Dear Reader:
Five things Nintendo did right in 2006
A portion of a Be-Something article…
1. They Stopped Thinking of Themselves as Market Leader
For a lot of the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube eras, it felt like Nintendo — and particularly Nintendo Co Ltd in Japan — had blinders on. It was as if they felt that Nintendo was destined to be top dog in the video game marketplace, and that any sales report to the contrary were just the delusional rantings of market analysts and sales tracking firms. And it wasn’t entirely unjustified, really. At the end of the SNES era “Nintendo” had become synonymous with “gaming.” We didn’t play video games, we played Nintendo.
The Gamecube announcement made it clear that Nintendo believed the customers were just standing around waiting for them to release new hardware. It was hardware that addressed none of the criticisms of the previous platform, and offered nothing in the way of innovation or even marked differences over its competitors. It wasn’t a failure, but it was just sort of boring. And boring is something a company with an already dwindling userbase can’t afford to be.
It wasn’t until Nintendo stopped acting like they were a phenomenally successful company and started acting like a company in need of phenomenal success that they were able to make the moves that lead to the Wii.