The Legend of Nintendo

[tthurman]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-21/how-nintendo-s-switch-helped-the-japanese-gaming-giant-win-again

[Adultery]

Nintendo puts consoles back on top... again.

Great read, thanks!

[RIP-Felix]

Concerning the Nintendo Classic edition, this confirms for me what I had already figured out:

Quote

But what seemed to some like a supply-chain disaster looked to others like a calculated strategy. At $59.99 per unit with no additional games, NES Classics were a low-margin item; much more important for the company was to whet the world’s appetite for Nintendo games in preparation for the Switch.... The strategy worked... Over the next fiscal year, the Switch accounted for $6.8 billion of revenue.

What pisses me off is they will perpetuate the cycle now. They think the practice is validated by the outcome, simply by profits. They guess it helped. They don't know for sure, they just assume it drove more sales. The only way to know for sure is to go back in time and produce enough NES classics to meet demand, then see if shorting supplies increased switch sales. That can't happen, so they're attributing the success to the strategy. This is known as "attribution fallacy" and it's a common mistake in reason. It's very possible they lost money by putting off long time Nintendo customers who finally had enough, but that the switch was a good enough product on it's own to be a success. No collector feeding frenzy needed. We'll never know for sure. 

What is sure, is that Nintendo will continue business as usual now that it hit it big...again. Damn it! I hoped they would gain some humility and return to the creative and fun games that made them great. Nothing like overpaying an employee will ruin them faster ("wow, if I'm worth this much to them, I must be good at my job"). Same applies to a company ("wow, if they are paying us this much, we must be doing a good job"). Attribution Fallacy!!!