StarTopic Future Nintendo Hardware & Technology Speculation & Discussion |ST| (Read the staff posts before commenting!)

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

What's this about the 3DS "flopping"?

The system sold almost 80 million units, how is that a flop?

It needed to be sold at a loss for a while because Nintendo badly miscalculated its appeal and had to price drop right away. It sold significantly less than its predecessor and its successor despite being sold at a loss for some period of time.

 

[C_Ali]

What's this about the 3DS "flopping"?

The system sold almost 80 million units, how is that a flop?

Imo it isn’t… But I do believe after the DS it can be perceived so.

 

[C_Ali]

It needed to be sold at a loss for a while because Nintendo badly miscalculated its appeal and had to price drop right away. It sold significantly less than its predecessor and its successor despite being sold at a loss for some period of time.

I’m sorry but these factors don’t inherently make it a flop.

The Wii U was a flop, no matter the change in strategy Nintendo could not sell the device. The same cannot be said for the 3DS regardless of its predecessor or successor.

 

[Hocot8]

It needed to be sold at a loss for a while because Nintendo badly miscalculated its appeal and had to price drop right away. It sold significantly less than its predecessor and its successor despite being sold at a loss for some period of time.

doesn't make it a flop though. Just means that mistakes were made early on, which they rebounded from. Not the first time that's happened either ala the Ps3.

 

[Koren Lesthe]

My brothers and sisters in Christ it has happened.

Live reaction from France at the Beauty mansion :

BTW, Hardware Speculation speedrun (1337%) achieved.

 

[C_Ali]

doesn't make it a flop though. Just means that mistakes were made early on, which they rebounded from. Not the first time that's happened either ala the Ps3.

The only problem I have with the ps3 correlation is that they didn’t turn the ps3 around. Sony lost around 4 billion dollars before the ps3 itself became profitable. Which means they weren’t taking losses on console sales YET they still had lost 4 billion already.

The 3DS not only was pulling its own weight after it became profitable but the Wii U also. Which IIRC never made Nintendo money…

 

[Thraktor]

As the subject of Game Cards came up again, I thought I'd do a little digging to see if there were any clues online as to what Macronix's XtraROM (which is used in Nintendo's Game Cards) actually is. As it turns out, a bit of patent searching gave me the answer. In this Macronix patent from 2012, on page 3, they give a list of flash and ROM types including "NROM (XtraROM)". So, Nintendo's game cards use something called NROM.

What is NROM?

NROM is Nitride Read Only Memory. It was invented by a company called Saifun Semiconductors and details were first published back in the year 2000. Despite the name, it wasn't originally intended mainly for use in read-only memory, and is a type of charge trap flash which competed in the early non-volatile memory space with NAND and NOR. It was used in some flash products in the early 2000s, such as AMD's Mirrorbit line, but seems to have all-but disappeared by the mid 2000s, as NAND took over. Macronix were reportedly the first licensee of the technology, and started production of flash products using it branded Nbit in 2002 (they still use the Nbit branding for XtraROM).

There are likely a few reasons that NROM didn't last long against NAND flash, the primary one probably being cost, which was reportedly why Toshiba declined to use it in favour of NAND in 2002. However, when looking at patents, one thing which seems to come up repeatedly is that erasing data is a particular issue with the technology. Here's a quote from a 2004 Macronix patent:

NROM devices use a relatively thick bottom oxide, e.g., greater than 3 nanometers, and typically about 5 to 9 nanometers, to prevent charge loss. Instead of direct tunneling, band-to-band tunneling-induced hot-hole injection (BTBTHH) can be used to erase the cell. However, the hot-hole injection causes oxide damage, leading to charge loss in the high threshold cell and charge gain in the low threshold cell.

Moreover, the erase time must be increased gradually during program and erase cycling due to the hard-to-erase accumulation of electrons in the charge trapping structure. This accumulation of charge occurs because the hole injection point and electron injection point do not coincide with each other, and some electrons remain after the erase pulse.

In addition, during the sector erase of an NROM flash memory device, the erase speed for each cell is different because of process variations (such as channel length variation). This difference in erase speed results in a large Vt distribution of the erase state, where some of the cells become hard to erase and some of them are over-erased. Thus, the target threshold Vt window is closed after many program and erase cycles, and poor endurance is observed. This phenomenon will become more serious when the technology keeps scaling down.

In addition, charge trapping memory devices capture electrons in a charge trapping layer in both shallow and deep energy levels. Electrons trapped in shallow levels tend to de-trap faster than those electrons in deeper energy level traps. The shallow-level electrons are a significant source of charge retention problems. In order to keep good charge retention, deeply trapped electrons are preferred.

Basically, NROM has significant rewrite performance and endurance issues, and they become more serious as the manufacturing process improves. Obviously this is something Macronix and others worked on solutions for (it's what this patent is about), but it may have been a factor in NROM's limited use in the flash market.

