It’s the only reason to ever own Nintendo consoles
Comment on "Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 1 day ago
How many people are buying a switch BECAUSE of Nintendo’s exclusives? I would speculate damn near all of them.
Exclusives absolutely do drives sales and give the hardware a _reason_to exist. Nintendo figured this out ages ago.
Any logic about how the industry works based off things Microsoft does is…poor.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well yeah, that’s kind of the point.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nintendo’s moat is quite a bit bigger, but they’ll likely see similar diminishing returns on that old strategy as the younger generation is just as likely to play only Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. It’s not just based on what Microsoft does but how much demand there was on other platforms for their games that didn’t drive Xbox sales, and not even just that.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
How many people buy Nintendo for exclusives isn’t super relevant. The important questions are how many more games would they sell if they were multi-platform, and how many fewer consoles they would sell if their games were available elsewhere. They would very likely sell substantially more games, but also likely see a significant reduction in console sales. This would still likely be a win as the games are far higher margin than the consoles.
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Selling hardware if important for them and without exclusivity, they’re not selling it.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
They would still sell a lot of consoles, the super fans are going to buy Nintendo consoles. The people that actually own multiple consoles in the same generation aren’t actually that big of a group, especially compared to non-Nintendo owners that would consider buying a few games if they were available.
Infrapink@thebrainbin.org 1 day ago
There's more to it than that.
Nintendo have spent decades meticulously building up a powerful brand image. As such, there are people who are fans of Nintendo the company/brand to an extent you don't see with Sony or Microsoft; other company's individual games have fans, but you don't get Microsoft Fans or XBox Fans so much as Halo Fans. This means Nintendo's games and hardware reïnforce each other; someone who bought a Switch for Mario and Zelda is the sort of person who thinks "Ooh, Fire Emblem!" and buys that, too.
Plus, if you've gone to the trouble of buying a Nintendo console for one or two games, there is a psychological urge to justify your choice, to make it worth your while. So if you just got it for Mario and Zelda, well then you've spent hundreds of euros on a machine to play two games. But if you also get Fire Emblem, that's three games. Kirby brings it up to four. Thus, every exclusive makes the console purchase feel more reasonable.
Then there are sales breakdowns. Nintendo gets 100% of the non-tax price of every one of their own games. To give a concrete example, Donkey Kong Bananza costs €69.99. Nintendo get €56.90 of that (€69.99 less 23% VAT). If they sell it elsewhere, they lose another 30% of the non-tax price in store fees. Thus, if they were to bring Donkey Kong Bananza to Steam, they would only get €39.83 per copy (€56.90 × 0.7). They would thus need to sell 1.43 times as many copies on Steam to make the same money as selling them on the eShop.
That's the big thing right there. Some people for sure decide to go without Nintendo games if they aren't on other platforms. A subset of those people would be willing to buy Nintendo games on other platforms. But is that cohort at least 43% the size of the cohort who just buy a Nintendo console?
But, of course, Nintendo don't just sell their games on the eShop. There are also tons of third-party games, each of which pay 30% of their non-tax price per purchase. If somebody has a Nintendo console, even if those third-party games are on Steam and PlayStation, they might buy those games on the Switch instead. (Source: I have done this. If you own a Switch, so have you). That's another chunk of money Nintendo would lose out on if they weren't selling consoles.
In conclusion, for third-party developers, being multi-platform is good. But for Nintendo, a first-party developer, keeping their games exclusive is the logical choice.
MITM0@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Attacking fans is brand image ‽
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Nintendo is heavily reliant on physical media and traditional retailers, they aren’t getting anywhere near 100% of most sales. Brick and mortar takes around a 50% cut, Amazon takes a cut as well. Being on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam isn’t a significant difference in what they would make.
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
Nintendo’s exclusives likely wouldn’t work as well on other consoles or would show significant bugs or problems. Their games are purpose built for their hardware.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
There’s a few titles that have relied on gimmicks that would be difficult or impossible to do on other systems. It would be a temporary learning curve to get games able to support multiple platforms, but everyone else has already done it and Nintendo consoles have been the least powerful systems so it should be easier.
tyler@programming.dev 19 hours ago
I’m not talking about being able to run on those other hardware. I’m talking about Nintendo devs literally being able to write code for that other hardware. You expand to numerous platforms you get more bugs. You need more devs. You need devs that know more platforms. It has nothing to do with Nintendo gimmicks. It has to do with building for more platforms just by default being more buggy (which is exactly what happens).