Why Nintendo Is Laughing Their Asses Off At Microsoft And Sony

Most "hardcore gamers" (God, I hate that term. Sounds so ridiculous and makes us sound like fanatics or worse...) have written off poor ol' Nintendo for their most recent console, the Wii. And I don't blame them in the least. Nintendo has taken the road less traveled and started appealing to the casual circuit of gamers that weren't getting any attention since around the Super Nintendo days. There weren't a lot of pick-up-and-play games during the Playstation 1 through XBox 360 and PS3 era. And as the graphics became more advanced, so did the controllers and so did the games. Most games were so inaccessible to someone who might just walk up to a controller sitting on the couch.

Now, Nintendo has seen the hardcore market fully saturated by Sony and Microsoft and knew they needed to take a new route. It started with the Gamecube and has now moved onto their enormously popular Wii console. The Gamecube was never tremendously popular. It wasn't the most attractive little box to have sitting in your entertainment center, but it was a great console and I had a wonderful time with mine. But I digress....

So, Nintendo comes up with this fancy little motion controller that you can wave at your TV and it does wonderful, magical things that can only really be explained by studying the Necronomicon or joining Scientology. But it got people off the couch and got people who had never played a video game in their life, to pick up that little remote.

It was a gamble, no doubt. Trying to appeal a console to an entire group that has never been into playing video games. But, as all smart people should, they bet on black and won. And they won big.

Despite what most gaming folk believe, Nintendo has never lost money from any console they've ever made, including the Gamecube. Sure it didn't perform as well as the other two systems did, but they still made a hefty profit while poor little Microsoft's original XBox lost over a billion dollars during it's lifespan. Yep...that's right. A BILLION dollars lost.

I am losing track of where I want to go with this stupid post. I hate that I can never organize my ideas correctly. A problem which will forever keep me from ever writing for a publication that more than 10 people read...ANYWAY!

Why is Nintendo laughing at mega giants Sony and Microsoft? A good place to start would be to check the all time best selling console/handheld games list. Among the top 20 best sellers list, 18 of them are, in fact, made by Nintendo themselves. (The other two being Gran Turismo 3 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) Now I know what you (non-existent) Microsoft and Sony fanboys might say right here. "But Casey. Those probably count all the games back in the NES and Gameboy days when they had no real competition!"

To which I must reply, that of the 18 best selling games of all time, 12 of those games have been made in the last seven years. Now, let's take a deeper look at why Nintendo is laughing so incredibly hard. Take the game "Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day" This silly little game was made to train your brain a little and maybe kinda help you think better, possibly. This fun little game was developed, marketed and shipped on the hefty little price tag of about half a million dollars, total. Selling for $30 a piece, it has gone on to sell 18.7 million copies. And hopefully my math isn't failing me here, but that should add up to about $560 million in profit.

Now we shall take a look at the best selling game of the two mega consoles of this generation, made by studios in their particular house. (As in, made by either Sony or Microsoft) And that game is no doubt, Halo 3. Halo 3 sold a very impressive $8.1 million units. That is exceptionally strong for a console game that sits with a $60 price tag. So, let's do a little quick math here. So, at 60 bucks and selling 8.1 million, the money made from the game comes to around $486 million. But now we must all factor in the $40 million it cost just to develop the game. (not counting TV ads, print ads, packaging, and shipping) So, without all the extras we'll say the game made about $446 million bucks. Not too shabby.

A piece of the Nintendo laugh comes in at the fact that "Brain Age" mentioned earlier is that it's only the 3rd best selling game on the Nintendo DS and 7th overall. The two games above it being Nintendogs and New Super Mario Bros. also made those ridiculous piles of cash. And this is just on their silly little handheld system! Let's take a look at the Wii now.

The top 3 best selling console games of all time happen to be Wii games. Those being Wii Play (27.4 million sold) Wii Fit (22.6 million) and Mario Kart Wii (22.5 million) Analysts have put the cost to develop a Wii game at about $8-9 million or so. Much much less than the $20-30 million per game it costs the Microsoft and Sony consoles. So, we'll do some quick math yet again with Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii (Wii Fit has the balance board in it and costs a hundred bucks. I have no clue how much the balance board costs to make so I don't want to use it in the example) Both of these games sold at $50 a piece. So we are looking at $1.37 BILLION made from Wii Play and 1.125 BILLION from Mario Kart. Subtract out the 8 or 9 million for development costs and hell, take out another 10 million for advertising both games and you still have two games that made Nintendo a billion dollars each. Just two games.

The list can go on and on about how much Nintendo makes on their games. Sure, the system is full of crap games that are made because of the small cost of development and people are trying to make easy cash. But in the world I live in, I always look at scoreboard. And scoreboard says that every single Nintendo executive is swimming around in their own Scrooge McDuck style money vault.

And now, Microsoft and Sony have both seen how large Nintendo's money vaults actually are and how much money they are losing. They really want a piece of that action. So, Sony has developed it's own motion sensitive controller that will be coming out soon and Microsoft is releasing their Natal system that uses a camera mounted on your TV to sense motion. This is a last ditch, desperate attempt to get in on that casual gaming market that Sony and Microsoft had forgotten existed. Only time will tell if these new gadgets will pay off...or if it will be too little too late.

Wow this was written like crap. Oh well, I liked it. Later.