• halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Simple, they don’t have any direct competition.

      Microsoft and Sony are competing against each other and Nintendo is doing their own thing, they always have. Nintendo won the console wars of their time, and now just does their own thing. Sony and Microsoft waded in and created a new console war and Nintendo hasn’t tried to compete against them, but they sell record numbers of devices every year doing it.

      When was the last time Nintendo released hardware just to compete, rather than to innovate in a way they wanted to move forward, regardless of the other companies? Nintendo sits on their bubble printing money doing whatever they want and their customers of all ages, hardcore and casual, keep coming back for more every year. Meanwhile everyone else fights around them for a different set of “gamer” customers, and the title goes back and forth.

      • Transtronaut
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        9 hours ago

        I would have been happy to keep giving them money too, if they hadn’t kept doubling down on shady and abusive practices like tying digital purchases to hardware, forcing online check-ins for offline games, and patent trolling. That doesn’t matter one jot, though, since the broad appeal of their products means their audience largely consists of people who don’t notice or care about things like that in the slightest. Makes me wonder if that’s part of the strategy, but then again, I doubt it’s any different for Microsoft or Sony, so maybe it’s moot.

      • Kelly@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Meanwhile everyone else fights around them for a different set of “gamer” customers, and the title goes back and forth.

        PS3 and Xbox 360 were essentially a tie, but sony has maintained a pretty healthy lead for the other PlayStation generations.

        • Twinklebreeze @lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          PS3 was not a tie. I love Sony, and I’ve had all of their consoles (I had an original Xbox but stopped there). The 360 won that generation easily.

          • Kelly@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            IIRC the 360 started strong but the PS3 did better in the second half of that gen.

            The numbers we have are:

            • PS3 – 87.4 million
            • Xbox 360 – ≥84 million

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles

            To my mind that’s a wash.

            When you consider how these brands performed in the previous gen (>160m vs 24m) and following gen (117m vs ~58m), the 360/PS3 race was remarkably close.

            • Twinklebreeze @lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              A lot closer than I thought it would be. I’m gonna tell myself that all of the later sales were just for the blu ray player. To save my pride. I just remember PS3 online services sucked hard, and support from 3rd party devs was lacking in some cases as well. Black Ops ran so bad, and had so many hackers, on the PS3 that I have never bought another CoD game.