"Bringing your games to other platforms is how you’re going to win" - Circana

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ampersandrew@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/bringing-your-games-to-other-platforms

Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry.

Exclusives aren’t driving console purchases anymore, as evidenced by Forza Horizon 5 most of all.
Nintendo would likely benefit from this too, but they’re unlikely to do so anytime soon.
It’s too early to predict any sort of success for Switch 2, as the numbers they’re seeing right now may be little more than the supply being great enough to reach their biggest fans.
Overall demand for gaming hasn’t gone down and has stabilized. Those dollars won’t be distributed evenly, but the enthusiasts are showing up.

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TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
How many people are buying a switch BECAUSE of Nintendo’s exclusives? I would speculate damn near all of them.

Exclusives absolutely do drives sales and give the hardware a _reason_to exist. Nintendo figured this out ages ago.

Any logic about how the industry works based off things Microsoft does is…poor.

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- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  How many people buy Nintendo for exclusives isn’t super relevant. The important questions are how many more games would they sell if they were multi-platform, and how many fewer consoles they would sell if their games were available elsewhere. They would very likely sell substantially more games, but also likely see a significant reduction in console sales. This would still likely be a win as the games are far higher margin than the consoles.
  
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  - TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Selling hardware if important for them and without exclusivity, they’re not selling it.
    
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  - tyler@programming.dev ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Nintendo’s exclusives likely wouldn’t work as well on other consoles or would show significant bugs or problems. Their games are purpose built for their hardware.
    
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  - Infrapink@thebrainbin.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There's more to it than that.
    
    Nintendo have spent decades meticulously building up a powerful brand image. As such, there are people who are fans of Nintendo the company/brand to an extent you don't see with Sony or Microsoft; other company's individual games have fans, but you don't get Microsoft Fans or XBox Fans so much as Halo Fans. This means Nintendo's games and hardware reïnforce each other; someone who bought a Switch for Mario and Zelda is the sort of person who thinks "Ooh, Fire Emblem!" and buys that, too.
    
    Plus, if you've gone to the trouble of buying a Nintendo console for one or two games, there is a psychological urge to justify your choice, to make it worth your while. So if you just got it for Mario and Zelda, well then you've spent hundreds of euros on a machine to play two games. But if you also get Fire Emblem, that's three games. Kirby brings it up to four. Thus, every exclusive makes the console purchase feel more reasonable.
    
    Then there are sales breakdowns. Nintendo gets 100% of the non-tax price of every one of their own games. To give a concrete example, Donkey Kong Bananza costs €69.99. Nintendo get €56.90 of that (€69.99 less 23% VAT). If they sell it elsewhere, they lose another 30% of the non-tax price in store fees. Thus, if they were to bring Donkey Kong Bananza to Steam, they would only get €39.83 per copy (€56.90 × 0.7). They would thus need to sell 1.43 times as many copies on Steam to make the same money as selling them on the eShop.
    
    That's the big thing right there. Some people for sure decide to go without Nintendo games if they aren't on other platforms. A subset of those people would be willing to buy Nintendo games on other platforms. But is that cohort at least 43% the size of the cohort who just buy a Nintendo console?
    
    But, of course, Nintendo don't just sell their games on the eShop. There are also tons of third-party games, each of which pay 30% of their non-tax price per purchase. If somebody has a Nintendo console, even if those third-party games are on Steam and PlayStation, they might buy those games on the Switch instead. (Source: I have done this. If you own a Switch, so have you). That's another chunk of money Nintendo would lose out on if they weren't selling consoles.
    
    In conclusion, for third-party developers, being multi-platform is good. But for Nintendo, a first-party developer, keeping their games exclusive is the logical choice.
    
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- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It’s the only reason to ever own Nintendo consoles
  
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  - TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Well yeah, that’s kind of the point.
    
