I've been a die-hard Nintendo fanboy since I got by Gameboy Color back when it was brand new. I'll just start by saying that.
I'm hoping this is well-written and concise enough that, maybe, just maybe, it will get a soundbyte on the blog, but probably not.
A lot of posts get put up by GoNintendo that quote "Doom-saying" Analysts, and, of course, we all look at them and say, "wut?" Nintendo's fine, right? They sold amazingly well last generation, they've had amazing games, their cash is through the roof, and, yeah, even though they had their first loss in like 1,000 years this last year, they've got enough cash reserves to lose money until 2060. Ideally, by then, they'd figure out what they were doing wrong.
That is all totally true, and it's good reason to believe we'll be seeing quality Nintendo like we love it for decades to come. There's no "doom" there.
But we gamers seem to think the message these analysts are giving is "Nintendo is losing this console war" or worse "Nintendo's going to go out of business soon." That's not at all what they're saying. Analysts don't care about whether the company goes out of business. They don't even care if the company makes money. They care about whether the company has a good return on investment. That means, if I buy Nintendo stock, I want to know whether that stock will grow in value so that my investment will make me money. An analyst's job is to inform investors about whether it's worth investing or not.
And, you know what? Analysts are sometimes wrong, but they've been pretty close to reality since 2008. Go to the link at the end of the article. It's the value of Nintendo stock since 2007.
Analysts were stupid when they thought Nintendo would be in trouble after the Wii launch. Well, they were wrong. If you bought stock in Nintendo right before the Wii launch, your stock would have doubled in value in less than a year. Awesome!!
But let's say you were stubborn, and you didn't listen to analysts at all from then on. Or, let's say you bought Nintendo stock at its height in 2008. What you would have been hearing the whole time from (most) analysts was "It's good, but it's not going to last." Now look at what's happened to their stock over the last while.
In 2008 was the whole market crash, so ignore that huge dive. That wasn't Nintendo's fault. But, still, your Nintendo stock would have lost a lot of money. Now follow it along as analysts get more and more pessimistic. Look how much Nintendo's stock value has dropped. Your Nintendo stock today is worth less than a quarter of what it was when the Wii was new. Nintendo still had amazing sales, made lots of money, and put out some Grade-A content, but if you were an investor you lost money. You see? The analysts were right!
In a recent article on GoNintendo, the headline read: "WiiU can't save Nintendo." That quote was totally misplaced. The article was describing results of a survey of gamers, not just some analyst making stuff up off the top of his head. The article described that, with the lessening demand for TVs that smartphones and tablets have created, there's a projection that less consoles will be purchased. Logical. If there are less TVs, people will buy less consoles for those TVs. The article stated that the WiiU can't save Nintendo from that trend. The article didn't postulate that Nintendo would go out of business or lose money. Its saying that the WiiU launch isn't going to motivate people to go out to buy new TVs, and that consoles will probably not sell as amazingly next generation as they did this generation.
You know what? I think they're right, and I think Nintendo needs to think about it, and I think they are. We gamers don't take Analysts seriously, but Nintendo sure does. It's why Nintendo makes such a big stink at their investor meetings about their plans for online content, DLC, their plans to woo indie gamers and "core" gamers. ("Core," by the way, has nothing to do with how "hardcore" you are as a gamer. It's describing whether you are a key revenue driver for the gaming industry, a.k.a you spend lots of money on games.) Nintendo takes these analysts seriously, and you all should, too.
That was long. Sorry.
Nintendo 5-year history: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NTDOY.PK+Interactive#symbol=ntdoy.pk;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;
