii owners are buying Nintendo games like Wii Fit and NSMB Wii.  Nintendo's games are what make it a success.
 
As for HD those of you talking about how not everyone has one yet and such, do you guys think at ALL about the future?  How long do you honestly expect not supporting HD to be considered even remotely acceptable?  We're talking about a consumer device that connects to televisions.  The assumption should be that it would support ALL commonly used video inputs and that include HDMI.  Nintendo was taking a risk by not including it in the first place.  Obviously the successor HAS to support it.  TV has changed.  Nintendo has to adapt.
 
Nintendo didn't re-invent the wheel with the GBA and it was a successful follow-up to the GBC.  Sony didn't re-invent the wheel with the PS2.  You don't have to go nutty, a boost in graphics quality and few tweaks is good enough.  The Wii was a big risk in that the remote could have been completely rejected.  If Nintendo goes nuts with a new control scheme again they run the risk of turning off the audience they've just won over.  I think you want to keep things somewhat similar to what they're already used to.
 
And a DSi style upgrade is just a big "**** you" to your customers.  They're arrogant pricks just asking to lose if they do that.  They might succeed this time but they'll just be preparing their own eventual fall.  Don't get cocky.  That's how Atari, Sony and Nintendo themselves all lost.
 
People spend money on worthless **** they don't need all the time if it's trendy.  The idiots that pay extra money for Starbucks when their office provides FREE coffee will fucking buy a Wii 2.

[KDR_11k]

Obviously the successor to the Wii will have HD but making a successor that's merely a Wii with better graphics would destroy Nintendo. With the disruption they changed the rules of the console market, making the same system with better graphics is no longer sufficient (and neither is making the same games with better graphics which is tripping those third parties up). Making a new console would be based around the question "how do we sell this to people who didn't buy a Wii?" and I don't think the number of people who refused to buy the Wii solely due to weaker graphics is significant enough to warrant the investment.

The Wii is like a new NES, making a SNES to it would just get fewer users because it can only recapture users from before, not gain new ones.

There won't be a DSi style upgrade, Nintendo doesn't do that with consoles. They've always done handheld revisions but console revisions are rare. Think about it, the console is just a block that you shove a disc into to connect your controller to the TV, it isn't nearly as important as the controller you are holding so things like the Wavebird were better revisions than replacing the box under the TV that you ignore anyway.

[Chozo Ghost]

The assumption should be that it would support ALL commonly used video inputs and that include HDMI.  Nintendo was taking a risk by not including it in the first place.  Obviously the successor HAS to support it.  TV has changed.  Nintendo has to adapt.

Nintendo took some big risks this generation, but not supporting HD was absolutely not one of those risks. It was actually the safest and least risky course to choose. Supporting HD made the PS3 and 360 insanely expensive consoles, and it made development costs a lot higher. These were risks Nintendo didn't take, but the competition did, and we see how things have worked out.

The Wii wouldn't be as successful as it is now if it had included HD and the reason is because both the console and the games would have been much more costly as a result. Aside from the motion controls, the big thing the Wii had going for it was it only cost $249 when its competitors were $500 or even $600. I don't care how much better graphics look, no one wants to spend lots of money on video games.

Look at every generation of video gaming and you will see the weakest system has always pulled ahead. It isn't because gamers hate the best graphics, its because they love the best price. Weaker consoles almost always cost less, and therefore they are more appealing to consumers.

So this was not only not a risk for Nintendo to leave HD out, but it would have been TAKING A RISK if Nintendo had included it. Becuase if they did the console would have likely cost $100 more (and/or been sold at a loss), and the MSRP of the games would be $60 instead of $49. Both of those factors would have made the Wii less attractive to consumers, and the higher development cost of doing HD would have diminished turd party support. I know the turd parties suck and are treating the Wii like a toilet which they dump their shovelware on, but if the games were expensive to make then that shovelware wouldn't be there. We wouldn't have quality games, what we would have is nothing at all. So I guess at least this way we are getting cheaply and quickly made shovelware instead of nothing, ala the GC.

And as for your comment about HD having HDMI connections, okay, but who cares? Every HD TV I've seen does indeed have HDMI ports, but you know what? Every HD tv also has RCA and component connections as well. Connecting a Wii to an HD tv is never an issue. And most people still do not own HD tvs, and back in 2006 that was certainly even more true.

So again, this was a shrewd move on Nintendo's party. They were playing it safe actually. It is the inclusion of HD that would have been the bigger gamble, and it is a gamble the competition has lost. As the facts will prove...

