Nintendo To Post First Annual Loss, Grossly Underestimates Losses

About time.

What's that supposed to mean?

He be hatin'

If they start losing money, maybe they'll realize they need to come up with better ideas.

The funny thing is when Nintendo made a profit, and more so with the Wii, people acted like as if this was a grand sin because Microsoft and Sony usually sell on a loss. I think some believe that selling at a loss=better games....or something.

I think people (Core Gamers) had a problem with the Wii because it was viewed as gimmicky. That the motion controls were nothing more than mere novelty rather than a real evolution in gaming. I don't think that has been proven wrong frankly. If you look at the Wii lineup, a vast number of the games from 3rd parties are "Party" games that just include a bunch of Mini-games, many of which are not particularly good. The only games to really use the motion controls well were all first party games from Nintendo directly, such as Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Skyward Sword, etc. Of those games though, the only one that I would argue would be made noticeably worse if it lost the Motion functionality was Skyward Sword. You couldn't really say Mario Kart or Mario Galaxy would have lost a lot if it didn't have the motion sensing in my opinion.

But I digress. I don't think people were hating on Nintendo for making a profitable system, I think they were hating on Nintendo for perceivably abandoning the "core gamer" in favour of the "casual gamer" with their Wii system through the use of gimmicky novelty. I don't think it actually WAS entirely common knowledge that Nintendo was making a profit on it's system sales and MS and Sony were losing. But I could be wrong there.

Pretty much says everything you need to know about Nintendo's console software sales.

Of course, both Sony and Microsoft have games as a division of a larger entity--it would be interesting to see how their standalone games departments performed.

@ Rinnon because the reply button got eaten up:

It may have not have been common knowledge that Nintendo sells on a profit, but it was still known enough by many avid gamers. By Nintendo going the casual/family route, Nintendo was also proven right that if they had tried to directly compete against Sony and Microsoft's market, Nintendo would have been whooped again, so they had to do something to make up their shrinking profit margins. I won't go into details on whether or not this was a good thing, but I will say that Nintendo opened up a new can of worms on the casual market for consoles.