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Comment by megaduck | Hacker News Reader

True, there's a lot of crapware, but look at the sales results. Wii is the top console, by a large margin. Nintendo is absolutely beating the stuffing out of both MS and Sony on profits.

Look at the game sales charts on The Magic Box. NDS and Wii games dominate the top 20, and have been doing so for years. There's simply no comparison.

It's really hard to make the argument that Nintendo's screwing up here. If anything, facts seem to support the argument that loose licensing requirements leads to dominance.

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Only Nintendo's Wii games are prospering, third parties are having trouble making money on the Wii.

Isn't this good though? If the problem is the 'deluge of shovel-ware' then having all of these third parties not being unable to turn a respectable profit with them is good news. It's capitalism at work, right? You make no money on crappy games so you stop making crappy games.

Though, I suspect they do actually make money on the Wii. The sheer number of crappy games coming out for the Wii would indicate that the 'market' believes these crappy games will sell enough to get a decent ROI.

This leaves one of two possibilities:

A) You made up your previous fact.

B) These third parties are all to dumb to realize that making these games isn't making them any money.

I'm betting on A.

There is another possibility:

C) The profitability of these games are reliant on a unsustainable pattern, or by itself contributes negatively to sustained profit. Say you were a knockoff manufacturer for expensive watches, and you were for some reason able to get your goods into the official distribution channel for real watches - this is an extremely profitable situation for you. Then everyone figures out how you're making money hand over fist and starts doing it too, and soon consumer confidence in the quality of the watches drops through the floor, and nobody (real or knockoff) makes any money. This is a very real possibility Nintendo faces. The profitability of shovelware relies on consumer confidence of products in the channel in general, and the market has a definite carrying capacity for shit games - exceeding this risks the viability of the platform entirely.

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