However, when Nintendo came to Macronix in the early 2000s looking for a replacement for mask ROM to use in game cards for the DS, they're presented with a use-case which completely side-steps the rewrite issues, as game cards only ever need to be written once when manufactured. It also seems as if there's a trade-off in the technology between shallow-trapped electrons, which improve rewrite performance at the expense of having charge retention issues, and deep-trapped electrons, which has better charge retention, but has worse rewrite performance. For a write-once use-case like XtraROM, Macronix could implement a variant of the technology which achieves very high charge retention (ie high longevity in a write-once use-case) at the expense of rewrite performance.

Does anyone else manufacture NROM?

As far as I can tell, no. I can't find any references to it being used outside Macronix since the mid 2000s, and other than Macronix all the early manufacturers of it either exited the flash market or switched to NAND. Saifun have ended up, through a series of acquisitions, as part of Infineon Technologies, although they don't have any references to it on their website more recently than 2005.

Many modern 3D NAND flash manufacturers have actually switched to a charge trap flash approach, as opposed to floating gate cells, which were standard in planar NAND. However the technology and manufacturing processes likely don't share much in common with Macronix's NROM-based XtraROM by this point.

Could Nintendo buy similar game card hardware from another supplier?

Probably not. Other common ROM types like mask ROM and EEPROM offer nowhere near the capacity of XtraROM, and although another company could in theory develop and manufacture a similar technology (the original NROM patents have now expired), it would likely be a very long and expensive R&D process. Macronix is a specialist in niche flash technologies, for example being a large NOR flash supplier, and have been developing NROM products for 20 years, so it's unlikely another company could, or would be interested in, creating a similar ROM product.

That's not to say Nintendo don't have other options, but my personal guess is that any alternative suppliers would use NAND based solutions. As @oldpuck pointed out here, the kind of cheap NAND used in SD cards is rated to last for around 4 years, compared to a 20 year expected lifespan for XtraROM. Another supplier would have to find out a way to bridge that longevity gap with NAND while keeping the game cards affordable.

Nintendo actually did source some DS (and possibly 3DS?) game cards from Sandisk, who presumably used a NAND based solution, so it wouldn't be completely unprecedented.

What does this mean for the speed or capacity of game cards going forward?

No idea. Given Macronix are the only company to have used this technology for almost 20 years, and they've never published significant technical details or roadmaps for it, your guess is as good as mine. However, it's not NAND, so you probably shouldn't make assumptions about it based on advancements in NAND flash technology, and the density and performance scaling challenges may be very different to those of NAND flash.

 

[Bowser Sr.]

The Switch's current sales are driven by the obscenely high budget TotK.

The only low budget franchise currently has is Pokemon (with the lower budget Kirby dev closing recently)

Outside of mobile trash, I think that Madden (which is a terrible game) and Pokemon are the only low budget franchises that are successful right now.

You have no reason to believe TotK is "obscenely high budget" though. Miyamoto told us before that BOTW needed to sell a minimum of 1 million units to start profiting as "Nintendo's most expensive" project thus far.
If a game that needs to make 60 million dollars to profit is Nintendo's baseline for "most expensive production yet" then their budgets are actualy very very very very very very very very sensible and efficient.

 

[Tentacle-tropes]

The only problem I have with the ps3 correlation is that they didn’t turn the ps3 around. Sony lost around 4 billion dollars before the ps3 itself became profitable. Which means they weren’t taking losses on console sales YET they still had lost 4 billion already.

The 3DS not only was pulling its own weight after it became profitable but the Wii U also. Which IIRC never made Nintendo money…

The WiiU itself was either flat or sold at a small loss but did become profitable after one software purchase according to ex-NOA President Reggie.

 

[C_Ali]

The WiiU itself was either flat or sold at a small loss but did become profitable after one software purchase according to ex-NOA President Reggie.

Only “one” problem nobody was buying the system.

I say that as someone who loved my Wii U. But even the GameCube wasn’t as big a monetary sinkhole and was profitable for Ninty.

But a flop the Wii U was, just as the ps3 was a financial disaster for Sony. The only thing that saved Nintendo was the 3DS…

So, I can’t in good conscience say 3DS was flop.


Edit for clarification: Also, the console being profitable itself with the purchase of a game doesn’t offset prior losses. Whether that be manufacture, advertising, development, etc…You still need to sell a decent amount of consoles.

