Should Nintendo Just make games
 

...and not systems?

No, they should stay with the console buissness... They have had pleantly of success in it and I dont think they'll stop any time soon... Maybe in a few generations, but not within the next 2-3...

They should definitely ride their handheld wave. They got a lock on that business.

I hated the Gamecube with a passion when it first came out. However, many of the games I've played through recently have been Gamecube exclusive.

No, they have the tools to be the #1 console, they just have to stop being stubborn about not going online or making more mature games.

And the fact they are even more money whoring than Sony and Microsoft combined.

Actually, I heard that they will most likely stop making consoles after the next one, and focus on games. :(

Nah. It was a rumor stemmed from a mis-quote

:roll: You're obviously uninformed... Microsoft alone surpasses all other major gaming companies with their money whoring. They have a legal monopoly on the computer industry... and are probably the second most popular gaming console now, second to Sony's.

No, i think Nintendo has the material to be #1, but they need to stop making fuckin kiddy games, wouldn't hurt if they would make more online games 2...if they change that they will be #1 in the future.

I wonder what mario would be like if it was made on another system other than nintendo...

By my count, that is 2 first party games, 0 second party ones and the rest are all 3rd party. And sports games don't count. :p

I am talking mostly about 1st and 2nd party games. If they had given Rare more of a chance (before they jumped ship :'(), there could have been some kickass games on GC. How many companies still make games exclusively for Nintendo? Not many. How many titles are being released on both Xbox and PS2, but not GC? Too many.

My point is, that if Nintendo and the 2nd party companies make more of an effort to get rid of the stigma, they can attract more 3rd party developers to make mature games. They don't have to stop making games like Donkey Konga or Paper Mario 2, because those are going kick ass when they are out, but they need to attract the majority group to buy the system and its games. I read somewhere that the average gamer's age is now 29.

In this country it's 21 with the average Gamecube owner being 23.

http://www.soft-toy.co.uk/acatalog/crash-bandicoot.jpg

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*shudders*

I don't give a shit which "party" they are. They're games on the console, that's all I care about right now. And why don't sports games count? They're not "kiddy" games, so they're perfectly valid.


And Rare is stupid for leaving. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are arguably their two biggest games (aside from their earlier stuff which was, yep, all Nintendo based). Since leaving, they've made... what, Grabbed by the Ghoulies? Oooooh they sure showed Nintendo. And anyways, they still make games for Nintendo anyways, like that upcoming "It's Mr Pants" one or whatever.


And yeah, it would be nice if games like GTA came out on the Cube, but whaddaya gonna do. Nintendo's original titles are enough to keep me coming back for more. LoZ >>>>>>>>>>> GTA

True. Hell, I just picked up Ocarina of Time off eBay for like $10 (also comes with South Park, but nobody likes that game). I don't really care which party the games come from myself, but if Nintendo wants to shed the stiga (warranted or not), they have to make the effort to say "hey, we care about the original gamers too". :-\

Does Nintendo have any second party compainies any more?

OoT was sick.

Are you stoned, or did you receive massive head trauma?

Because a list of a dozen games proves how they're not kiddy.

because a small list of token "adult" games makes up for the rest of their library.

Because everyone out there is like you, and still follows the trends set by TV shows for fourteen year olds.

It's not even the original gamers. It's the fact thatgamers are older these days.

Selling a large body of games that are viewed as kiddy will hurt you in the market when the average fan is over 20.

I think HAL Laboratories is 2nd party, as are Left Field Studios, Retro Studios and Silicon Knights. I'm sure there are a couple of others I'm missing.

this is right down my alley, let me see what I can do...


http://members.optusnet.com.au/james...ario-draft.jpg

:shifty:

:rofl: :love:

Try not being a pointless retard. :)

I hope nintendo don't go the way of Sega, I don't think I could bear just having Sony and Microsoft making consoles.

I'll never understand how the Dreamcast didn't take off.

They tried to corner the market by releasing the first 128bit system a year earlier than it the rest. The trouble with technology is that a year is a very long time, and the PS2 blew Sega out of the water as far as performance.

There was also Sega's history of really flighty support.

they released like a dozen consoles/add-ons between Genesis and Dreamcast. They supported like 3 for more than a month.

This is the reason no-one I knew bought a Dreamcast. Lack of faith in Sega's ability to keep a system up and running.

They could have competed with inferior technology...They had done it before. They released Genesis before SNES, and it ended up showinghow dated it was even against SNES LAUNCH titles. That didn't kill them, though.

