seven wingless kingfishers

parislemon:

Daisuke Wakabayashi for WSJ:

Nintendo slashed its sales outlook in the wake of disappointing holiday demand for its new Wii U videogame console, which it had been banking on to rekindle consumer excitement.

…

For the current fiscal year to March, Nintendo now expects an operating loss of ¥20 billion, compared with an earlier projection for an operating profit of ¥20 billion.

Yikes. Hate to say “I told you so” here, because I love Nintendo. But the writing has been on the wall for a while. I just don’t see how Nintendo stays in the hardware business.

Yes, yes, you could have said the same about Apple way back when. But the difference here is that it’s not about mismanagement. The world has simply changed.

We’ll see how Microsoft and Sony fare later this year, but I’m pretty bearish on stand-alone gaming consoles. Microsoft is wise to make the Xbox more of an “entertainment hub”, and less about pure gaming.

I just wonder how long it will take the very proud Nintendo to license out their games. If I were Apple, I would give them a blank check for iOS exclusives on Mario, Zelda, etc. Apple is all about making moves to sell hardware — imagine how much hardware such a move would sell.

Great points. A lot could be said for the kind of money Nintendo could be looking at in licensing those kinds of franchises to Sony / MSFT. Imagine a bidding war over who gets to put things like Super Mario World / Paper Mario / Mario Kart / Zelda / etc. on their network. But I don’t see it happening any time soon; seems fair to say being the source of those franchises is one of the reasons the Wii has sold so well for so long. Seems they either need to focus on making the Wii’s successor a homerun in the face of next-gen offerings, or maybe let the license bidding war happen. 

Paper Mario & Mario Kart on my 360? I can’t even.