 

[Sonicfan1373]

oh lordy lord, you are massively wrong here

Genshin Impact set to cost double its initial budget for each year of ongoing development - VG247

Developer miHoYo reckons that on-going development will cost $200 million per year.

web.archive.org

and yes, other studios are competing in this budget category, including western devs

But do we have many other examples like this specifically just for mobile (Genshin is also available on other platforms, much like other Freemium games like Fortnite). The problem with big productions on mobile is the monetization aspect of it. People will not pay $60+ for mobile games on the spot, the expectation to do that just is not there on mobile. They work on freemium and/or ad-supported models, which require you to get a dedicated base around a game and monetize them overtime. To get this wider base of gamers, you also need to work your game to work on less-expensive phones an you have to assume the touch-screen, motion, and camera are your main input methods. None of this amenable to console level productions. If it was I feel we would see more console ports to mobile devices (and there would also be less demand for something like the Switch).

Mobile gaming isn’t the “it” trend as it still is the biggest gaming market around. So plenty of companies are still trying to break into the market. While Nintendo didn’t become a 3rd party mobile dev, Iwata still was pressured into making mobile games. They stopped because of their half-assed strategy & Switch success.

And, I’m not really sure what you mean by “console-level production” because mobile definitely has been getting more & more resource intensive & expensive as time has gone on.

By the "it" I meant that the expectation at the time was that mobile smartphone gaming would replace consoles and handhelds and companies needed to fully put all attention towards, not that the market would reconfigure where it becomes another category (albeit a big one, given the number of people that have smartphones). In addition, while there are still efforts to break into that market, companies have also become more realistic about doing so. As I mentioned above to find success in this market you need games with streamlined controls, a very addictive gameplay loop that you can monetize overtime through some sort of freemium model (you will not be selling games at a large fixed price in this market), the tooling of marketing around the fact that you are entering a saturated market with tons of games and other non-gaming content that people download for free, and access to the wider spectrum of the market where people are not running the most powerful smartphone hardware or the latest software. This does not lend itself to console-level production (which is not just about budgets, though that also plays a partial role, but also the types of games you can make on mobile versus console/PC).

 

[Kazuyamishima]

Page 1337

 

[Semi Lazy Gamer]

The 3DS can be considered a flop if you compare it to the rest of Nintendo's handheld, but it isn't if you realize its 5th in sales out of the 11 pieces of Nintendo hardware.

Also, the 3DS does beat out the GBA in terms of software sales despite lower hardware sales, so it isn't a flop there.

 

[ILikeFeet]

You have no reason to believe TotK is "obscenely high budget" though. Miyamoto told us before that BOTW needed to sell a minimum of 1 million units to start profiting as "Nintendo's most expensive" project thus far.
If a game that needs to make 60 million dollars to profit is Nintendo's baseline for "most expensive production yet" then their budgets are actualy very very very very very very very very sensible and efficient.

I don't think they ever talked about a minimum amount of copies to be profitable. if you're referring to that "need 2M units" thing, that was never about Zelda but for the industry at large

But do we have many other examples like this specifically just for mobile (Genshin is also available on other platforms, much like other Freemium games like Fortnite). The problem with big productions on mobile is the monetization aspect of it. People will not pay $60+ for mobile games on the spot, the expectation to do that just is not there on mobile. They work on freemium and/or ad-supported models, which require you to get a dedicated base around a game and monetize them overtime. To get this wider base of gamers, you also need to work your game to work on less-expensive phones an you have to assume the touch-screen, motion, and camera are your main input methods. None of this amenable to console level productions. If it was I feel we would see more console ports to mobile devices (and there would also be less demand for something like the Switch).

yes, there's Tower of Fantasy, PubG mobile, the two Call of Duty mobile games, teh multitude of Honkai games

Sakura Wars cost $30M and was a huge bomb

back in 2017, when the market was much less risky, the top games were still putting in almost $10M in costs

 

[Sonicfan1373]

Really doesn’t change the fact that the quality of the final product isn’t great. No matter how much care or love was poured into it.

This is a company, their bottom line is to make money. They are failing on their end of the agreement with consumers in releasing buggy or technically unsound products. But it seems at this point their consumers don’t care either.

I think that is has just become so common place now that games are released in a bad state. Sales largely do not seem to be impacted by it in most cases. I guess in the case of Pokemon (and many other games that sell a lot on unsound technical footing) it is both the brand power and the core gameplay loop that remain satisfying and functional enough. Granted though that is not a high bar.

I am not sure exactly sure what is going on Gamefreak or the Pokemon Company, but there is something fundamentally wrong with how they are approaching game development. My assumption (and this is just an assumption; I would love someone to provide more details) is that they are using old and unoptimized software and workflows , and because they have to work on tie-ins with other media, they do not have the time to modernize their foundations. I would welcome GameFreak relying on a remake or two for the next mainline games while they take longer to work on the next generation. Outside of the media tie-ins, Legends Arceus and Scarlet/Violet should not have been spaced so close to each other (and even Legends Arceus could have used more time, given the remakes releasing just a few months before that were developed by another company could have given them more time).