Meh, I think so. It just seems that their systems always have a weak selection of games, excluding their first two systems which kicked ass.

Yeah, but yet in most territories the more powerful Master System got destroyed by the NES

Hudson?

I don't think Nintendo should turn to the Sega road and start making games as a third-party developer. The games they make work for their systems and their controllers, so their consoles are worth having every five years. However, they should get comfortable in the place they're now, because they show no sings of taking on the big boys. With their short number of sports games compared to other systems, arguably the most money-making genre out there for the console market, their lack of online support, and their stubbornness to market their kiddy image all help prove this theory. Most old school Nintendo fans are now 20 years or over. We were the ones that bought the NES and fell in love with Mario, Link and Samus. Now that we've all grown up, as much as we like the cute-like Nintendo titles, we're also attracted by more mature concepts, and Nintendo just doesn't deliver in that regard. Most of the good adult-oriented games are available for all consoles, or exclusive to Xbox and PS2, and Nintendo itself hasn't made a single contribution to the genre thus far. In all honesty, I'd prefer everything to stay the way it is. I wouldn't like Nintendo to go out of the hardware business, but for the sake of the industry, I certainly wouldn't like them being at the top.

Now, now, let's try looking at what we've seen from Nintendo over the years, compared to Sony and Microsoft in the video game industry:

- Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, just like he did months ago, recently stated that console online play wasn't a wise business decision for the company. Nintendo doesn't want to lose money in the still-green online console market. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft are supporting online play, even if they're still losing money for it.

- The Nintendo 64 and GameCube charged third parties more money for manufacturing games for their systems than Sony and Microsoft did for theirs. Earlier this year it was reported, by GameSpot, that Nintendo decreased its third-party fees to attract developers, as it was a big reason why some of them didn't make games for the GCN. As we all know, proprietary formats like the N64 cartridges and GCN optical discs cost more money to make, and as a result third-party developers pay more money to make games for these formats than they would for CDs and DVDs.

- Nintendo has just recently released a series of "NES Classics" for the GBA, each one priced at $19.99. One NES game for the GBA, 20 bucks. On the other hand, Capcom released Mega Man: Anniversary Collection for the PS2 and GCN, with 6 NES games, 1 SNES game, 1 PS/Saturn game and 2 arcade games, all for $29.99. This example is merely to show Nintendo's business practices.

- While Sony's Greatest Hits and Microsoft's Platinum Hits games are guaranteed to cost no more than $19.99, Nintendo's Player Choice games are either $19.99 or $29.99.

Saying that Nintendo might be more money-whoring than Microsoft and Sony in the video game industry wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination, and I'm not getting into other subjective points, such as the release of the GBA SP and its price only two years after the original GBA was released, the cost of playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles to their full potential, the marketing fiasco behind the 59 and 251-block memory cards, or more ancient practices, like their stronghold on retail stores during their NES days.


Silicon Knigths, creators of Eternal Darkness and developers of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, have left Nintendo to pursue success in other consoles as third-party developers. I'm not surprised, seeing as how Nintendo did a poor job at marketing Eternal Darkness, a sadly overlooked gem of a game, and SK's defining title. Rumor has it that SK is working on an Xbox project, but nothing has been confirmed.


Nope. They're not second party with Nintendo.

First off...

The problem is, combined against the two, your statements are pretty damning. However, the original contention was that they were more massively money whoring than the two combined. So you took ALL the negative aspects of Nintendo, and ignored all the negative aspects of the other two. Yes. If you only compare the worst aspects of Nintendo to the best of the other two, the contention is valid.

However...

Microsoft owns ISPs and charges a fee for X-Box online. Nintendo doesn't have that level of resource for online gaming. You have to be pretty naïve to think that Microsoft is taking the same kind of loss Nintendo would.

Sony didn't make Mega Man collection. Capcom did. That's a product of NONE of the three companies in question, and is totally irrelevant.

Sony's only offering to fix hardware they shipped out knowing it was defective to avoid a class action lawsuit. That's pretty money grubbing.

Sony has a lot more titles. Dropping their prices on Greatest hits games doesn't hurt them much. It hurts Nintendo more. PLatinum hits for the X-Box? They have a ton of money to throw at it.

Microsoft is known for a monopoly. When one has a monopoly, one tries to protect it. When one expands one's monopoly, one will throw a lot of money into undercutting the opposition, but only as long as it takes to run them out of business.

