Well, since you often talk about arcade culture, how successful games appeal to the expanded audience and about the NES and the types of game found on it, I’ve been wondering about those regions where absolutely none of this is relevant. How could Nintendo make their games sell there?
Because at the moment, none of Nintendo’s consoles seem to be doing too well over here (not one Wii U game even reached the top 40 around launch time, not even New Super Mario Bros U) and my experience is that few if any Nintendo games bar Wii Sports have ever sold well in recent years. Could Nintendo change this? Could any of their games actually sell in a country where the likes of FIFA and Call of Duty seem to top the charts every year and where pretty much everything else falls by the wayside after a few weeks?
Heck, is it even possible? After all, Nintendo can’t appeal to the arcade days or arcade style gameplay since arcades generally didn’t even exist in the UK or many other European regions. So people don’t know much about the likes of Donkey Kong or the original Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man or the like. And the NES doesn’t hold many memories for people either, since there was no video game crash outside of the US. So not only did the NES not become a major phenomenon, but supposedly computers dominated the video game market until about the time of the original Playstation. Mario Mania? Forget it, I don’t even think the UK or certain other European regions even got things like the TV shows, movie or tie in merchandise.
So how could Nintendo be successful in these regions? Because after all, the US isn’t the only country in the world where video games can be commercially successful, yet Nintendo’s popularity is often near non existant outside of the US and Japan.
Nintendo sells very well in places like France. The question is how does the Xbox sell in Europe. Outside UK, Xbox doesn’t sell at all. Most of Europe is divided between Sony and Nintendo.
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