| Shane said: Any game can be played by varying people, regardless of demographic. I've been addicted to both Sims on more than one occasion, regardless of its heavy female audience. That does not make those extra demographics a target. Sony doubled the market over the past 10 years. The way they did that was largely by appealing to an older (albeit primarily male) demographic. How'd they do that? Largely with mature games. We're not talking 80 here, but we are going to late 20s/early 30s, a market Nintendo failed to even care about. |
If that's the case then the sky's the limit with Nintendo's appeal to everyone strategy. In reality though Sony only expanded the market by reaching into largely untapped PAL regions. The rest of the growth in the video game industry is natural. Kid gamers (Atari days) became kid and preteen gamers (NES) who became kid, preteen, and teen (SNES/Genesis), etc. The market is always naturally aging and thereby expanding. Also rising incomes and (until recently) video game prices dropping allowed video games to penetrate more income levels. It, along with the end of the extreme console war on the SNES/Genesis days, also naturally pushed sales up. Selling a PS2 to someone who played Atari or Nintendo at age 10 isn't expanding the market (selling to Euros is). Nintendo reaching for gamers over 30-35 and women is expanding the market since those are people who never played games before.
