Nintendo Loses Nearly $1B As Wii Sales Plummet

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Nintendo reporting loses of almost $1 billion? Wow, the Xbox 360 has been eating everyone's lunch for the last nine months straight but I didn't know it was this bad at Nintendo. :eek:

Nintendo generated 215.7 billion yen ($2.84 billion) in revenue during the six-month period, representing a whopping 40.6 percent decline compared to the same period last year. Even more concerning, Nintendo's net loss hit $926 million, down significantly from the $26 million it lost in the six-month period ended September 30, 2010.
 
They better release the Wii HD before people lose total interest in anything related to Wii...
 
There isn't any content worth buying! My 2 sons, 16 & 10, haven't wanted a new Wii game all year. This will change with the new Zelda next month. But why would anyone buy a Wii when they all know in a year or so there will be a new Nintendo console.

wii-u-attendee4.jpg
 
People really want to play shovelware waggle games in HD! :D

Maybe :) I am interested in some of the bigger name games & backwards compatibility. Other than that, I'm finding Nintendo is becoming very irrelevant to most [H]ers.
 
Considering there aren't many good games for it, how the system doesn't support HD, AND it's 5 years old.....
 
Is it me, or in that photo above aren't those consoles connected via component...(which still can do 1080p...but still :confused:)

Maybe :) I am interested in some of the bigger name games & backwards compatibility. Other than that, I'm finding Nintendo is becoming very irrelevant to most [H]ers.

Can you imagine playing wii fit or wii sports in 1080p! :eek: I'm sure all the mothers and children that play it will care enough to upgrade...
 
nintendo needs new, big games. xbox is doing better is bc of all the recently released and upcoming games.
 
Is it me, or in that photo above aren't those consoles connected via component...(which still can do 1080p...but still :confused:)
.

That's to demonstrate the new Zelda game, so it would be using the current Wii console, not the new one.
 
Im surprised it too this long. Even at the Wii's peak I held firm it was a gimmick people would eventually get tired of.
 
people would buy more Wii's if Nintendo engineered a higher console failure rate like M$
 
Nintendo keeps screwing themselves by not having another 2nd party game. The whole cockblock the 3rd party developer needs to stop. They need another RARE. Rare games made the NES for me. Solar jetman, Snake rattle and roll (*sigh*) battletoads. And then for the N64, golden eye? perfect dark? Banjo kazooie?

Some of the top titles on those consoles was due to RARE making it happen. That is what Nintendo needed yesterday.
 
I just don't get this thing companies have for announcing new products over a year in advance. It gives them no benefit, and costs them a lot because people will wait for the new version.
 
The Kinect is way more fun than the Wii. And less risk of damage to my TV. That's why Santa brought an XBox 360 with Kinect in his sleigh last Christmas instead of the Wii.

And my kids have probably spent less than 40 hours since playing the XBox.
 
Considering there aren't many good games for it, how the system doesn't support HD, AND it's 5 years old.....
Well, all three consoles are using obsolete old hardware and can't really do true HD (1080p) in games.

Nothing unique to the Wii there.
 
The Wii was even farther behind in terms of hardware. Its was Innovation that let them win for the past years. But like typical Nintendo they sit on their asses thinking another Mario rehash can save them.
 
They better release the Wii HD before people lose total interest in anything related to Wii...

This honestly shouldn't be a surprise to any gamer. The Wii targeted casual gamers, who honestly don't really play games. Once the Wii's novelty wore off, and casual gamers went back to not being gamers, and the Wii dropped drastically in sales.

There are 3 types of people who play Wii games.

#1 Casual gamer who is fascinated by the WiiMote.
#2 Classic gamer, who remembers when 8-bit Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and N64 was what made Nintendo, Nintendo.
#3 Person who got it as a gift and played with it for about a month. Wii gets shoved into a closet or just collects dust afterwards.

The problem the Wii faces is what audience it's targeting. It started with the GameCube, as Nintendo was afraid to go after Sony and Microsoft for the hardcore market. So instead they stepped back and targeted the children's market, and failed miserably doing so.

The Wii went at it from another approach, and that's to go after the casual market. Nintendo needed to realize that it should have evolved it's game library if they wanted to keep their gamers. While the casual was a great success, it wouldn't last. They should have went back to their roots and develop the games we all remember before the GameCube and Wii was ever created.
 
They better release the Wii HD before people lose total interest in anything related to Wii...

You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:
  • Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
  • Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.
The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.
  • They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
  • They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
  • They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as
Call of Duty​
on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.
 
