General Nintendo sales/business discussion topic (previously: The Wii U Thread)

[SuperLink]

Nintendo are pretty hopeless. I mean for fuck's sake.

 

Their Wii U estimates are 9mil before 2014 fiscal year begins, the Wii U barely has half of those sales and their servers still aren't capable of handling the amount of Christmas purchases for the Wii U and 3DS. How did they think they would cope with their expected numbers if they can't even handle this? They fucked up in a huge way, this holiday season was imperative on getting the confidence and trust of consumers and they've made thousands of frustrating situations for people all around the world who probably in many cases can't play the games they bought at all with their families on Christmas.

 

Absolutely ridiculous. I know other digital services also had it rough yesterday but Nintendo so far has a fraction of the amount of regular online users that Sony MS or Valve have on a regular basis. There is nothing to blame but their complete incompetence at commanding and making the most of their holiday success.

 

I love my Wii U and I love my 3DS, but when it comes to services Nintendo needs to have a wake up call and try way harder, and it kinda seems like the upcoming "we sold half the units we were expecting to sell" will do that just fine at that.

 

/rant

[Kaabiitorori]

Nintendo are pretty hopeless. I mean for fuck's sake.

 

Their Wii U estimates are 9mil before 2014 fiscal year begins, the Wii U barely has half of those sales and their servers still aren't capable of handling the amount of Christmas purchases for the Wii U and 3DS. How did they think they would cope with their expected numbers if they can't even handle this? They fucked up in a huge way, this holiday season was imperative on getting the confidence and trust of consumers and they've made thousands of frustrating situations for people all around the world who probably in many cases can't play the games they bought at all with their families on Christmas.

 

Absolutely ridiculous. I know other digital services also had it rough yesterday but Nintendo so far has a fraction of the amount of regular online users that Sony MS or Valve have on a regular basis. There is nothing to blame but their complete incompetence at commanding and making the most of their holiday success.

 

I love my Wii U and I love my 3DS, but when it comes to services Nintendo needs to have a wake up call and try way harder, and it kinda seems like the upcoming "we sold half the units we were expecting to sell" will do that just fine at that.

 

/rant

 

Are you saying that Nintendo fucked up all their work throughout Christmas just because of a server overload? Excuse me, but with all my respect I cannot comprehend the reasons you gave in your rant. o_o

 

Nintendo is sometimes behind in terms of online and network services, cannot argue about that. But seriously, why should we attribute a server overload as a determinant reason of failure? From that logic, let's say GTA V Online, Battlefield 4, CoD Ghosts, or the Playstation Network, Xbox Live and Steam, online games and services whose servers had a rough time to keep stable on either their launch day or incoming quantity of new users, are instantly qualified as failures. And those are far better structured than Nintendo's.

 

I understand users complaining over these type of issues... but come on, it's not the end of the world! These issues will be fixed soon, so a little bit of patience won't hurt. And in regards to whoever is responsible for the issues (in this case, Nintendo), get your acts together and deal with 'em soon! According to their Facebook page they acknowledged Nintendo's services were experiencing heavy traffic and they apologized, so that's something.

 

I do think their FY 2014 prospects are out of proportion, but it's delusional to think the Wii U is not making a comeback as we speak. This Christmas was indeed imperative on getting the confidence and trust of consumers. Well, I don't think Nintendo were sitting on their butts doing nothing, 'cause otherwise we wouldn't have seen both the 3DS and Wii U heavily advertised on TV, or doing tours across the USA to promote the Wii U on malls and shopping centers, or giving them away on airports and TV shows, or supporting it with heavy hitters like The Wind Waker HD or Super Mario 3D World. We wouldn't have seen how the Wii U, a console that was quite moribund during the first half of 2013, managed to grasp a certain recovery between the spotlight of the PS4 and Xbox One launches, how the units are being sold out in several physical and online retailers, and how the upcoming games for 2014 are making the prospects of the console more interesting than what it was months ago.

[Solkia]

Because a lot of people probably got their Wii U's for Christmas and this will make the Wii U's image even worse than it already was.

 

What does it say about the Console and Nintendo's online experience if they can't get right something that has been a standard for almost a decade now?

 

SuperLink is right. They fucked up and they need to get their head out of their ass.

[Autosaver]

That's because Nintendo thought no one would buy a Wii U for Christmas.

 

Duh.

[Solkia]

You know this is serious when eve Autosaver is taking the piss.

[SuperLink]

I'm not saying it's the end of the Wii U or the end of the world or anything like that.

