The Nintendo Death Watch - The Stupider They Fall
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However, Nintendo kept interest in their system by engaging in a price war toward the end of the consoles lifespan. Prices were nearly cut in half, which did help keep the platform afloat. Also Nintendo did have a strong showing from its first party franchise games (Mario, Zelda), which has strong name brand appeal.
And again, a new wave of systems premiered. The Playstation 2 premiered in October 2000 and was an instant success. It had its built in audience from the Playstation, was backwards compatible with all those games (something Nintendo never had even attempted prior), and was marketed as a system for teenagers and adults. The Playstation 2 could play DVD's and CD's almost becoming a true home entertainment system onto itself. The games featured on the system were violent, bloody, and intense. This is just what the larger gaming audience wanted.
A year later Microsoft premiered their system, the X-Box. While they were a year late, they made up for the mistake with an excellent system that had its own hardrive, built in online capabilities, and better all around hardware. While it was not the instant success that the Playstation 2 was, it eventually took over the leading position among the current generation of games due to its superior hardware and graphics capabilities.
Premiering at a similar time as the Microsoft X-Box, the Nintendo system was called "Gamecube," and looked as such. It was shaped as a small "cube" with a Playschool-like controller. Instead of DVDs, the Gamecube again played on Nintendo's own custom game media format for "copy protection" sake, which in turn prevented the Gamecube from keeping up with Sony or Microsoft in the volume of data on the discs and the playback of DVDs. While Nintendo went to great lengths to get back the third party support that they had driven away with the N64, most software developers were slow to write games exclusively for Nintendo, which is why today most 3rd party games appear on every platform.
Recently Nintendo again showed its Gimmicky side with the Nintendo DS. Here again is a system like that Virtual Boy that relies on a gimmick to generate interest. A large touch-pad-like screen is in the middle of the unit, allowing the user to control by touch rather than using the traditional directional pad. If consumers didn't like using touch pads on laptop computers, will they like using it on a system that is even smaller, and for games that require precise control?
(Following 2 paragraphs edited for content 9/14/2005)
The system was released recently, and is already being outsold in the US and Europe. In Japan it is the dominant system by more than a million units. However, the Japanese market is very different than the American and European markets, and different factors drive sales. Sony and Microsoft have the marketing formula to grow and expand in the US, while Nintendo clearly doesn't.
And being that Japan's video game, hardware and software market has shrunk 30 percent since 2000, the future of gaming is on the other side of the pond so to speak.
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