 

[epicmartin7]

As the subject of Game Cards came up again, I thought I'd do a little digging to see if there were any clues online as to what Macronix's XtraROM (which is used in Nintendo's Game Cards) actually is. As it turns out, a bit of patent searching gave me the answer. In this Macronix patent from 2012, on page 3, they give a list of flash and ROM types including "NROM (XtraROM)". So, Nintendo's game cards use something called NROM.

What is NROM?

NROM is Nitride Read Only Memory. It was invented by a company called Saifun Semiconductors and details were first published back in the year 2000. Despite the name, it wasn't originally intended mainly for use in read-only memory, and is a type of charge trap flash which competed in the early non-volatile memory space with NAND and NOR. It was used in some flash products in the early 2000s, such as AMD's Mirrorbit line, but seems to have all-but disappeared by the mid 2000s, as NAND took over. Macronix were reportedly the first licensee of the technology, and started production of flash products using it branded Nbit in 2002 (they still use the Nbit branding for XtraROM).

There are likely a few reasons that NROM didn't last long against NAND flash, the primary one probably being cost, which was reportedly why Toshiba declined to use it in favour of NAND in 2002. However, when looking at patents, one thing which seems to come up repeatedly is that erasing data is a particular issue with the technology. Here's a quote from a 2004 Macronix patent:



Basically, NROM has significant rewrite performance and endurance issues, and they become more serious as the manufacturing process improves. Obviously this is something Macronix and others worked on solutions for (it's what this patent is about), but it may have been a factor in NROM's limited use in the flash market.

However, when Nintendo came to Macronix in the early 2000s looking for a replacement for mask ROM to use in game cards for the DS, they're presented with a use-case which completely side-steps the rewrite issues, as game cards only ever need to be written once when manufactured. It also seems as if there's a trade-off in the technology between shallow-trapped electrons, which improve rewrite performance at the expense of having charge retention issues, and deep-trapped electrons, which has better charge retention, but has worse rewrite performance. For a write-once use-case like XtraROM, Macronix could implement a variant of the technology which achieves very high charge retention (ie high longevity in a write-once use-case) at the expense of rewrite performance.

Does anyone else manufacture NROM?

As far as I can tell, no. I can't find any references to it being used outside Macronix since the mid 2000s, and other than Macronix all the early manufacturers of it either exited the flash market or switched to NAND. Saifun have ended up, through a series of acquisitions, as part of Infineon Technologies, although they don't have any references to it on their website more recently than 2005.

Many modern 3D NAND flash manufacturers have actually switched to a charge trap flash approach, as opposed to floating gate cells, which were standard in planar NAND. However the technology and manufacturing processes likely don't share much in common with Macronix's NROM-based XtraROM by this point.

Could Nintendo buy similar game card hardware from another supplier?

Probably not. Other common ROM types like mask ROM and EEPROM offer nowhere near the capacity of XtraROM, and although another company could in theory develop and manufacture a similar technology (the original NROM patents have now expired), it would likely be a very long and expensive R&D process. Macronix is a specialist in niche flash technologies, for example being a large NOR flash supplier, and have been developing NROM products for 20 years, so it's unlikely another company could, or would be interested in, creating a similar ROM product.

That's not to say Nintendo don't have other options, but my personal guess is that any alternative suppliers would use NAND based solutions. As @oldpuck pointed out here, the kind of cheap NAND used in SD cards is rated to last for around 4 years, compared to a 20 year expected lifespan for XtraROM. Another supplier would have to find out a way to bridge that longevity gap with NAND while keeping the game cards affordable.

Nintendo actually did source some DS (and possibly 3DS?) game cards from Sandisk, who presumably used a NAND based solution, so it wouldn't be completely unprecedented.

What does this mean for the speed or capacity of game cards going forward?

No idea. Given Macronix are the only company to have used this technology for almost 20 years, and they've never published significant technical details or roadmaps for it, your guess is as good as mine. However, it's not NAND, so you probably shouldn't make assumptions about it based on advancements in NAND flash technology, and the density and performance scaling challenges may be very different to those of NAND flash.

While the compression thing Nintendo patented might not be the ultimate solution, I do think that'll definitely help lower the cost if Nintendo is able to compress more data and extract it faster than they normally can on the regular switch.

 

[chocolate_supra]

This is likely the only thread on Famiboards that'll ever reach page 1337 so...

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

You have no reason to believe TotK is "obscenely high budget" though. Miyamoto told us before that BOTW needed to sell a minimum of 1 million units to start profiting as "Nintendo's most expensive" project thus far.
If a game that needs to make 60 million dollars to profit is Nintendo's baseline for "most expensive production yet" then their budgets are actualy very very very very very very very very sensible and efficient.

