NathansFortune
Regular
I can't personally understand a business entity as part of a publicly traded company NOT attempting to maximise profits. I suspect COD 4 became massive because it gave people what they wanted, so perhaps thats the answer. Are Sony studios making the games they want to play and not the games which the widest possible audience want to play?
Maximising profits is a misnomer. That style of management leads to mediocrity and eventually failure. Innovation breeds success which is what counts when it comes to profitability.
Nintendo does that too, but for the most part whenever they do it they achieve a lot more success in the marketplace which is perplexing.
They achieve more success when it comes to Mario or another core IP like Zelda. Nintendo have a different business model whereby people associate them with certain franchises and those franchises will drive hardware adoption, Mario and Pokemon are the obvious ones, recently Wii Sports and Wii Fit have been massive for them, but they are linked to the Wii brand more than the Nintendo brand like Mario is.
I think in buying Mm SCE have bought themselves a Mario in Sackboy. A character that people will link to PlayStation 2-3 gens from now in the same way Mario is linked to Nintendo consoles or Sonic was linked to Sega. It's very important to have that I think as it helps people differentiate what they are going to get, they know with a Wii they will get Mario, Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus, with an Xbox 360 they know it will be Halo or Gears. The problem for Sony has been that they only have GT5, a car game with no mascots, as their system defining game, more recently Nathan Drake has been helping perceptions a lot but Sony still need a character that is synonymous with PlayStation, and I think it will be Sackboy.