Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Iwata: “We are battling the indifference of people who have no interest in videogames.”

That’s the Wii’s success in a nutshell. That is the fundamental philosophy (in Star Trek terms, the “prime directive”) that churns Yen after Yen out of Nintendo’s quirky little console.

As an avid gamer myself, I’ve realized for the past few years that this kind of philosophy was just waiting around for some game company to make money with. Sony and Microsoft are going the other way, i.e. making games for the avid gamer, which translates into making games more and more challenging, i.e. difficult.

That approach will ensure that they keep their audience limited, which they don’t seem concerned about, obviously. They’ve made a very reasonable but restrictive assumption about what video games and gamers are that Nintendo decided to challenge: only gamers are interested in gaming.

Sony and Microsoft’s assumption is one that is made about lots of other things from baseball to cooking to astronomy. One is either interested in the subject or isn’t.

Nintendo wondered something both quite simple and quite audacious “There are a LOT of people not playing video games. What if we could get “non-gamers” interested in playing video games. I think we can do that.”

There should definitely be people concentrating on making games to challenge and satisfy the avid gamers, but the marketplace also needs and, obviously, is ready to reward a Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft quite reasonably saw video games only as a gamer’s love. They sold to gamers, Nintendo is selling to the world.