 

I'm saying that Nintendo were apparently trying to really help the Wii U's momentum and popularity over the holiday season, they were confident they could, but they couldn't even figure out how to sustain probably the smallest amount of online traffic of any gaming industry competitor even when they were expecting twice the amount of Wii Us to have been sold by this point.

 

It's not "all over" because of this, but this just proves that Nintendo aren't taking it seriously, they're resting on their laurels way too much and it's hurting their reputation. Reputation being a pretty important thing.

 

Picture this, you bought a Wii U for your kids for christmas, your kids begged you for this Wii U, your partner wanted a Wii U, whatever, you got a Wii U for Christmas, everyone is excited, but when you open it it doesn't work properly! You already heard that maybe the Wii U isn't the best option, and now you can't even download the game that's packaged with it because the online store isn't working for two days straight when far busier networks managed to fix things much quicker.

 

Your faith in Nintendo isn't exactly going to be exuberant and restored if you can't even play the digital games you bought to play with the family on Christmas day. This is causing innumerable people frustration, just look at facebook and twitter comments.

 

Nintendo should have been prepared to wow people for Christmas with great service and smooth sailing, that is how you give a console buzz and positive word of mouth.. the only Christmas stories people will be spreading about the Wii U this year are how they couldn't update it or even play Zelda.

 

Like I said, it's not the end of the Wii U, but I just can't believe how they could fuck up something so simple that could have helped their reputation so much.

[Gabz Girl]

Well Xbone and PS4 didn't exactly have smooth sailing the first couple of days when they came out...

I see what you mean though, SuperLink. Maybe Nintendo just wasn't prepared for so much traffic on their service. You know what they're like I mean this IS this the first time they are using something like Xbox Live and PSN. =[

[Solkia]

They need to hire an online manager. I get the feeling their just letting current staff work on Online stuff occasionally.

 

EDIT: I used the wrong kind of they're gomen I am trash

[SuperLink]

Well Xbone and PS4 didn't exactly have smooth sailing the first couple of days when they came out...

I see what you mean though, SuperLink. Maybe Nintendo just wasn't prepared for so much traffic on their service. You know what they're like I mean this IS this the first time they are using something like Xbox Live and PSN. =[

They weren't prepared, but it also shows they just don't know what they're working with and they really need to.

 

Like, I can't get over the fact that they were expecting the Wii U to have twice the sales it actually has, and their servers still can't handle it. If they expect the Wii U to have 9mil units sold, maybe they should have prepared servers that can handle anywhere near that amount of systems + 20+mil 3DS' accessing online elements.

 

It's almost like they just thought the servers would magically be able to handle Christmas for 8mil Wii Us. They're new at it but it's such a darn important season for their reputation and they made such a darn elementary mistake like it's so obvious that people are going to be using the eshop on Christmas get better servers doesn't anyone in your company known what kind of servers 30mil systems around the world needs.

 

I kinda think Goomy-san is right.

[Solkia]

And it's not like they're not used to running servers, Club Nintendo Accounts ae been going long before the Wii was even a thing.

 

I think they just don't know how to deal with large Traffic.

[Kaabiitorori]

I know what you mean SuperLink, but in all honesty, this is common amongst almost every gaming online service. And at this point I am not surprised whenever these are overloaded for a couple of hours or even days. Did Rockstar expect GTA V Online to go buttersmooth when it launched? Or PS Network and Xbox Live when both PS4 and Xbox One launched respectively? You forecast and prepare your servers to hold up as many instructions as possible when the users get access to them, that's right. If you manage to hold 'em up like a champion, good. But if not, all I can say is whenever these problems happen, admit them and fix them pronto. In Nintendo's case, they did the former right now and certainly they must be working hard to address the latter.

 

However, I'd not go as far as saying the Wii U's and even the 3DS' reputation will be hindered because of a temporary server overload. Were the reputation of the other examples hindered as well? Surely users may have raised their eyebrows when that happened on the first couple of days, but all in all everything was okay later on. I expect the same on the Wii U and the 3DS.

[SuperLink]

The difference here is that

• Competing servers handle multiplefold the amount of consoles Nintendo has out there at any given time
• competing servers usually fuck up at less important times of year
• Despite those services being far more popular than Nintendo's, they were all fixed way quicker than Nintendo's services were,.

Even though Nintendo's competitors had issues yesterday on Christmas day they have more systems in the wild than Wii Us and 3DS' sales combined. PS3 and 360 both have sold at least 80million units, meaning Microsoft and Sony are dealing with far far far huger problems than Nintendo.

