Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Over the past six months, Nintendo’s Wii has been more or less lapping the field in the video-game console business. The company has sold the family-friendly gaming system at a much lower price than Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 — both of which have many more technological bells and whistles.

After reading this New York Times article on how Nintendo has partnered with game developers more closely than ever before, Hoover’s editor Chris Huston offered this pithy summary: “Nintendo seems to be making inspired move after inspired move.” I asked him to elaborate, and he came up with these seven dimensions for Nintendo’s current success (emphasis his):

• Philosophy to focus on the masses (particularly as a community of family or friends) instead of the hard-core, dedicated gamer (this may be their biggest success – every winning decision stems from this)
• Relishing, understanding, and executing on the benefits and opportunities as an underdog
• Earnestly reaching out to third-party developers (Microsoft does this well; the PS3’s architecture is eroding Sony’s relationships)
• Online community (Microsoft does it best, but Nintendo has developed its own niche even here; Sony is horrendous here)
• Game design
• Marketing
• Price-point of console/market entry-point

Sounds about right to me. In one venue or another, I’ve been talking about Nintendo’s success with the Wii for more than six months, and as time goes on, The Little Console That Could just seems to get better and better.