I just made the jump into console gaming in the house by purchasing a used Wii. Haven't had a console since the old SNES, and the Wii was the "baby step" to getting the wife to agree. Will be a christmas present for our 5 year old daughter ;) I figured it would be the best option for her to get started with gaming as I just don't see a lot of easy games for young girls on the XBOX/PS3... though I could be missing them.

I'm amazed at the slow turnout of games for the Wii though (and I guess the other consoles to a certain extent). Like I said, no console since SNES, so I remember the huge number of games on the old consoles, even with all the crappy ones that were released.

What I really find strange is how these games continue to command such a high price. Punch Out Wii is still $25 on Amazon... and it is 2 years old!! I can't even seem to find a place to buy used Wii games cheap other than Ebay. Seriously, where are the bargin-bin Wii games?
 
people would buy more Wii's if Nintendo engineered a higher console failure rate like M$

Lol, I will never buy another xbox, not the next gen ones, nothing,

Ever. Microsoft can suck a dick for 2 RROD xboxes and warranties not honoured.
 
i know the hardcore aren't the bread and butter, but they usually have sway over those that are.

there needs to be more titles with greater variety coming out.

there have been a TON of awful decisions on what to localize and what not to...(mother 3, fatal frame 4, damn near every rpg etc).
 
My kids still like the Wii after all these years, but I stopped playing for about a year. I bought my first 360 and Kinnect for Christmas last year, and I don't even play that much (though I am hoping the new Sports game is good).

The DS is probably a bigger problem for Nintendo than the Wii. It used to be about every kid owned a DS. Now kids play cheap apps on cellphones and tablets instead (at least mine do) . The 3DS just isn't worth the cost of upgrading, and the games are expensive compared to cell phone apps.

I really don't have a lot of interest in the new Nintendo console. I can understand why Nintendo is having a rough year.
 
You sir, are an idiot.

So is everybody else in this thread whose spouting off "HD" like it means something.

I'm really surprised I'm seeing this on the HardOCP forums, so I'll make this quick and brief.

High-Definition does not exist.

Let me repeat that for the slow among you forum posters: High-Definition Does Not Exist.

When it comes to improving a rendering image there are largely two methods that apply to video games:
  • Increase the number of pixels rendered for each frame -- that is to say High-Resolution
  • Increase the amount of color detail, texture detail, polygon detail, and or shader detail -- that is to say High-resolution art assets.
The term "High-Definition" has been abused as a catch-all term for cranking up the resolution of the rendered image and the corrosponding resolution of the art assets by marketing punters who don't understand how video games or designed or made.

Let me clue you in on something that even Digipen students don't have a firm grasp on.

When it comes to consoles with limited and unchanging hardware specifications, as a coder or an artist, you approach the console with those limitations in mind, and you do your level best to toe those limitations as closely as you can. You also try to toe those lines while keeping the -minimum- specification in mind.

The Wii is primarily designed with 480p as it's upper resolution limit and 480i as it's lower resolution limit. That means that every single texture, every single rendering frame, has to be able to be rendered in either a 480p or 480i window. This means that artists don't have to create textures, polygons, or shaders, that exceed the limitations of that window.

You can see this type of art-asset limitation in games such as UT99, Dues Ex, Advent Rising, or even Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. Go chunk those games on a high-resolution monitor such as 1920*1200. At 10 feet away, can you -really- tell a difference in the higher pixel resolution versus running those games in a much lower resolution such as 720*480? Sure, you -might- be able to tell a difference in a 1ft to 2ft range where you can count the polygons and actually make out the pixel distortion inherent to LCD panels running out of their native resolution.

* * *​

Btw, here's a hint: Nintendo tried a mid-life-console system upgrade once with the 4mb memory pack on the N64. Sega tried a mid-life-console upgrade not just once, but twice: SegaCD and Sega32X.

The console reality is that simply chunking a couple extra GPU units into the Wii and increasing the frame-buffer simply to enable rendering in higher-resolution pixel counts and increased resolution-texture counts isn't possible. While the Wii has a traditional CPU/GPU setup, it has a shared 24mb low-latency memory system coupled with a not-as-fast 64mb GDDR3 memory system. Feeding those higher resolution art assets would require an increased system bandwidth, which means not only raising the clockspeed and or bit-rate of the system bus, it also means increasing the amount of system memory for BOTH types of Ram.

If you figured out this means essentially designing another console... congratulations, you've just passed Zelda Blob Studios 101.

This is where you run into the problems that Nintendo experienced with the N64 expansion pack. New code designed to leverage the increased system capacity, by laws of coding physics, will not work on systems without that increased system capacity.