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Nintendo’s moat is quite a bit bigger, but they’ll likely see similar diminishing returns on that old strategy as the younger generation is just as likely to play only Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. It’s not just based on what Microsoft does but how much demand there was on other platforms for their games that didn’t drive Xbox sales, and not even just that.
  
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Aielman15@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Imagine saying that one of (if not the most, we’ll see how it goes) successful consoles of all time should follow Microsoft’s example when it comes to administering their consoles and exclusives.

Like, wow. I despise Nintendo and everything they stand for, but this is just delusional on so many levels.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I don’t have to imagine it; he’s backing up his points with data.
  
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  - Aielman15@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    The strategy worked for Xbox because the alternative was to curl up and die. There’s no reason for Nintendo to give up their 30% sales cut to reach audiences in their system of choice.
    
    Nintendo also has a lot more visibility and brand recognition (and generally speaking, more prestige and goodwill) compared to whatever Microsoft is attempting to sell at the moment, which again, means there’s little reason to reach people who bought into other systems. People already know Pokémon and Mario, and know those are good games. If they wanted to play them, they would’ve bought a Nintendo console.
    Porting Mario and Pokémon to PS and Steam would certainly bring in more sales, but it would also devalue a console whose entire shtick is that it lets you play games you can’t play anywhere else.
    
    The only concession Nintendo has done so far is to bring some spin-off titles to mobile, possibly in an attempt to corner the younger market that seems to be less interested in traditional consoles, and hook them with their games in the hope of them buying a Switch and doing their purchases on the Nintendo store.
    
    Whoever says that Nintendo should follow in the steps of one of the biggest failures of today’s console market, instead of doing what they’ve done so far with resounding success, is nuts, especially since the “data” MS has released so far about their consoles and the revenue is muddy at best - they say, for example, that GamePass is profitable, but we don’t know how much profitable it is, nor how much does it cost for them to bring into the service all those games, nor the opportunity cost of releasing those games on the service instead of selling them, nor… Anything at all, really. Like, how many players are on GP that play regularly? How much money did those players spend on the store before subscribing to GP? How much do they spend now? How many of those players are subscribed for Gold and Call of Duty, and how many are interested in other titles? What’s the difference in sales between GP and selling the same game on a successful platform, ie Steam/PS? Is GP the fault of other titles selling poorly on the console, and if so, doesn’t that threaten the stability of the console, when the developers refuse to optimize or straight up release their game on the platform because it’s a waste of time and money to do so?
    
    Microsoft knows that data and refuses to tell us, so we’re left wondering what “profitable” means. What we know for sure is that Xbox is dead, and Nintendo isn’t.
    
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  - paultimate14@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.
    
    As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.
    
    I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.
    
    He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.
    
    You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.
    
    If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.
    
    The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.
    
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Citing a racing game as being evidence that console exclusives aren’t moving consoles seems a bit of a stretch. Is the genre that popular that a racing game alone would push hardware sales?

looks at Mario Kart on Switch 2

OK maybe it is.

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- Gerudo@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Back in the day, Gran Turismo took forever to come out with, I believe, 3 or 4. I wanted a new racing game, and was in the market for a new console. Forza had just come out. Xbox has been my main console since.
  However, if it had been multiplatform, I would have stayed PS.
  
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absquatulate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
As a PC player I wholeheartedly welcome the demise of exclusives, but are the strategies toward them really changing? Near as I can tell it’s only microsoft that’s pivoting, and that’s probably because they have to. Sony is sticking to their strategy of the past few years of delayed PC releases, and nintendo does what nintendo does - keep everything in-house and sue everyone.

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- paultimate14@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  This may just be me, but I see delayed exclusives as basically being equivalent to multiplatform releases. Especially for single-player games.
  
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Sony just released Helldivers 2 on Xbox, and their delayed PC releases are because of exactly the phenomenon that Piscatella concludes here: people are perfectly content to wait for these games to come to the platform of their preference rather than get invested in another one.
  
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