Unless Nintendo doesn't pay their employees at all, a 6 year production that had over a thousand people working on it over its dev cycle is going to be extremely expensive.

Nintendo is obviously not hyper efficient budget wise anymore (if they ever were) because their games take just as long to come out and dev costs are people multiplied by time.

So Nintendo's big games (TotK, Metroid Prime 4, etc) are either

1. Very expensive to make
2. Nintendo has very few people making them at any time (possible, but seems very unlikely considering how many people in total end up working on TotK and other games)
3. Nintendo pays their employees significantly less than other companies

 

[Apopheniac]

You have no reason to believe TotK is "obscenely high budget" though. Miyamoto told us before that BOTW needed to sell a minimum of 1 million units to start profiting as "Nintendo's most expensive" project thus far.

This came up before in the first party thread a couple of months ago and it's an incredibly warped misinterpretation. The quote was

In striking that balance, while it's important that we do not overextend by putting an excessive amount of content in our games, the only solution is how to make software that sells well. There will be big hits somewhere in our business, and they support the games that fail and allow us to take on other challenges. So our basic premise is to create software that will sell in the range of at least two million units. We simply couldn't recoup our costs if we only released games in Japan that had sales of around 300,000 units, so the global market is our standard.

[source]

Nowhere in the question or the answer is any game or series mentioned at all. His point of comparison is a hypothetical game that does 300k only in Japan, which isn't relevant to the biggest blockbusters Nintendo has ever put out.

The "at least two million units" point isn't a break-even point, it's a sales target, meaning that number has to account for labor costs, marketing, COGS, etc, as well as a profit margin on top of that. If you want an example of a game with that sales target, I would look at Nintendo games that have sold in the 1.5m-4m range.

 

[Hermii]

Unless Nintendo doesn't pay their employees at all, a 6 year production that had over a thousand people working on it over its dev cycle is going to be extremely expensive.

Nintendo is obviously not hyper efficient budget wise anymore (if they ever were) because their games take just as long to come out and dev costs are people multiplied by time.

So Nintendo's big games (TotK, Metroid Prime 4, etc) are either

1. Very expensive to make
2. Nintendo has very few people making them at any time (possible, but seems very unlikely considering how many people in total end up working on TotK and other games)
3. Nintendo pays their employees significantly less than other companies

What's your source for a 1000+ people?

And I do think 2 is true, for the majority of development time. Nintendo games spend a long time in the prototype stage, bejng worked on by a small team, before they bring in the cavalry. Also Aonuma said TOTK spent a year after it was content complete just ironing out bugs, the sort of task where a small team often is more efficient than a large team.

 

[Discostew]

Unless Nintendo doesn't pay their employees at all, a 6 year production that had over a thousand people working on it over its dev cycle is going to be extremely expensive.

Nintendo is obviously not hyper efficient budget wise anymore (if they ever were) because their games take just as long to come out and dev costs are people multiplied by time.

So Nintendo's big games (TotK, Metroid Prime 4, etc) are either

1. Very expensive to make
2. Nintendo has very few people making them at any time (possible, but seems very unlikely considering how many people in total end up working on TotK and other games)
3. Nintendo pays their employees significantly less than other companies

Or, Nintendo isn't tying in insane expenses and transfers of money that aren't actually part of the game's development into the overall cost. Take for instance the money that Miyamoto vs Kotick made in 2020. Miyamoto had a base salary of $1.79 million, while Kotick had a base salary of $1.75 million. However, what Kotick also gets is equity awards, and in 2020, that amounted to more than $30 million.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/miyamato-and-nintendo-director-salaries

 

[Apopheniac]

What's your source for a 1000+ people?

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom credits (Nintendo Switch, 2023) - MobyGames

The official game credits for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released on Nintendo Switch in 2023. The credits include 1,408 people.

www.mobygames.com

 

[ILikeFeet]

I think that is has just become so common place now that games are released in a bad state. Sales largely do not seem to be impacted by it in most cases. I guess in the case of Pokemon (and many other games that sell a lot on unsound technical footing) it is both the brand power and the core gameplay loop that remain satisfying and functional enough. Granted though that is not a high bar.

I am not sure exactly sure what is going on Gamefreak or the Pokemon Company, but there is something fundamentally wrong with how they are approaching game development. My assumption (and this is just an assumption; I would love someone to provide more details) is that they are using old and unoptimized software and workflows , and because they have to work on tie-ins with other media, they do not have the time to modernize their foundations. I would welcome GameFreak relying on a remake or two for the next mainline games while they take longer to work on the next generation. Outside of the media tie-ins, Legends Arceus and Scarlet/Violet should not have been spaced so close to each other (and even Legends Arceus could have used more time, given the remakes releasing just a few months before that were developed by another company could have given them more time).

quite frankly, I don't think people notice a lot of the problems as much as people on the internet or digital foundry puts emphasis on. the stuttering is annoying, but it's not actively stopping them from playing the game. that's enough for a lot of people

 

[D36]

This is likely the only thread on Famiboards that'll ever reach page 1337 so...

