Nintendo Revolution... More Like Retrolution

[Xantar]

Well, what does it mean to be in third place?

Number of consoles sold? Ok, I suppose I can buy that, but how important is that?

Amount of money made? This being a business, is that what's really the most important? Well, Nintendo's not in third place there.

If there's anybody who has some hard facts to deal with, it's Microsoft. They're going to have a hard time making money any time soon. After posting a profit for one quarter not too long ago, they went back to losing even more money than usual. Sure, Microsoft has deep pockets, but they didn't get to be giants by losing money for decades in a venture. And truth to tell, I'm not so sure the Xbox 360 is going to pull Microsoft out of the rut either. It seems to have gotten rather overshadowed by the PS3, and in this generation, Microsoft isn't going to have the clearly most powerful console (note, I don't know which console is most powerful, but there's no clear winner which is really the point). Meantime, Sony can lower the price of the PS3 and force Microsoft down whenever they feel like it just like they did in this generation. So where's Microsoft going to make the money? Some day down the road a few generations from now? A lot of things change in that amount of time.

Nintendo is doing fine businesswise, meanwhile. Incidentally, the DS sold 2 million units as of April 20th and the PSP sold half a million as of March 31st. There's no more up to date data available, unfortunately. And yes it's true that the DS had a head start (although by the same token, so did the PS2). My point is simply that the DS isn't clearly getting creamed in the U.S. by the PSP either.

Now a word about FuFu's vendetta: I think his point was that even if Nintendo had showed a lot about the Revolution, people would have jumped on them for showing Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros. and so on. That's not all that Nintendo shows (in fact, they had a lot of stuff in this E3 that wasn't one of their big three franchises), but it's what people notice. So if they had shown the Revolution with all their franchise characters, many people (and I think you, too) would have criticized them for relying too much on their franchises and not looking forward enough. They would have looked at the Mario platformer and said, "Same old, same old. Get something new." And if Mario and Zelda had been nowhere in sight, other people would have complained about how Nintendo isn't giving the fans what they want. And since they didn't actually show much about the Revolution, people also complained. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

It's not a conspiracy. It's just that people are always looking out for things to criticize about Nintendo. And meantime, nobody complains about the fact that the PS3 is going to have Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4, Gran Turismo 5, and Tekken 6. Not that I think they necessarily should. But there seems to be a bit of a double standard going on here.

I really don't know that Nintendo could do anything to satisfy someone like you except perhaps become a clone of Sony. But they can't do that, nor do I think they should. Microsoft is trying to beat Sony at their own game, and all they've gotten out of it is a several billion dollar loss. Sure, now they've gotten their name out there. What's that worth in an industry that moves as fast as this one? I'm sure Nintendo has known for a long time that people like you wouldn't be happy with what they're doing, and I'm also sure that they've calculated that their bottom line will do just fine nonetheless. And I'm also sure that if they started trying to do everything that Sony is doing with multimedia functions and revealing information about everything and trying to outpower the competitors, it wouldn't gain them a thing. The industry just doesn't work that way.