Everyone today has an opinion about what Nintendo should do. A hedge fund is pushing the company to develop mobile games and add more in-game microtransactions. Some analysts believe that Nintendo should acquire former rival Sega, or develop software on rival hardware platforms. These ideas, presumably, could reverse the company's 70% and 25% respective reductions of its Wii U and 3DS sales forecasts for fiscal 2014.
All of those ideas, however, overlook the biggest problem of all -- that Nintendo isn't properly growing its brands or evolving as a company. So let's examine how Nintendo can evolve its business by taking cues from a similarly iconic company that grew into a media conglomerate -- The Walt Disney Company.
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
After being benched for 20 years, and returning only to be forsaken again despite being a splendid game, it's time Kid Icarus gets salvation.
Mario's already more popular than Mickey Mouse, so I can't see why not.
Also, Disney has acquired a bunch of more mature titles and studios, I wouldn't mind Nintendo doing that.
In fact, I agree with the article completely. Nintendo needs to evolve, they need to make more mature titles, but they should definitely keep their family oriented games as well.
Nintendo would make more Star Wars games if they acquired Lucas Films like Disney did.
Nintendo should have just made a console in the same league as PS4/xone and finally warmed up to 3rd party publishers by making it have easy to develop for hardware and a strong online infrastructure.
If Nintendo's console had the power of xone/ps4, all the third party titles, proper online and controller, it would have been unstoppable.
I don't know why Nintendo never tries to appeal to 3rd parties, there's so much money to be made from licensing fees - and honestly, they couldn't have done any worse. They failed since N64 and got lucky ONCE with Wii. Doing the same thing each gen and avoiding the typical core gamer is not working for them at all. N64 (demolished), GC (demolished), Wii (woohoo short term success then lost all new casual gamers to phones/ipad), Wii U (people are questioning whether they can survive making consoles).
I for one would been happy to have the console that plays BF4, Destiny, Division, etc. at the same level of PS4/xone AND Metroid, Mario Kart and Zelda.
Nintendo is fine doing what it is doing.
Wonderful article but....Nintendo is Nintendo and disney is disney. Mario is already more popular than Mickey.