This leaves developers with a choice.
  • They can implement a solution that only increases an aspect of system usage, such as rendering, that can be scaled on demand, in the case of the N64 that was resolution and or color depth. For the N64 the increased color depth offered a larger visual difference since it improved the art-assets, improvements that largely weren't noticed on games that simply doubled the resolution without doubling textures or polygon counts.
  • They can implement a solution that fully leverages the new system capacity and completely forget about trying to back-port onto previous constraints: See Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64
  • They can implement a solution that has some content locked behind increased system capacity and some content available on the original platform: see Perfect Dark.

* * *​

Assuming developers get past the coding limitations, then there becomes the matter of content delivery. Granted this is not really a big problem in and of-itself since most Wii-games are shovelware because Developers didn't know what to do with the system, or games are crap because Developers didn't know what to do with the system (Sega, EA, Activision, that would be you).

It's a fair stretch to say that -most- Wii games probably have space on the DVD drive for higher-resolution art assets. Case in point would be Metroid Prime Trilogy which managed to fit 2 Gamecube games and the third Wii game on a single disc... although this did mean the cutting of many extras from both consoles... and Retro Studios could actually re-leverage a significant amount of textures... which... to the point... they kind of did when creating the games to begin with.

Actually getting higher resolution art assets to players may or may not require a new loading system... and to be fair... the cost of printing discs is low enough publishers probably could afford to include both a high-resolution art-asset version of a game in the same box as the Wii's base art-asset version.

That being said the Xbox 360 is a perfect example of developers running into platform delivery problems. Anybody who cares could probably name all of the Xbox 360 games that had to come on multiple discs compared to their single disc Playstation 3 versions. For the most part game developers have been crippled by the lack of a high-capacity system-spec storage delivery solution for the Xbox 360. But this post isn't about "What was good for Microsoft wasn't good for the consumer"

* * *​

The production reality for Nintendo is that making a console that is capable of rendering in a higher-pixel-resolution with a higher-detail-resolution boils down to making a completely new consoles. Which, incidentally, Nintendo is doing with the WiiU.

Now, the big question is this: will a higher-resolution console attract game developers?

Nobody knows. One of the problems the Wii console ran into is that publishers and developers had written Nintendo off. It was no secret that everybody but Ubisoft had decreased budgetary spending on Nintendo products, and that Nintendo support wasn't even tertiary among training or production for publishers and developers.

The aftermath of the Wii's sales explosion and market dominance left most third-party developers and publishers with their heads spinning. The desperation to get something, anything, on the Wii platform, lead to the flood of shovelware titles early on in the life of the Wii as publishers and developers scrambled to keep their brand-names fresh in the mind of Wii purchasers. Slight problem: a -bad- game will only turn people away.

When gamers did get proper games, such as Resident Evil 4, the publishers being those games decided to keep trying "different" stuff... case in point with Capcom is they kept doing bloody rail-gun games on the Wii with Umbrella:Chronicles rather than a proper Resident Evil Adventure game. Same thing with Dead Space. The big consoles got a proper adventure title. The Wii got a light-gun shooter. The lack of sales shouldn't have really been a big surprise to anybody. No matter how marketers tried dress it up, gamers weren't buying the Wii to play light-gun shooters.

When it came to getting big franchise titles such as
Call of Duty​
on the Wii, development was handed off to developers who simply didn't care about making a good games; or alternatively, simply were not capable of making good games.

Unfortunately the WiiU may face a similar problem. It will land on store shelves only a year or so before Sony and Microsoft are due to haul out their next consoles, the so called Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4.

If publishers and developers do the same thing they did back with the launch of the Wii, that is focus a significant amount of primary resources on Sony and Microsoft's next console entries, the WiiU will once again be regaled to the back corners of B-team portings from developers who simply don't give a damn.

qft
 
While the Wii does not play a lot of games in our house, it sure gets used for Netflix. Be nice to see a unit that has HDMI out and supports the 1080p sized monitors.
 
Nintendo waited too long to bring out the HD version of Wii. It'll be too little too late next year. :(
 
The Kinect is way more fun than the Wii. And less risk of damage to my TV.

This.

Combined with the lack of new games over the last year, the lack of HD (even 720p would be an improvement), and Nintendo having already announced a replacement (why buy last years model when a new one is comming out).

If they had made a minor upgrade to the Wii last year: More built in flash memory, 720P (or better) video, hdmi connection, etc, and they might have been able to get a couple more years out of it.
 
It's a great time to buy one on craigslist. Play through Galaxy 1,2, New Super Mario Bros, and maybe Donkey Kong returns then you're good to go to pass it to the next person . Time to hop on to the PS4 or 720 nintendo.
 
And you guys should get the move not the kinect. Much funner unless you're a kid under 6 who's hands are too small to hold anything.
 
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