[Chozo Ghost]

As for HD those of you talking about how not everyone has one yet and such, do you guys think at ALL about the future?  How long do you honestly expect not supporting HD to be considered even remotely acceptable?  We're talking about a consumer device that connects to televisions.  The assumption should be that it would support ALL commonly used video inputs and that include HDMI.  Nintendo was taking a risk by not including it in the first place.  Obviously the successor HAS to support it.  TV has changed.  Nintendo has to adapt.

Ian, as you know Blu-ray won that war it had with HD-DVD, but despite that its adoption rate has been a major disappointment for Sony. It seems that consumers just don't give much of a **** about HD this and graphics that. Wii Sports looks like an N64 era game, but its kicking the ass of anything that's been made on HD. Consumers simply don't care.

The only ones who care about HD at all are elitist technophiles (a very small minority of consumers, mind you), and the big-wigs over at Sony and other companies. These are the only ones who give a rats ass at all about HD. Everyone else doesn't even care, and if you put it in front of them they probably won't even be able to notice the difference. What they do notice is that one costs ridiculously more than the other.

You seem to have bought into the corporate HD bandwagon espoused by Sony and so forth. Meanwhile, the majority of consumers are having fun watching DVD movies on their Standard definition TVs and DVD players and playing SD games like Wii Sports.

And the proof of this is right there in front of you if you look at the sales. Blu-rays adoption has been far less than Sony had hoped, and the same is true with the PS3 and all things HD.

You may be right that at some point Nintendo will be "forced" to make a change to HD, but this will be years from now and by then we will be in a new generation of gaming.

[NWR_Lindy]

Yes, HD is not as popular as it could be now, but SD is on the way out.  It'll take a while though, maybe 10 years, but that doesn't mean that devices can't move things forward at an accelerated rate.  HD just doesn't have a killer app at the moment, but that doesn't mean that people absolutely don't care about it.  It's just that there isn't something out there that has MADE them upgrade yet.

However, do you think that the next TV people buy is going to be HD?  I do.  But expensive TVs aren't something you buy more than maybe once in a decade, so you aren't going to see HD adoption overnight.  Nintendo would be wise to at least cater to it in some respect; ignoring it outright will look sillier and sillier over the next few years.

[Chozo Ghost]

I don't think HD will ever get this "killer app" because it can't do anything different than what SD can do. It can only make things look a tiny bit better, but that's it. There's absolutely nothing different besides aesthetics.

[Ian Sane]

To me this HD thing is like if Nintendo released the NES with coaxial being the only option and all of you would have been fine with it.  The Gamecube supports component video.  It was not something that was widely used.  But if people had the TV that supported it it was a nice feature to have and one widely expected from a consumer electronic that connected to a television.  I don't live in the US.  I don't know what things are like there.  But with the people I know I'm the old fuddy duddy for using an SDTV and being perfectly content with it.  Do stores even carry anything but HDTV's these days?  I just looked at the TV's on BestBuy.ca and every single one was HD.  You think Nintendo not supporting the features of EVERY TV IN THE ****ING STORE is okay for the foreseeable future?

I also think it's silly to assume that crappy ass graphics are part of the Wii's success.  It's not like if Wii Sports looked good it would have bombed.  And the "rule" about weakest hardware fails with Nintendo's own SNES which SMOKED the Genesis in sounds and graphics and won the 16-bit generation.  All of Nintendo's previous consoles were also the TOP hardware at the time of release with the exception of the Cube which launched with the Xbox, but was still cutting edge for the time.  The Wii is the oddball.  It is the only console I can think of where they INTENTIONALLY borked the hardware.  The NES being weaker than the Sega Master System doesn't mean squat.  The SMS came out after.  The NES at the time was a monster compared to the Ataris and Colecovisions it was replacing.

I guess what I'm asking is do you think Nintendo should match the current PS3 hardware with the Wii 2?  The PS3 costs $300 which is well within the realm of affordibility.  If Nintendo matched that in the next two years it would be a good price point and the PS3 is probably not getting replaced because it would take another $600 disaster to do so.

Making a new console would be based around the question "how do we sell this to people who didn't buy a Wii?" and I don't think the number of people who refused to buy the Wii solely due to weaker graphics is significant enough to warrant the investment.

That's a weird business model.  What's wrong with just getting the existing Wii userbase to buy another console and give you repeat business?  If you just focus on who isn't buying your product you risk losing those that already are.  You know who didn't buy a Wii?  The people that cared about graphics capabilities and decent third party support and weren't impressed by motion control.  How do you get those people to buy a Wii 2 unless you do what I'm suggesting?  The Wii is mainstream.  There's no vast untapped market.  Nintendo tapped it last gen.
 

