I'm not expecting them to ever replicate the Wii. But they're definitely competing with Sony and MS with the Wii U and the Wii U2. Unless Mums around the world are recognising that the different nuanced product offerings between the various expensive plastic slabs in the shop mean little Johnny should have more than one, then they're competing for the same consumer spend.

Profitability isn't a very good measure of success for them based on where they've come from and what they own. I could make money as CEO of Nintendo by firing everyone, renting an office with a phone line and saying yes when people ring up asking to licence IP. I could probably make a profitable Mario game by hiring a two-bit dev to repackage Doodle Jump and release it on iOS. Neither of these are very promising in the long-term. But neither is releasing solid gold games on their own hardware to an ever-dwindling, ever more jaded, ever-ageing group of man-children.

I'm probably never going to be Nintendo CEO. I probably won't ever by their CFO either. So there's a limit to how much I care about any of this. I am one of their ageing man-children core market though. And if they're going to keep asking me to buy a bespoke plastic box to play 3 or 4 games on over 3 or 4 years then a) the games had better be gold and b) I'm not doing that forever.

regmcfly wrote:

Most of the games sold weren't for you cf 20 million copies of Carnival Games

Just dance man. That game is still selling on wii I think.

optimark_prime wrote:

Unfortunately, a lot of people who bought a Wii and Wii Fit etc, aren't the people who are used to upgrading their console every 6 years or so.

But they are the kind of people who may upgrade a phone every two.

monkey wrote:

For Nintendo, I'd define success as anything other than another third place out of three contenders at the end of the lifetime of the console. They can be profitable for the next 50 years if they wanted just by licensing their IP to other devs.

They could sell the most consoles by flogging them at a massive loss.

I guess that we've concluded that success is a mutlifaceted thing.