Just read here that Nintendo are to reveal a pre-tax loss of ¥100 billion (£821 million), which is a lot of money even for Nintendo. With the recent flop of 3DS and developers turning away from Nintendo DS / Wii because of high production costs, bad sales and the terrible WiiWare and DSiWare platforms, is there much future left for Nintendo? Nintendo are also suffering at the hands of smart phones and tablets such the iPhone, iPad and Android, with the insanity driven sea of free and $0.99 games and apps (termed frapp-mentality) taking over, people do not want to pay $20-$40 for a hand held game these days,
How can Nintendo survive? Well they can go the way of console hardware manufacturers of the past such as Sega and sell / rework old intellectual properties / develop games across platforms. They could even embrace the Android platform and create their own handheld based / phone / tablet on the technology, offering their own premium Nintendo apps channel.
Who knows, is this the beginning of the end of the much loved Nintendo as a console developer / manufacturer or do Nintendo have something up their sleeves that will blow us away like the Nintendo Wii originally did? Maybe some crazy cool virtual reality console that you control with your mind!? I guess we will have to just wait and see.
Hats off to Nintendo and good luck to them.
Personally I read into this months ago. The failure of the 3DS to pick up any sales was a HUGE warning sign.
It was clear that once more Nintendo was resting on the laurels of their Wii console, just like they do every time they have a successful console cycle.
The need for an HD version was clear, however the Wii U is not what people want, form the reactions I have seen following the press release. So they are going to have to price it very low if they want to be successful.
Mobile is now such a different game from the days of the GBA. Every smart phone is now also a powerful game console, more powerful than GBA 3DS or PSP, the quality of content may be lacking but I doubt it that Nintendo will enter the Android platform, it’s not in their DNA to write software for platforms that they do not own. Also if they do that, they will kill their own hardware line, just like Sega did, with the current management that will never happen, they prefer to let Nintendo die than to do anything as dramatic.
As a Nintendo “Fanboy” (own every console) for many years I am now used to this cycle in Nintendo, one huge success followed by almost bankruptcy and a miraculous rescue, somethings never change 😉
Yep, its a pity about the 3DS, I had held hopes out for it, but the sags with it causing problems with peoples eyes didn’t help.
Lets hope they pull it back again 🙂