[Ymeegod]

I think Big N would have been better off with a bit more power myself.  Why?  Multiplatform titles.  The GC recieved alot a ports simply because it really didn't cost much to port it over the only thing lacking was disc space.  The WII actually has the same disc storage space as the Xbox but it lacks power meaning the developers have to remake the game instead of just porting.  Yeah Big N wins in profits but the gamer suffers.

I think Big N will have to come out in 2012-2013 myself.  Why?  In the US the WII continues to kill the others but in Japan the WII sales have slacked off so the PS3 is gaining a bit of steam.  Controlling the Japanese market is going get interesting this year and I'm guessing Sony's going gain 10% back of the market.  MS is still dead weight over there so.

[Chozo Ghost]

To me this HD thing is like if Nintendo released the NES with coaxial being the only option and all of you would have been fine with it.  The Gamecube supports component video.  It was not something that was widely used.  But if people had the TV that supported it it was a nice feature to have and one widely expected from a consumer electronic that connected to a television.  I don't live in the US.  I don't know what things are like there.  But with the people I know I'm the old fuddy duddy for using an SDTV and being perfectly content with it.  Do stores even carry anything but HDTV's these days?  I just looked at the TV's on BestBuy.ca and every single one was HD.  You think Nintendo not supporting the features of EVERY TV IN THE ****ING STORE is okay for the foreseeable future?

A few things to say here:

1) Every NEW TV in a store seems to be HD, yeah, but TVs in a store is one thing, TVs in homes is another. How often do people upgrade their tvs? Since TVs aren't cheap I suspect many people use them until they die, and then get a new one. When they do odds are what they get will be HD, but this is going to be a slow process that takes years.

2) The Wii works fine on HD tvs. I know this for a fact because my Wii is hooked up to the only HD tv in the house. I also have a non-HD DVD player hooked up to that HD tv and it works just fine on that as well.

3) Do I think Nintendo not supporting HD is fine for the foreseeable future? As a matter of fact, yes. It isn't like the Wii won't work on an HD tv, so no one is being forced to make an upgrade. This isn't like DTV where you had to upgrade or your TV would stop working. The Wii will work just as well on an HD ad an SD. It won't spit out HD graphics on either one, but that is fine by me and by most people for that matter.

I also think it's silly to assume that crappy ass graphics are part of the Wii's success.  It's not like if Wii Sports looked good it would have bombed.  And the "rule" about weakest hardware fails with Nintendo's own SNES which SMOKED the Genesis in sounds and graphics and won the 16-bit generation.

But the 16-bit generation was the ONLY exception to the rule of weaker hardware always winning. There was never another generation (that I know of) where that was the case. Also, that generation was extremely close and it wasn't really a run-away victory for the SNES, which really only began to pull ahead in the later years of that era. I think a lot of the SNES success had to do with the failure of SEGA's Genesis add-ons which ruined customer confidence in the company. And also because SEGA was moving on with its Saturn thing while Nintendo was still plodding ahead for another year on the SNES.

Some really killer SNES games came out in the final years of its life that are hard to believe were done on 16-bit hardware. Hell, games like Super Mario RPG, DKC, and Killer Instinct looked as good as or even better than PS1 games.

But that's going offtopic... all I'm saying is every rule has an exception and the 16-bit generation was that exception of the weaker system always winning rule. But even then it was a close fight, and there's never been another generation with that coke/pepsi style duopoly of the videogame market.

[BlackNMild2k1]

The next Wii will be HD, Iwata has said this already, so what are you guys arguing about?

As far as HDTV adoption.... it's good. But why is it good?
To the average consumer it's not because you can watch movies or TV in HD, it's because of form factor. Throw out that old 32" tv that takes up the space of a La-Z-Boy(& weighs about the same too), throw out that 55"  projection that takes up more space than the dining room table(& heavy as a car) and get an even bigger TV that has widescreen and gets rid of those black bars, a bigger TV that fits on this small shelf or hangs directly on the wall, this bigger TV that only weighs 25 lbs.

As a matter of fact, if you need a new TV you will have to look far and wide to even find a store that sells anything but HDTV's.

So it's not a question of will the Wii2 be HD, it a question of what else is the Wii2 gonna do besides HD and wiimote+ that is gonna make everyone want to rush out and buy it.

& I still stand by the prediction of Xmas 2011 (depending on how Xmas 2010 goes).