Nintendo are being unfairly treated by the media which “diminishes” their relative successes over the past year, especially with their resurgent 3DS within western markets.
That’s according to Amazon UK’s category leader of videogames and software Ketu Patel, who reasoned that “as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy” and that neither Microsoft or Sony are subjected to such extreme criticism.
“Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year,” Patel openly declared to EDGE.
“They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.”
After announcing their revised financial forecast, many have been quick to declare that Nintendo have lost their direction, no longer understand the market, should sell their older titles on smartphones, and have even suffered calls for president Satoru Iwata to step down.
“I think Nintendo have this imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception,” he continuedP. “Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done.
“If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.”
Amazon UK: Nintendo have “been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy”
