Analysts Strike Again: Nintendo Bad For Gaming

Uhm, I think you're reading a skosh too much into what the dude said. Black Spy is quite correct.

As presented the article is disturbingly misleading, probably with an eye to creating exactly the sort of comments that have followed it.

The analyst in question is not presuming to cast judgement over Nintendo for anything as asinine as 'ruining the gaming industry' or any other such nonsense...indeed his comments are directed not at gamers, the gaming industry, or even Nintendo. He presumably addresses investors, attempting to educate them about the sector in question, a sector you and I presumably are familiar with. The denziens of the spong forum know (and care about) the ins and the outs and the whys and the wheretofores...He and his presumed audience care not about the state of the industry except insofar as it affects their account balances and dividends, he is concerned with the money, not whose fault it is or why.

An old adage is a rising tide lifts all ships, and in the world of stocks and securities this old adage sometimes has its own intertia, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, within a sector, many times the stocks of other companies within the sector are affected in a positive manner by the success of other stocks within the same sector. Many times this is a perfectly reasonably and correct phenomena, other times, a kind of placebo effect. What this analyst is actually saying, and once again hes saying this to investor and money types, is just becasue Nintendo is kicking ass and taking names (once again your shrewd investor type could care less about why the Wiis are all sold out in the shops, but he can see SOMETHING is going on, 'praps hes even played a bit of Wii Bowling with Gran), don't count on the same success from major game publishers, becasue they're keeping most of the money themselves. What he IS practicaly screaming as loud as he can without actually saying it is: If you want to invest in the sector, BUY NINTENDO or nothing. Because the 'major game publishers aren't going to benefit from Nintendo's success.

This guy would probably see a raft of impending liscenced movie tie-in games as a GOOD THING for chrissake...don't get too worked up by what comes out of his mouth, it wasn't for your consumption in any case.

Previous generations have shown that generally only Nintendo really profits from its own systems, thus I think it would be reasonable to deduce that other publishers will find it harder to have a hit on the Wii and DS thus as Nintendo takes more market share there will be a knock-on effect for other games companies.

I think these are reasonable comments.

Of course, all this depends if publishers and developers actually manage to innovate and release good, solid titles as opposed to half-baked games that sell on other systems. At the moment even Nintendo isn't producing much quality, innovative, software for Wii especially thus there is, perhaps, a potentially bigger third party market at the present time than on previous systems.

In previous generations, you mean the industry-reviving NES or the third party bonanza that was the SNES? Because you can't really mean the N64 or GC where third parties just left Nintendo so that Nintendo was the only one making worthwhile games on those consoles and also, exclusive good third party games on those two consoles did sell well.

Oh look, we ran out of previous generations to make your point with! How odd.

it is true that Nintendo consoles have the problem that you have to compete with Nintendo's games. But good quality third party games do sell on Nintendo-consoles nonetheless. Not Nintendo's fault that third parties chicken out or only release useless cookiecutter on their consoles that sell bad (because the games are crap) and then use that as a good reason to stop making games for a N-console. Now is it...

"Likely shorter product cycles" is the phrase that really exposes this man's ignorance. He's obviously swallowed Sony's "ten year product life" boast whole (as if it wasn't entirely due to backwards compatibility), or maybe he thinks that the DS and DS Lite are two completely different videogame systems.

Nintendo's domination of its own systems' sales charts is, I'm sure, due largely to the poor market share those systems had. Did Nintendo also hog the NES and SNES game sales? Or Game Boy and GBA? Does it hog DS sales? I don't know the answers to these questions -- but I suspect that despite the insane popularity of Nintendo's Pokemon, other publishers did quite well on the handhelds, where Nintendo had the dominant system. And the Wii is clearly poised to dominate this generation of consoles.

I'm sure others will be able to point you in the direction of Nintendo's various anti-competitive practices with these consoles, notably with regards to cart chips.