I was listening to our friend Guillaume's
podcast this week and they were discussing how Nintendo can boost sales of New 3DS and set it apart from regular 3DS and 3DSXL. I was surprised to hear that all four panelists agreed that they need to make more exclusive games than just Xenoblade and that they seemed to agree that they should be paving their way to a future where more and more games were exclusive to New 3DS.
I found this kind of puzzling, because I feel like the New 3DS can sell on its own merits. People like new tech and there's enough things here to justify upgrading from 3DSXL and especially from the original 3DS that the carrot of exclusive games shouldn't be necessary to get sales going. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they keep releasing desirable games for 3DS, they can expect New 3DS to sell in the same way that DS Lite and 3DS XL sold well even though they didn't have exclusive games. And although the DSi did have a big exclusive library thanks to DSiWare, I don't think it was much of a force behind sales because I imagine the mainstream audience didn't take much advantage of it.
I realize some people see the upgrade from 3DS to New 3DS as more like that from Gameboy to Gameboy Color, but the Gameboy had been out for close to a decade when that came out. 3DS has only been out for about 5 years and people aren't going to be as happy about big Nintendo handheld games not being available for the hardware they shelled out for not too long ago. And of course there's the age old idea of splitting the userbase, where Nintendo isn't going to be able to take full advantage of the many millions of 3DSes already in homes.
Now, I'm going to be upgrading to New 3DS as soon as possible because I still have the monstrosity that is the original 3DS and it's got some issues, so it won't personally affect me if games are exclusive, but I still would empathize with people who would be understandably upset at noteworthy exclusive titles for 3DS, especially if they already upgraded to a 3DSXL this generation. Xenoblade is one thing, as its available on Wii already, but if the new F-Zero was New 3DS exclusive (as Guillaume suggested), that would be a bitter pill to swallow.
Do you guys agree with me? What's in Nintendo's best interest? What's in your best interest? I'm open to hear that I'm wrong and that New 3DS exclusives are good for everyone, but I just don't see it.
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