Nintendo’s 10 Biggest Failures EVER
Looking at the biggest blunders that Nintendo wants you to forget about.
Starting as a card-selling company in 1889, Nintendo changed forever during the 1970s when the president at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, decided to focus on video games. Cut to 2020 and Nintendo has become a gaming juggernaut, having sold five billion games and over 750 million consoles.
Due to the versatility of the Switch, as well as its vast choice of stellar games, the future is looking bright.
As easy as it is to praise the company, Nintendo have made some poor business decisions over the years. Due to mismanagement, short-sightedness, and underestimating the competition, Nintendo has helped their rivals, turned themselves into a laughing stock, and lost billions of dollars.
Obviously, nobody is infallible. If you have to maintain a billion-dollar organisation with countless workers all over the world, mistakes are guaranteed.
Making mistakes is completely acceptable so long as you learn from it. Also, it's tough to maintain success when you're up against steady competition like Sony and Microsoft. But many times, Nintendo caused more damage to their company than their rivals ever could have.
In order for Nintendo to stay on top-form, they need to acknowledge their mistakes to ensure they never EVER do anything this stupid again.
10. Stopping Sales Of The NES Classic
After the failure of the Wii U, Nintendo rushed out the Switch as soon as they could. Despite the fact the company only worked on it for two years, the Switch became the fastest-selling console in Nintendo's history.
However, the Switch could have come out earlier. Although it was released in March 2017, it was supposed to be available for Christmas 2016. Nintendo didn't want to lose potential sales during the busiest time of the year so they released a mini-version of the NES with 30 games pre-installed that November. The NES Classic did extremely well, selling 3.6 million units in 18 months.
The console seemed like a dream for the nostalgic fans but it had some problems. The controller cord was too short, there were some emulation glitches, and the sound was a bit iffy on certain games. Fans assumed Nintendo would fix these errors with a patch and develop updates for the console so consumers could download new games.
But once the Switch was released, Nintendo decided to fully concentrate on it, abandoning development on the NES Classic. Fans were so outraged, Nintendo decided to reproduce the NES Classic in June 2018. Sadly, development stopped again six months later.