4 ms·

was there any indication from Nintendo that they would come out with a market-leading console (after the disaster that was the GameCube) ?

by wumi 19y ago

marvin 19y ago
Yes, there was. Or rather, there were indications that the Wii would get very popular. I was in the camp of "the Wii is definitely going to be successful", but the market at large obviously wasn't. From what I heard at the time, the Nintendo DS was very successful in "niche markets" (or "casual gamers", choose the label that suits you), which could be taken as an indication that the Wii, with its promised novel control scheme, would be very popular at least among non-gamers. For contrarian investing, there were a lot of things pointing towards Nintendo being undervalued in early 2005. The prevalent opinion of "graphics capabilities is the most important aspect of a computer game" and "gamers want predictability, not a novel control scheme" and "Nintendo sales have been falling since the NES" should have set off lots of red lights among people who actually play games. Market-leading is actually an irrelevant label in this regard, the important thing is that Nintendo released a console that made them more profitable than they were. In sales, the GameCube did about as well as the XBOX..not the market leader by a factor of 6, but definitely not something that would kill the company by itself. Any console doing better than that would drive up the stock price of Nintendo ("break the negative trend canal in sales", as an annoying stock market analyst would say)
- maxwell 19y ago
  Nintendo has been the leader of the videogame hardware market continuously since the NES days. Though they lost the fifth- and sixth-generation console wars to Sony, their >90% share of the handheld market was enough to secure them as top manufacturer through the late 90s and early 00s.

4 ms·

was there any indication from Nintendo that they would come out with a market-leading console (after the disaster that was the GameCube) ?

by wumi 19y ago

was there any indication from Nintendo that they would come out with a market-leading console (after the disaster that was the GameCube) ?

marvin 19y ago
Yes, there was. Or rather, there were indications that the Wii would get very popular. I was in the camp of "the Wii is definitely going to be successful", but the market at large obviously wasn't. From what I heard at the time, the Nintendo DS was very successful in "niche markets" (or "casual gamers", choose the label that suits you), which could be taken as an indication that the Wii, with its promised novel control scheme, would be very popular at least among non-gamers. For contrarian investing, there were a lot of things pointing towards Nintendo being undervalued in early 2005. The prevalent opinion of "graphics capabilities is the most important aspect of a computer game" and "gamers want predictability, not a novel control scheme" and "Nintendo sales have been falling since the NES" should have set off lots of red lights among people who actually play games. Market-leading is actually an irrelevant label in this regard, the important thing is that Nintendo released a console that made them more profitable than they were. In sales, the GameCube did about as well as the XBOX..not the market leader by a factor of 6, but definitely not something that would kill the company by itself. Any console doing better than that would drive up the stock price of Nintendo ("break the negative trend canal in sales", as an annoying stock market analyst would say)
- maxwell 19y ago
  Nintendo has been the leader of the videogame hardware market continuously since the NES days. Though they lost the fifth- and sixth-generation console wars to Sony, their >90% share of the handheld market was enough to secure them as top manufacturer through the late 90s and early 00s.