Next-Gen: Nintendo Not #1

[WereKitten]

richardhutnik said:

WereKitten said:

richardhutnik said:

...

Nintendo is doing this.  Did you forget the 3DS?  That is a Blue Ocean move.  Did you even think that Nintendo would do a 3DS before it was announced?  By the time others move into there, they will be into another market.  Nintendo HAS already moved on and the videogame industry has grown as a result. 

Hmm? how so, exactly?

The 3DS sounds like a very conventionallly positioned handheld. It has a nifty display tech and had very good press exactly because of it and of a very solid, but again very conventional, lineup. It impressed the specialized press and made a lot of old Nintendo fans happy with some fanservice, but which big untapped market is it going to rely on? It's aiming fair and square for the present market of DS and PSP, as far as I can tell.

3D without glasses is Blue Ocean.  The untapped market is people who REFUSE to do 3D with glasses on.  Count me as one of these.  By clustering things as they are, they end up capturing a market no one else is in.  The key to Blue Ocean is to have no competition when you go into it, and get established.  It isn't that, after you have the entry, you go "Wow, I would of NEVER imagined that was possible, and people are there".  What Nintendo is looking to do is bring 3D movies to handhelds with the 3DS also.  Again, it is a marketspace currently being untapped and looks to be untapped for a few years.  Nintendo is likely able to do this also, because did ANYONE think Nintendo would go into this area?  They failed with Virtual Boy, so I am sure people thought Nintendo would not do 3D again.  I am likely seeing Sony wasn't even prepared for that.  When you think 3D normally, do you think need for glasses?  Well, I do.

Uhm, that's a pretty elastic definition of "blue ocean" you got there. You might as well say something like that of every tech innovation that goes mainstream: it offers something that was not offered before. By the same logic Kinect will tap in the "blue ocean" of those people who wanted dancing games tracking their legs.

While such people exist, I highly doubt that such a market is big enough, or disconnected enough from known and tapped ones, to be considered "expanding the market by tapping a blue ocean".

Same for the 3DS, really. Nintendo did not invent the 3d display tech it's using, it - as reported by first-hand testers - doesn't work particularly well for 3d movies at that size and 3DS is unlikely to become the portable 3d movie player of choice, because for several years to come 3d movies will come mainly on optical discs. And as soon as costs go down for autostereoscopical displays in the 7-10" ranges the usual suspects will bring out portable 3d blu-ray/memory card players to replace nowadays' portable DVD players.

Again, as a game console, it aims at the same market as DS and PSP.