The Return of the King of consoles? Nintendo just might
You can call the Nintendo Wii whatever you want: Low-powered, yes. Cheap, maybe. Immature? Hell no. Successful? Damn right. Nintendo has fought its way back from a near death experience as far as hardware goes and is again poised to reclaim the throne it lost more than a decade ago.
After the GameCube tanked, the Japanese patriarch of modern gaming relied heavily on the selling power of its handheld systems Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. The future looked bleak for the future of console gaming in the Nintendo community and millions of fans were left with no assurance of the glory days ever coming back to the brand they loved.
While fans of Sony‘s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft‘s Xbox drooled at the thought of Nintendo getting relegated to a mere game publisher that will make new Zelda and Mario games for their platforms, Nintendo bosses Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto planned a literal revolt against the hardware specs race that they, in part, set with the release of the old Nintendo 64 console. The strategy was simple: Make something that will take gaming to the next level without forcing consumers to spend too much.
What followed afterwards was a phenomenon that feel-good movies are made of. With its sleek design and trademark motion-sensing controllers, the Nintendo Wii set the market on fire. Essentially, what it did was expand the market to reach out to people of all ages and turn everyone into at least a casual gamer.
Nintendo also revealed that their Nintendo DS handheld was a testing ground of sorts for their strategy. Using innovative controls and less-powerful hardware, Nintendo once again proved that gameplay is of a higher value than visuals and that it’s the software that makes or breaks systems. With the monstrous sales that the DS enjoyed, Iwata and Miyamoto had the guts to defy the norms and go with the cute, sleek Wii.
Since January of 2007, the Wii has been the fastest-rising console of this generation, outselling Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 with comfortable margins. The only problems that market analysts see with the platform is Nintendo’s inability to keep in stride with the huge demand and its lukewarm policy with third-party developers. If it can address those issues, we just might see a videogame rendition of “The Return of the King.” If you want to read the full CNN article on how Nintendo is Creaming the Competition, see the read URL.
You can call the Nintendo Wii whatever you want: Low-powered, yes. Cheap, maybe. Immature? Hell no. Successful? Damn right. Nintendo has fought its way back from a near death experience as far as hardware goes and is again poised to reclaim the throne it lost more than a decade ago.
After the GameCube tanked, the Japanese patriarch of modern gaming relied heavily on the selling power of its handheld systems Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. The future looked bleak for the future of console gaming in the Nintendo community and millions of fans were left with no assurance of the glory days ever coming back to the brand they loved.
While fans of Sony‘s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft‘s Xbox drooled at the thought of Nintendo getting relegated to a mere game publisher that will make new Zelda and Mario games for their platforms, Nintendo bosses Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto planned a literal revolt against the hardware specs race that they, in part, set with the release of the old Nintendo 64 console. The strategy was simple: Make something that will take gaming to the next level without forcing consumers to spend too much.
What followed afterwards was a phenomenon that feel-good movies are made of. With its sleek design and trademark motion-sensing controllers, the Nintendo Wii set the market on fire. Essentially, what it did was expand the market to reach out to people of all ages and turn everyone into at least a casual gamer.
Nintendo also revealed that their Nintendo DS handheld was a testing ground of sorts for their strategy. Using innovative controls and less-powerful hardware, Nintendo once again proved that gameplay is of a higher value than visuals and that it’s the software that makes or breaks systems. With the monstrous sales that the DS enjoyed, Iwata and Miyamoto had the guts to defy the norms and go with the cute, sleek Wii.
Since January of 2007, the Wii has been the fastest-rising console of this generation, outselling Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 with comfortable margins. The only problems that market analysts see with the platform is Nintendo’s inability to keep in stride with the huge demand and its lukewarm policy with third-party developers. If it can address those issues, we just might see a videogame rendition of “The Return of the King.” If you want to read the full CNN article on how Nintendo is Creaming the Competition, see the read URL.