Fun is not a gimmick
Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 08:38PM The Wall Street Journal reports that "In February, U.S. retailers sold 335,000 Wiis, compared with 228,000 Xbox 360s and 127,000 PlayStation 3s, according to NPD Group Inc., a sales-tracking firm in Port Washington, N.Y." They also report that game developers are turning in droves to develop games for the Wii.
Just a year ago, the Nintendo GameCube was a distant third-place finisher to its higher-powered competitors made by Sony and Microsoft. What's changed?
Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del (a Web comic and commentary site about video games and gamers) hit on it when he said, "I mean, anybody but a fanboy can plainly see that Nintendo rolled the dice here and opted for a gimmick over cutting-edge graphics, in an attempt to sell systems on the fun-factor."
It speaks volumes about the hard core gamer culture that a self-styled spokesperson feels that making games "fun" is a gimmick. He has the grace to admit later in the piece that the Wii has transcended gimmickry, but I still find it hilarious that he thinks the $600 cell-processor-powered, Blu-Ray enhanced PlayStation 3 is not gimmicky while games people might enjoy are.
Rather than concentrate on the relatively small (though rabid) hard-core gamer market, Nintendo decided to expand the market for game consoles by appealing to everyone with a TV and desire to have fun. That's a pretty broad market. And instead of trying to one-up the competition on features and graphics as Sony and Microsoft have been doing, Nintendo decided to concentrate on what would actually satisfy the customers they've targeted.
The motion-sensitive Nintendo remote is only a part of Nintendo's long-standing focus on fun and accessibility for casual gamers. Rather than focus on hyper-realistic war games, Nintendo has always been known for games you'll want to play over and over with your family. They were pioneers in multiplayer games where people can cooperate rather than simply try to obliterate each other, and they're well known for making games "easy to learn yet hard to master." Even their pricing (well below the other consoles) plays into this strategy.
Paul Young at Product Beautiful points out that "in a feature war, only the leader wins." Knowingly or not, Nintendo sidestepped the feature issue by knowing their market and giving them what they wanted. Fun is not a gimmick. It's what (most) people buy video games for.
Here are the details on my (eventually successful) attempts to purchase a Wii. Right now my wife and I are addicted to the tennis game in Wii Sports. I've got a score of 1801.
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