 

Not only that, but these problems should only be common if the numbers are far higher than expected, but with Nintendo these numbers are lower than expected.

 

It won't hurt the 3DS' reputation, but probably the Wii U's a bit especially since a huge amount of those sales were from the Zelda or Mario bundles and you of course can't download those games without the eshop working which it still isn't working even though most of Nintendo's competitors with their far bigger installbases managed to get their servers up n running again.

[Sean]

Wonder how many people returned their Wii Us after finding out they couldn't download their bundled games.

[Autosaver]

Well I mean... since the stores are closed on Christmas

 

0?

 

banned

[Sean]

Didn't realize every store was closed the day after Christmas too

[Kaabiitorori]

The difference here is that

• Competing servers handle multiplefold the amount of consoles Nintendo has out there at any given time
• competing servers usually fuck up at less important times of year
• Despite those services being far more popular than Nintendo's, they were all fixed way quicker than Nintendo's services were,.

Even though Nintendo's competitors had issues yesterday on Christmas day they have more systems in the wild than Wii Us and 3DS' sales combined. PS3 and 360 both have sold at least 80million units, meaning Microsoft and Sony are dealing with far far far huger problems than Nintendo.

 

Not only that, but these problems should only be common if the numbers are far higher than expected, but with Nintendo these numbers are lower than expected.

 

It won't hurt the 3DS' reputation, but probably the Wii U's a bit especially since a huge amount of those sales were from the Zelda or Mario bundles and you of course can't download those games without the eshop working which it still isn't working even though most of Nintendo's competitors with their far bigger installbases managed to get their servers up n running again.

 

Gotta add one more to the list: Microsoft and Sony have their online services subscription-based if you wanna play online, giving them a source of income that's designated to their constant improvement.

 

As I said before, Nintendo's quite behind in terms of online and networking services and that's something they should improve (agreeing to what Goomy said too in regards to hiring more staff for online infrastructures, which I forgot to say). The only thing I gotta say on their benefit is that their online services are free, and to be honest I bloody hope they stick to that policy because I certainly am not keen on subscription-based fees to play online. And that's coming from someone who used to pay for Xbox Live's Gold Membership: that model was comprehensive back in 2005, but not worthy as of today. Something that now Sony decided to jump in for the PS4 instead of keeping it optional (except on F2P games), which was absolutely fine by me back on the PS3.

 

Ah, that's a point that didn't come to my mind, although I thought the NSMBU bundles were physical copies. Nevertheless, and as I said once again, they better address the issues ASAP.

[Jet Prower]

deleting yet again

[Sean]

Do you have anything else to say other than "This is what you get for playing digital games"?

 

Your strawmanning generalizations of behavior that doesn't even exist in this thread are irritating and absolutely nobody in this topic is raising up unreasonable complaints about Nintendo right now. So please don't stir up shit where it isn't needed, people are trying to have a civil discussion and you're the only person who thinks anybody is acting whiny or childish. And if there's anybody who's overblowing things, it's you.

[Cola]

Ha ha thanks nintendo I mean who would even want to transfer all their stuff to their shiny new 3ds xl and download the brand new zelda game right

...

*cries*

Edit: also jet this isn't a "hiccup" this is the entirety of nintendo's online system bucking under the pressure of a fuckton of new users

[Jet Prower]

Do you have anything else to say other than "This is what you get for playing digital games"?

 

Your strawmanning generalizations of behavior that doesn't even exist in this thread are irritating and absolutely nobody in this topic is raising up unreasonable complaints about Nintendo right now. So please don't stir up shit where it isn't needed, people are trying to have a civil discussion and you're the only person who thinks anybody is acting whiny or childish.

 

Fine then, go about what you were doing. I really do get tired of people talking like this, but fine then.

[Tornado]

Wait. Digital bundled games? What douchebaggery is this in the first place?

[PSI Wind]

Wait. Digital bundled games? What douchebaggery is this in the first place?

Yeah, I don't get it either. Even the PS3 Black Friday games were physical.

[Wraith]

I'm surprised Nintendo went with the digital approach with all these bundles to begin with considering the Wii U's extremely limited space for downloadable games.

[PSI Wind]

I'm surprised Nintendo went with the digital approach with all these bundles to begin with considering the Wii U's extremely limited space for downloadable games.

Well, on the plus side, Nintendo are gods at game space. SM3DW is just under 2 GB for gods sakes.

[Solkia]

Well, on the plus side, Nintendo are gods at game space. SM3DW is just under 2 GB for gods sakes.

 

Wait are you serious?