Balance board and Vitality sensor, hints of next Nintendo disruption?

[SJGohan3972]

Showertea said:
The thing about Disruption is that it's really hard to predict what will actually work. When the Wii launched, Nintendo had no idea if motion controls were going to be a hit or not.

I think the Vitality Sensor is part of a shotgun approach to disruption. They'll release a bunch of prototypes of weird control methods, and if any of them become wildly successful (like Wii Fit) they'll get sequels (Wii Fit +) and if they don't we'll never hear from them again. And when it's time to put together the Wii's successor, it'll have all the hits from the Wii with improved hardware, and a few more crazy shotgun disruptions just for kicks.

I think your right, Nintendo under Iwata has been a company that comes out with fun, interesting, new things and sees if people like them - if they do they continue to do them.

The Balance Board was new (or atleast never before was very popular, there was actually a balance board type peripheral for the Atari 2600 which I recently found out - pretty sweet) and people seem to be liking it because it allows you the phycially effect the game with your body.

The Vitality Sensor is new for gaming and if you look past the initial "lameness" it actually has some pretty interesting implementations for core games that would be really fun (i'm hoping the Grinder uses it to determine how scared/pumped up you are to determine how many enemies to throw at you) - if it's popular with the intial games Nintendo (and hopefully others) make for it then it will get more support, if not it will die.

 

Nintendo does different thing than other Video Game companies but they (contrary to popular internet belief) do listen to their consumers and the market trends, they simply like to be the company influencing or starting those trends not the company solely reacting to them.