Malstrom: Microsoft has lost control of the NATAL hype

[Avinash_Tyagi]

WereKitten said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

No i'm afraid you still don't get it, he was talking about Nintendo's disruption strategy back in 2006, before the Wii launched, Nintendo's disruption strategy has panned out as he said it would.

Actually, I doubt that very much. The thing that happened is that Nintendo sold a lot of consoles and made a lot of money.

But where exactly is the "disruption" from textbooks? Where is the conquest of the core markets by those values introduced by the extended one ( that he defines "touch instead of sight", "easy to pick up and play", "games closer to everyday's life" )? The disruption theory requires this movement to replace the previous solutions.

Instead, what change trends have we seen in the high-end market in the last 3 years? Big games are still big. Online is ever more central, as are gamers communities and communicaion. DLC is growing in importance, and episodic content + digital distribution seem to be a relief for the high development costs. Does any of this come from the alleged disruptor? To me it seems like the hints are coming from the PC world.

What I see is a great success story with little of the "disruption" shifting and flowing, unless you want to shoehorn facts into an a-priori interpretation. I see a console tapping into a huge, mostly untouched market right from the start, and with no competition from two adversaries that had moved towards a spec war, fighting for an entirely different goal (the media-center market).

This extended market has been stormed by the Wii, and to this day it exists as an almost completely orthogonal market to the "traditional" one, save for very few bridge titles. A "blue ocean" strategy for sure, though it's going to become red as the dust settles on the high-end plains.

But where is the disruption? "Core" titles are to this day selling as much as they did before the success of the Wii, and though we'll never know, I doubt that the hardware sales of the Wii impacted the sales of the HD consoles but marginally.

That's the kind of details that I would like to see tested against the real data. Saying "the Wii will be disruptive of the whole game market thus it will win in sales" and then "the Wii won in sales, thus it was disruptive of the whole game market" is a logical fallacy. But I'm ready to change my mind in the face of actual evidence.

Actually the core is being slowly conquered, you'll see it start to accelerate with the introduction of Wii motion plus and more core games that take advantage of that, all this is happening right now, Just look at the lineup for the Wii in the Summer and fall,look at Wii sports resort, this is the perfect example of a game that will help move many of the current downstream gamers upstream, people that play swordfighting and Archery in sports resort will probably be interested in trying Red Steel 2 and Zelda Wii, not to mention these games will be directly targeting the core.  Look at NSMB Wii another example of a game that hits not only at the core, but is likely to help move many people upstream, due to its cooperative play and the ability to skip over difficult areas.