Nintendo has for the first time in 20 years launched a stationary console that outsold the previous one. There were two primary trends president Saturo Iwata and game developer Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to take advantage of with the new console, which in turn was code-named Revolution. First of all the fact that the players are older today and have less time to play (due to families and such). The second was that games have become very expensive to develop, while at the same time developers rather spend money developing NHL 2017 instead of something innovative. Except from these two negative trends, Nintendo had started another, more positive trend using its portable video game console Nintendo DS.
Through games like Nintendogs and Brainage people who had never owned a game console before all of sudden gained an interest in games. Nintendo wanted to use this and the controller was the key. The video game controller hasn’t changed significantly since Nintendo launched the NES in 1983. The rumors about the revolutionizing controller were ridiculously many and all completely off. When the controller arrived there weren’t many that questioned the choice of codename.
Then we have the second negative trend; the cost of game development. Instead of building a performance monster that would measure up to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 Nintendo chose to use a chip similar to that used in GameCube. The focus of the console would not be on performance, but the controller. This was a big risk to take; would innovativity be able to stand up to pure performance in this HD society of ours?
To make Wii complete Nintendo needed a design that appealed to the masses. It started already with the Nintendo DS where it went for a stylish and clear design, a trend that continued with the Wii. Nintendo realized that the console would be placed very close to or even right next to the TV, creating a need for a clean design, which may sound as a given, but in Japan this is a lot more important than in the west.
Nintendo has now released its fiscal report for the last year and with it a revenue at 966,5 billion YEN ($8 billion) and an operating income at 226 billion YEN ($1.9 billion). This is a 90% and 150% improvement respectively, compared to the year before. 29 million games and 5.84 million consoles were sold in this period. Over 40 million Nintendo DS and 130 million games have been sold so far.
According to VGChartz 6.4 million Wii consoles has been sold up until today. More than twice as many as PlayStation 3 and if the current trend continues Wii will have passed Xbox 360 before the end of the year. So far there isn’t much that points to that Nintendo made a wrong move when picking innovativity instead of hardware.