This looks like one of those "How to draw manga" books from the early 2000s.

 

[Deleted member 887]

As the subject of Game Cards came up again, I thought I'd do a little digging to see if there were any clues online as to what Macronix's XtraROM (which is used in Nintendo's Game Cards) actually is. As it turns out, a bit of patent searching gave me the answer. In this Macronix patent from 2012, on page 3, they give a list of flash and ROM types including "NROM (XtraROM)". So, Nintendo's game cards use something called NROM.

Excellent finds! For a long time, based on Macronix's descriptions, I assumed XtraROM was actually NOR flash wrapped in an ASIC to implement read only/DRM. This makes much more sense.

I do wonder what Nintendo's approach will be with this much longer development cycle of the console.

snip long 3DS discussion

I've lost the thread here a little, but let me see if I understand

• There are folks who thinks it is "realistic" for Nintendo to add a $100 premium above the base cost of [redacted]
• Those folks rationalize that the reason Nintendo hasn't done this historically is because they've never had a hit console
  • or that none of the previous hits counted for reasons
• The DS was a hit, and the 3DS launched with a $100 premium
• Which was quickly cut back because the 3DS sold very poorly
• Some of these same folks argue the 3DS was a flop
• Ergo this subset of folks argue that it is realistic for Nintendo to replicate the exact mistake of their previous, fucked up, handheld transition

The 3DS was not a flop. Objectively the 3DS, was sufficiently successful to keep Nintendo alive through the genuine flop of the Wii U. It was profitable at launch, and probably cut down to "at cost" (based on estimated BOM I've seen from teardowns + shipping marketing costs), and sold a lot of software. It outsold the NES, SNES, Xbox, Xbone, N64.

The 3DS transition was a top to bottom failure. The 3DS lost over 50% of the DS's users. The DS was a behemoth. In the year before the 3DS's announcement, the DS sold 25 million units. After the 3DS announcement, sales plummeted, but it was still a respectable 16 million over the next year. The year after the 3DS launched, sales fell to 5 million.

The 3DS was priced as a premium device, but despite backwards compatibility, it didn't enhance base titles, and it launched with titles that played to the chunk of the DS audience least likely to pay for a "premium" experience. It staggered the launch poorly, didn't make all SKUs available worldwide, and was forced into a major price cut, along with giving away 20 games as an apology to early adopters.

Launching a successor console, even if it never reaches the heights of it's predecessor, should at least push past where the sales were at the end of the predecessor's life time, and arresting the natural taper of sales for a few years. The 3DS retrenchment let the 3DS recapture the DS sales - if you combined DS sales and 3DS sales, instead of a bump at 3DS launch - or at least, a flattening of the line - you get exactly the curve you would predict from the DS sales alone. The 3DS failed to reset the clock.

All it managed to do was function like another DS revision, with continued DS support, with users buying "up" as they replaced their old system, and Mario/Zelda/Pokemon fans buying when their games launched - much as they had bought special editions and revisions in the past.

I'm sure there are plenty of lessons to be learned here, and not all of them are obvious to me as a tech oriented outsider, instead of a business oriented insider. But I think it's pretty obvious that Nintendo knows that you can't charge a premium price for a replacement level experience, and after 7 years, next gen is a replacement level experience.

6 years ago I paid 350 bucks (including the game) for the fresh thrill of playing full fat Zelda in my hands. In the interim I have upgraded my phone and laptop twice a piece, each pay roughly the same price as I had for the previous upgrade, which each upgrade offering a substantial improvement over the base experience.

Nintendo simply cannot offer me that thrill again, but that's okay. Nintendo paid off the promise of that thrill with really incredible support for the platform. That has transmuted the thrill into trust. I will pay a comparable amount of money to stay on this ride - the ride of new Nintendo games that aren't available elsewhere, of last gen games I missed out on but can now get to because handheld, and a stream of solid indie titles.

But I'm not going to pay a premium price just to stay on the ride.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

The issues with the comparison again are that

1. The DS's audience was hugely diminished and Nintendo didn't realize that when designing the 3DS to be sold at $250
2. Nintendo used their $100 premium mostly on a feature no one turned out to care about

To compare to the Switch

1. The Switch has no direct and successful competitors. The Steam Deck sells a tiny fraction of what the Switch sells. The Switch's audience hasn't been diminished at all.
2. We'll see how Nintendo uses their price wiggle-room if they hit $500 but it's hard to see it being as unpopular as 3D.

If the Switch 2 needed a panic price cut to be sold at a cost to only sell half as well as the Switch 1, that would be a flop, but I don't see it happening at $500 if the Switch 2 is packed with performance or gameplay enhancing tech.

