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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> but when it comes to technology and current trends Nintendo is consistently considered the lagging player

Technology was never their selling point—even the original NES came out with an 8-bit processor while 16 bit processors were already available. Why? Because it was cheaper, and easier to develop for.

Their main selling point has always been strong gameplay experiences.

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A selling point which isn't enough in the current climate when it comes to living room hardware. As of June this year the Wii U has only sold (to retail, which doesn't actually mean total sales to consumers) 13.02 million units worldwide. [0] Compare that to the either Playstation 4 or Xbox One sales and the pricing of their new 4K iterations (respectively PS4 Pro and Scorpio) and it's obvious to see both enthusiasts and the typical consumer no longer value Nintendo's games enough to shell out $300 for their small catalog.

Their current strategy consists of developing and selling software to the casual cohort they lost between the Wii and WiiU release, in order to bolster new hardware sales. Buying their stock on the announcement of that software is ill-advised because no one knows what their new hardware looks like and whether or not they can convince that audience to spend cash on it when the alternatives are such better/easier sells.

[0] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/sales/hard_soft/ https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/2016_01.html

NES had only two types of games: either you jump on top of enemies or you constantly move right and kick them. Actually there were only two games but with different sprite images. But even that was wonderful in 1982, because it happened on your TV, like movie, but controllable by you! And they're trying to sell the same 'magic VCR where you can control retarded boy jumping on mushrooms' in 2016. Except on phone handsets instead of TV sets. Maybe someone will be heavily impressed that instead of dialing and talking you control virtual italian plumber right on your telephone!

Off the top of my head I can think of many other 'types' of NES games that break the side scroll paradigm. For example:

Top down action RPG (Zelda)

Decision based RPG (Dragon Warrior)

Picture games (Anticipation)

Game show games (Family Fued)

Sports / Racing games (Punch Out, Rad Racer)

ETC.

You really need to research more about Nintendo...

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