Some Nintendo What Ifs

[Kalin]

a) Good title do well.

Very, very questionable.

 

[Teasy]

There's been plenty of game AFAIK launched on one console that eventually made the transition to another console and found a willing customer base there.

A game being released on one system and then selling ok on another system 6 months later is hardly the same thing. Mario, Zelda, Metroid ect are only ever released on a Nintendo console. If you want those games on a console then you know from the start that there is only one place to get them. Having said that I have no doubt that these games would sell some copies on the PS2 and even some on XBox but the question would be how many. What you surely must agree on is that these games would sell nowhere near as well on PS2 or XBox as they did on GC.

Royalties is where they lose profit margins, but if they sell more games they make more money. Would they rather make $1 billion profit selling on their own hardware without paying royalties, or $2 billion profit selling on PS2 after paying Sony's royalties.

As I've mentioned before this generation Nintendo sold at least 60 million of there own games on GameCube. They've also made a couple of billion from licensing fees and peripheral sales. To beat Nintendo's profit this generation as a third party they would have to sell around 225 million games.

Now lets assume that the same 20 million people who bought a GC again buy 60 million Nintendo games (average of 3 games per person). That means that 80 million people who weren't even interested enough in Nintendo games to buy a $99 console would have to buy 165 million Nintendo games (just over 2 games per person on average for those 80 million people). How can you really say that you believe that would happen if Nintendo went third party?

 

[fearsomepirate]

There's no rel evidence either way. some think that anyone interested in playing Mario (GC) games would buy a GC, but I don't think that's true.

Obviously it's true of some people. While no one buys a GC for Mario Tennis, you do get two kinds of adopters regarding Mario:

1. People who buy the GC out of a general appreciation of the Mario franchise. These people then go on to buy a few Mario games later.

2. People who buy GC's for other reasons (Zelda, Mariokart, whatever), then buy Mario games because they're there.

The second type of adopter disappears if Nintendo goes 3rd-party. Mario Baseball was a top ten game last month in part due to the fact there weren't many other games on the Cube it had to compete with. Someone owning only a Gamecube isn't choosing between Mario Baseball and DMC3. Similarly, Metroid Prime 2 only had to compete with Halo 2 among people owning both Xbox and GC and people getting their first console. For people owning only a GC (such as me), Halo 2 wasn't even an option last Christmas, so MP2 was the "big" title. While 400K units isn't the greatest, if it had been an Xbox title, sales would likely have been lower, not higher.

The point is whether the increase in user base would mean more software income for Nintendo

No, the point is whether the increase in user base would mean more software income for Nintendo, period. You are completely overlooking the huge increase in competition they would have purely on the software front. Increasing usebase doesn't always mean increasing income. The classic examples are Sega (Xbox has a much larger audience than DC ever did, but they couldn't move sell copies of Jet Set Radio Future to save their lives) and the Viewtiful Joe 2. Nintendo as a software publisher has an effective near-monopoly on somewhere between a 10 and 18 million-person segment of the home console market. Has this worked? I'd say hell yeah; the only company on the planet that beats them in software sales is EA. #3 Activision trailed by a good 20% last month, and #4 THQ pulled around only half as much as Nintendo did.

You think it's because they make so many games? Guess again. In September, Nintendo published a grand total of four new games. Activision publsihed twelve.

DO NOT KILL THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGG.

 

[Tahir2]

What if Shigeru Miyamoto started *making* games again instead of leading projects.

What if 2D platform games became the killer app of next generation consoles?

What if only on Revolution there was this neat mode that allowed a sprite to be mapped and scaled over a large area creating the effect of 3D scaling?

What if...I didn't miss my SNES so much.