 

[NintenDuvo]

If Nintendo does charge $500 for the Switch 2 i could see myself still getting it because i know its going to have all kinds of great games made by Nintendo. Also factor in that the demand for new Nintendo Hardware is crazy high right now so they could actually get away with that price

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

[*]The DS was a hit, and the 3DS launched with a $100 premium
[*]Which was quickly cut back because the 3DS sold very poorly
[*]Some of these same folks argue the 3DS was a flop
[*]Ergo this subset of folks argue that it is realistic for Nintendo to replicate the exact mistake of their previous, fucked up, handheld transition

DS launched at $150. Considering inflation, that would be similar to $175 when 3DS launched. So you could say that compared to that, 3DS launched about 43% higher.

Switch launched at $300. Considering inflation to the present and a bit of guesstimation for the future, maybe that would be similar to $380 when Redacted launches. For them to replicate the exact mistake, they'd have to launch higher than $540. $500 would be a lesser mistake than 3DS. $450 would be a SIGNIFICANTLY lesser mistake than 3DS. $400 would nearly be to the point of launching at post-Ambassador prices.

 

[MadMarvainy]

No chance Nintendo sells a console at $500.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

The other interesting price for next year is how people react when the PS5 Pro costs $700, lol.

 

[Giancarlo]

I’m not the biggest Pokémon fan, but maybe these games keep selling because they have a very solid core gameplay loop and a lot of care put into them despite the technical issues.

care in a Pokemon game? have you see how badly developed are the world of gen 6, 7 , 8 e 9 compared to it gen 5?#

 

[TomNookYankees]

What's this about the 3DS "flopping"?

The system sold almost 80 million units, how is that a flop?

Selling only 80 million after the DS sold 150 million is absolutely flopping much in the same way that the PS3 is considered to have flopped even if it sold 87 million units.

WiiU being one of the most catastrophic flops for nintendo doesn't mean the 3DS was a success.

 

[Giancarlo]

You have no reason to believe TotK is "obscenely high budget" though. Miyamoto told us before that BOTW needed to sell a minimum of 1 million units to start profiting as "Nintendo's most expensive" project thus far.
If a game that needs to make 60 million dollars to profit is Nintendo's baseline for "most expensive production yet" then their budgets are actualy very very very very very very very very sensible and efficient.

it was 3 milions units, Breath of the Wild needed to make a profit, if we divide 3×60:$ 120 milion budget?

 

[TomNookYankees]

The issues with the comparison again are that

1. The DS's audience was hugely diminished and Nintendo didn't realize that when designing the 3DS to be sold at $250
2. Nintendo used their $100 premium mostly on a feature no one turned out to care about

To compare to the Switch

1. The Switch has no direct and successful competitors. The Steam Deck sells a tiny fraction of what the Switch sells. The Switch's audience hasn't been diminished at all.
2. We'll see how Nintendo uses their price wiggle-room if they hit $500 but it's hard to see it being as unpopular as 3D.

If the Switch 2 needed a panic price cut to be sold at a cost to only sell half as well as the Switch 1, that would be a flop, but I don't see it happening at $500 if the Switch 2 is packed with performance or gameplay enhancing tech.

To be fair, the 3DS's competitor (PSVita) wasn't successful either so #1 on your second list applies to the 3DS too.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

To be fair, the 3DS's competitor (PSVita) wasn't successful either so #1 on your second list applies to the 3DS too.

The DS's main competitor was the iPhone in retrospect and the 3DS lost huge chunks of the DS's audience to the iPhone.

I don't see a credible competitor taking the Switch's audience right now or in the near future.

 

[Giancarlo]

The DS's main competitor was the iPhone in retrospect and the 3DS lost huge chunks of the DS's audience to the iPhone.

I don't see a credible competitor taking the Switch's audience right now or in the near future.

SteamDeck? or the severals handheld consoles/PC, Project Q, that companies/Sony are releasing since the Switch launch?

 

[YolkFolk]

SteamDeck? or the severals handheld consoles/PC, Project Q, that companies/Sony are releasing since the Switch launch?

 

[Lelouch0612]

The 3DS was not a flop. Objectively the 3DS, was sufficiently successful to keep Nintendo alive through the genuine flop of the Wii U. It was profitable at launch, and probably cut down to "at cost" (based on estimated BOM I've seen from teardowns + shipping marketing costs), and sold a lot of software. It outsold the NES, SNES, Xbox, Xbone, N64.

Just a precision but Nintendo definitely sold the 3DS at a loss after price cut, and initially lost money on the machine.

The WiiU on the other hand kept its price point during its lifecycle and was sold to a profit

It is pretty visible in that graph, with losses the year before the WiiU launched, that continued for a while.

