Responding to Wii Essay

With innovation on his mind,Yamauchi branched out into a number of other, less lucrative endeavors, including an instant-rice company and a pay-by-the-hour “love hotel.” These disappointments led Yamauchi to the conclusion that Nintendo’s greatest asset was the meticulous distribution system that it had built over decades of selling playing cards. With such an intricate and expansive pipeline already in place, he narrowed his entrepreneurial scope to products that could be sold in toy and department stores and settled upon a new category called

Video games have been around for years with many different types of consoles and games. The video game industry has grown into a $20 billion dollar industry over the past ten years, and it only shows signs of growing larger in the years to come. In the United States alone, the market has grown considerably where 60% of all Americans play video games, 40% are women, and 60% of all gamers are between the ages of 25 through 44 years old (games-advertising.com). According to an article on Gamespot.com, analysts estimate that the video game category will have about 50 to 55 more square feet of shelve space in Best Buy by the year 2007.

While Sony is losing market share in the console market, it is winning the “Battle for the living room” with Microsoft. With momentum gained from the previous 2 generations and technological superiority of Sony’s offering, Microsoft has taken a bigger blow, with almost double the operating loss of Sony. (Sony operating loss of $1246.1 M vs Microsoft $2066 M, from Exhibit 2b in the Responding to Wii case – Harvard Business Review).

The main suppliers in the video game industry are the game makers. These companies pay a royalty fee to the company that makes the console. Game makers have the decision to make certain games exclusively for one console if they are paid enough money, for example Halo made for the Xbox, or make them available on many different platforms. This threat is also moderate for the game industry. The larger the variety of games as well as the better the quality the more likely a customer is to buy one game console over another.

The role of technology is vital in this industry as it focuses on technological efforts for competitive advantage. Every new development uses new technology. Though there are restricted innovations in the gaming industry, the speed of technological transfer is very high. Nintendo’s role from playing cards to toys to video games and then with each console introduced, included many technological changes. Technological up gradation increased hardware costs and discouraged innovation. The online capability of Nintendo Wii was a major change in the technology of the video game industry though they were not able to do as well as their competitors (Sony, Microsoft).

The product I have chosen to study is the Nintendo DS. This product is one of Nintendo’s most recently released games consoles. I will explain what the Nintendo DS does. It is a handheld games console that consists of a book like structure. It has a small LCD screen on each side. One is a touch screen and the other is a viewing screen. The console also incorporates a microphone and has Wi-Fi capabilities. This allows the user to operate the game by using a small stylus on the touch screen, it can also listen to voice commands and can be used with other players if utilising the Wi-Fi feature. Nintendo is one of the world’s most globally recognised brands. It was founded in Kyoto, Japan in 1889. What it developed in those

The Nintendo brand has changed over the years, starting out as a simple card company that has expanded into the massive electronic giant we know today. They have had their ups and downs through their time as a gaming company but they always have the gamer’s interest in mind. As the late CEO of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata said, "On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer" (Yu, E., & Chan, W.

To attempt counteract this cyclical slowdown, EB games have introduced an ever-growing variety of accessories with games to increase the revenue raising capacity of their respective consoles, as well as maintaining the loyalty and attention of a fickle gaming public. Some types of games have been released, with specialty controllers to great success, mitigating the expected lull in sales in the lead-up to new consoles. Recently however, the competition has become slightly skewed. Nintendo’s newfound dominance of the market is causing some headaches for Sony and Microsoft.

Nintendo’s strategy for pricing of consoles and games was to lock-in the network effects consoles offered by pricing them at- or below- cost and reaping profits by pricing video games at significant margin. Nintendo took these actions because it knew that if consumers used the NES/ Famicom console, they would be a captive audience for its higher-margin video games which were necessarily more perishable from a consumer taste perspective. This affected the value created by

Several years had passed and a Japanese company by the name of Nintendo decided it wanted to enter the market. Nintendo’s Family Computer, or Famicom, was doing well in Japan and Nintendo wanted to try and find success in North America. This proved to be difficult because America was still wary on the idea of game consoles after the crash. To try and avoid the skepticism that came with items labeled as a game console, Nintendo rebranded the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System and marketed it as a toy. Believe it or not, this actually worked and Nintendo became a household name. In order to keep their success going Nintendo took steps to avoid another market crash. Nintendo would put developers under a contract that kept them on their console and would keep them from developing games for developers. Developers also had a limited amount of games they could release in a year as

However, the extent to which the hardcore gaming demographic dictates the structural aspects of the gaming industry as a whole is remarkable. Companies are still willing to cater to this audience because it is a profitable enterprise, as it is only the most devoted of fans who will line up days before a system release while generating free publicity on the internet and through word of mouth in the months prior. Thus, and perhaps unexpectedly, an important factor in the Wii's meteoric rise was Nintendo's ability, through the strength of its brand and residual nostalgia effects, to co-opt this hardcore gaming culture with a console that at best, only occasionally acceded to its wishes, while at worst, marginalized them completely. What Nintendo realized, and ultimately capitalized on, was that the hegemonic structure influencing the industry was inherently weak, in that it was essentially a small minority overwhelming the relatively silent masses. Although there are doubts to the sustainability of such an endeavor, the signs are present that the Wii has already altered the video game

Nintendo’s emphasis on creative games and interesting story lines changed user perception of gaming. High quality of gaming introduced a new breed of consumers.” (wikipedia)

The video game industry is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video and computer games. It includes video game consoles, game software, handheld devices, mobile games and online games. The video gaming industry has been growing exponentially in recent years with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo competing for the higher profits in the market. This essay will analyze each of the five forces acting on the industry: threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products or services, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and the competitive rivalry among existing firms. Then it will be determined if the video game industry is still an

Overall, the market response to these three consoles has been surprising. Nintendo Wii, has outsold its rivals and more surprisingly, Sony’s PS2 has outsold PS3. This has let Microsoft and Sony with the enormous challenge of competing with a rival possessing two key advantages: a lower cost console and a product with a sound response in the market.

The video game console industry is a very competitive segment. This segment requires a keen eye on product development as well as strategic product marketing and a rather large logistics arm to ensure rapid distribution to targeted areas. Video game industry in the US, which is hugely driven by retail sales of software and hardware, registered revenues of USD ~ million in CY'2012. Even so with the advent of new video game players in the industry, the revenues decreased by 11.7% compared to