It’s been a cry made by so many over the years;

Nintendo aren’t number one anymore, why don’t they just quit the hardware business like Sega did?

It’s a cry of ignorance, perhaps a cry for help, but certainly a cry from people who don’t have a fucking clue about the history or current state of the gaming market. Let me make this clear and concise, I am sick to the back teeth of people who are likely in their late teens stating they know better than my favourite Kyoto-based multi-national.

I must admit that this piece has been brewing for a while, but I have been tipped over the edge by this ridiculous, naive article over at Bleepblog. The article, titled Nintendo’s Folly, states that Nintendo should gracefully bow out of the hardware market in a similar fashion to Sega. Saying that Sega’s retreat from the hardware market was a graceful bow is a warped view of history and only strengthens my view that this article and those who hold similar opinions are under 20 and have no sense or idea of the rich video game history of the past 25+ years. Quoth the article:

Nintendo need to take a long hard look at their product range. Sega decided to gracefully retire from the consumer games hardware market after the Dreamcast’s disappointing retail performance against the Playstation2: when the DC performed badly outside of Japan, Sega decided to stop producing more consumer gaming devices while retaining their capability to produce arcade units.

Sega was broke following 4 years of heavy losses due to the poor performance of it’s Saturn and Sony’s hijcking of the Dreamcast’s launch when it revealed the PS2 on 9/9/99, stealing some of Sega’s thunder and placing another nail in the old boy’s hardware coffin. Sega did not bow out gracefully because their hardware did badly, they bowed out because they were broke (Sega’s history).

Nintendo on the other hand is not broke, they are flush with cash. This financial year saw an influx of about $1.04 billion operating profit, an increase of 3.6% over last year. A company that’s making a billion dollars a year is a company that is doing something right (although not everything right as this article states).

But let’s play the numbers game here, some of their recommendations for Nintendo are;

ditch the GBA
ditch the Game Boy Micro

So, Nintendo should drop the GBA which last year sold 15.4 million units and 84.57 million pieces of software. Granted this is down from 17.59 million units from the year before, but the DS sold 5.27 million units last year. If you ignore the “third pillar” bollocks and consider the DS to be the GBA 1.5, then they’ve sold 20,670,000 handheld gaming devices in the 12 months to March (source).

Sony are expecting to sell 12 million PSPs in it’s first year, such a disappointing performance should surely have they gracefully bow out of the handheld market. Surely. Microsoft have taken 5 years to just slip past Nintendo to the number 2 position, and they’ve lost $5 billion in the process. Surely with such losses, Microsoft should bow out gracefully from the hardware market.

Yes the GameCube is third in the current “console war”. Yes, MS and Sony both fully flopped out their next gen console cocks at E3, while Nintendo remained meek and reserved in it’s revealing of the Revolution. I have no doubts that the drooling 15 year old fanboys would have had little fits of orgasmic excitement at the pre-rendered lies produced by MS and Sony at E3 (they were real-time! Honest!), but thankfully, fanboys don’t run the industry.

Let’s conclude by taking a reality check;

• Nintendo still have a virtual monopoly on the handheld market, and the rumoured revealing of the next true GameBoy at E3 2006 will likely strengthen this in the next 24 months
• Details are exceptionally thin in regards to the Revolution, so anyone counting it out as vapour-ware need remember that no one at E3 got to play on the PS3 either
• Nintendo have almost six billion dollars in cash reserves
• Rather than complaining that you want Nintendo to produce games for the PS3 or Xbox2, buy the fucking Revolution when it comes out, it’s going to be cheap and play GameCube games to boot. Stop bitching, bitch