 

[EvilChameleon]

This is likely the only thread on Famiboards that'll ever reach page 1337 so...

The music thread will get there some day, even if I have to make 67,000 posts in it myself.

 

[LiC]

DS launched at $150. Considering inflation, that would be similar to $175 when 3DS launched. So you could say that compared to that, 3DS launched about 43% higher.

Switch launched at $300. Considering inflation to the present and a bit of guesstimation for the future, maybe that would be similar to $380 when Redacted launches. For them to replicate the exact mistake, they'd have to launch higher than $540. $500 would be a lesser mistake than 3DS. $450 would be a SIGNIFICANTLY lesser mistake than 3DS. $400 would nearly be to the point of launching at post-Ambassador prices.

Inflation is only relevant when analyzing Nintendo's margin or profits or whatever. It's barely relevant when discussing pricing strategies as they are received by consumers.

 

[Concernt]

Just a precision but Nintendo definitely sold the 3DS at a loss after price cut, and initially lost money on the machine.

The WiiU on the other hand kept its price point during its lifecycle and was sold to a profit

It is pretty visible in that graph, with losses the year before the WiiU launched, that continued for a while.

Wii U was not sold for a profit, despite everything, and didn't hold its price at all. A few months only, before the Basic Set got nixed and the Deluxe Set was reduced by 50$.

 

[Magic-Man]

I love my Switch, but if the Switch 2 costs $500 it better have some actual features. I'm talking a web browser, backgrounds, media apps, quick resume, messaging, real folders, a camera, etc. Obviously not all of that will be included, but damn at least give me some.

 

[D36]

I love my Switch, but if the Switch 2 costs $500 it better have some actual features. I'm talking a web browser, backgrounds, media apps, quick resume, messaging, real folders, a camera, etc. Obviously not all of that will be included, but damn at least give me some.

I don't think that would make it worth $500. I don't even know how Nintendo and Nvidia would justify that price point.

 

[Magic-Man]

I don't think that would make it worth $500. I don't even know how Nintendo and Nvidia would justify that price point.

It wouldn't, but at least you could make the argument that it's a premium product similar to a phone or tablet.

 

[Lelouch0612]

Wii U was not sold for a profit, despite everything, and didn't hold its price at all. A few months only, before the Basic Set got nixed and the Deluxe Set was reduced by 50$.

I'll amend what I said, the WiiU needed to sell one game to be profitable at launch:

https://www.engadget.com/amp/2012-10-26-nintendo-wii-u-to-be-sold-at-a-loss.html&ved=2ahUKEwjfl9PzxJGAAxVcVKQEHYv5CeIQFnoECCoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1fjb4cGm1pYuS1UaQBruo4

It took more than a year for the 3DS to be sold for a profit again:

https://www.engadget.com/amp/2012-10-26-nintendo-wii-u-to-be-sold-at-a-loss.html&ved=2ahUKEwjfl9PzxJGAAxVcVKQEHYv5CeIQFnoECCoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1fjb4cGm1pYuS1UaQBruo4

Given the volume sold between the two platforms, it is still clearly the 3DS that contributed significantly to Nintendo's losses over the early years

 

[EvilChameleon]

At $400 I'd be there day one.
At $450 I'd have a serious debate with myself.
At $500 I'd wait for the inevitable backlash that causes them to lower the price to $450.

 

[Angel Whispers]

What's this about the 3DS "flopping"?

The system sold almost 80 million units, how is that a flop?

It is and it isn’t a flop. It is, relative to its predecessor, as it achieved barely half the sales. It couldn’t get some of the development support that came to the much less successful Vita. We can identify the reasons why it couldn’t reach the heights of other portables before it, so, in that sense, and by Nintendo’s own very high expectations, it was a failure.

It isn’t, in that it passed the PS2 in its domestic market, and the idea that around 75m sales of anything being called a “flop” would seem absurd to the global public. While I’ve described the 3DS as a failure in the above sense, I’m also very sympathetic to this point. To some extent, it did help them to weather the storms of the Wii U era.

Perhaps “internal misses” would be a more accurate and appropriate description here.

 

[YugamiSekai]

At $500 I'd wait for the inevitable backlash that causes them to lower the price to $450.

I'd hope a GameCube/Wii game ambassador program would come from this.

 

[TomNookYankees]

There's no way nintendo will launch it without at least an option that is below $499, but I could see them doing what the seemingly fake 4chan leak suggested of a cheaper $399 model that has abysmally small internal storage and pretty much requires using external storage and a more expensive $499 model that has more storage.

 

[Giancarlo]

I don't think that would make it worth $500. I don't even know how Nintendo and Nvidia would justify that price point.

let supose Nintendo chage $500 for it next gen hardware, what features/tecnologies would make Nintendo charge $500 for the Switch sucessor?