You bring up (how you won't get into) various costs for playing various games. Good reason. Final Fantasy XI is similarly costly. That's just to play it. None of this "full potential" bullshit.

How much does it cost to play a 16 man game of SOCOM II? That's 16 PS2s, 16 TVs, 16 ISP accounts, 16 USB headsets, 16 Network adapters, 16 games...

Yeah. Crystal Chronicles is gonna be soooo expensive commpared to that...

Nintendo doesn't have to follow the Xbox Live model. It could simply do what Sony does, allow the games' developers to take care of the online plan used. With Nintendo having a broadband and dail-up adapter, they can support their own system with online games as much as Sega does, and Sega was much smaller than Nintendo when a) They took the Dreamcast online, and b) When developing Phantasy Star games for the GCN. Nintendo has options; they just chose the one that reads, "Do nothing."


I specifically said in my last sentence that the example was merely to show Nintendo's business practices, which are quite "money-whoring."


Did Sony know their hardware was defective before shipping it out?


So what? You attacked RemyRedAssassin for saying Nintendo isn't money whoring compared to the other two, and what you just said is exactly being the money-whoring one of the three. Whatever the reason, Sony and Microsoft have more, cheaper titles than tNintendo, so if you go out and get one GH/PH/PC game from each system, which company would you be giving more money to?


But they are far from being a monopoly in the video game industry. Sony would likely be the monopolist of the three, but the economic model that best describes the industry is an unbalanced oligopoly. As far as video games are concerned, Microsoft doesn't have the dominance in the industry as it does in the computer industry, and that's what's relevant. Nintendo makes more profit than Sony and Microsoft in video games, even if the latter two sell more units in software and hardware in America. Who's the one getting richer?


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Ah, but that's every MMORPG of its magnitude. If Nintendo were to make an RPG that big, it would have to charge just as much, if not more. Big MMORPGs have always been known to cost expensive monthly fees, long before Final Fantasy XI showed up at the scene. Still, I will give you a freebie. The HDD from Sony has yet to show the usefulness we've all expected to have, with only FFXI and Resident Evil Outbreak taking advantage of it.


I see your point, but here's mine: What's the purpose of each game? S.O.C.O.M. is a game designed and intended for online play, and all you need is a network adapter and a headset, both of which you'll use often in pretty much 80% of PS2 online games, so purchasing these is somewhat of a necessity if you want to play almost any game online. On the other hand, you have Crystal Chronicles, which is intended to be played by four people simultaneously. You'll need four link cables and four GBAs, and when are you likely to use all that equipment again? With Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords, and that Pac-Man game. That's it.

You might argue that you could instead play with fewer people on FF:CC, and that people may want to play S.O.C.O.M. offline, but where's the reality (or logic) in that? Playing S.O.C.O.M. online gives you the same experience as playing offline, the only difference being that it's much cheaper and you play with people from different parts of the world, not from your living room. Playing with two or three players on FF:CC however, is not the same as playing with four, since the main draw of the game is having three other people in your room having fun along with you, creating more strategy in battles and whatnot. It's only cheaper, but it's potentially less fun.

In other words, getting the most out of S.O.C.O.M. (online play) is cheaper than getting the most out of FF:CC (4P gameplay).

As far as im aware, the GC doesnt come with a hard drive, DVD player or any other "extras" the xbox and ps2 have. Therefore it costs less to make. They're also cheaper to buy. Im willing to bet they have the largest profit margin per unit of any of the big 3. PS2s and Xbox's wern't always 200 bucks. Not everyone has 400-500 bucks to spend on a console. They also make kid games(as well as mature games, despite the smaller selection) PS2 and Xbox have very few kid type games.

Its a cheaper, more family suited solution.

PS2 has more kid games than any other console, it's just that they get lost with so many PS2 games that come out.

And by "profit margin", yeah, Nintendo are making the least loss per console. MS are losing £250-£300 per console sold these days.

I doubt they're loosing that much...even if they claim it to be so.

They have pockets deep enough to be able to afford it, but I doubt they'd willingly lose that much money in a market where they wont own a monopoly.

Now, if they we're losing this much money to put sony out of business, I could see it happening. But Sony isnt going anywhere, and as long as they're in the gamming console market, they'll be #1 ahead of MS in terms of units sold, games avalible, and every other stat.

You're probably right about PS2 having more kids games, but they dont have the image of catering to kids needs(and parents desires). Thats why its not a bad thing for Nintendo to have this image. Something the parents feel more comfortable buying for their wee one.