I'm Pleased With the Wii U's Sales

[oniyide]

RolStoppable said:

oniyide said:

@bolded 1 alot of people Ninty included believe that 3rd parties would support it. 

@bolded 2 Why are they not possible? PS2 is the best selling home console by a mile, not even WIi was able to get near it in the end. The library consisted of mostly red ocean type games. Was the red ocean able to put up those kinds of numbers? Or was it a blue ocean machine? maybe the first 2 years when people wanted a cheap DVD player but that selling point went away when DVD player prices dropped. Did it start as one thing and became something else.

Yes, the red ocean was able to put up those kind of numbers. Just look at the competition which got gored: 10m DCs, 21m GCs, 24m Xboxes. Sega got forced out of the hardware business, GC and Xbox sales fell off a cliff by 2005. That's the appeal of red ocean strategies: If you are able to dominate, you roll in the money without having to think outside of the box. Naturally, it's much easier to create a sustaining product than conceiving a new product. In the case of the former you know that the market is there and you have a good idea of what it wants, in the case of the latter these things are unknown (there may be a market, but the size of it is a mystery).

Combining red ocean and blue ocean traits into one console isn't possible, because the blue ocean strategy is about creating value that differs from the existing red ocean products in the market. In the simplest terms, the PS3 and 360 prioritized the hardcore gamer while the Wii aimed to get as many people as possible to play, regardless of their experience with video games. The result were two high priced machines that emphasized graphics, singleplayer, online multiplayer and gritty games, and one low priced machine that emphasized accessibility, local multiplayer and playfulness. The question wasn't solely "PS3, 360 or Wii?" like it was in previous generations. Nintendo's approach also created the choice "Wii or nothing.", because they weren't in direct competition with Sony and Microsoft. Or to be more accurate, they weren't in symmetrical competition (which means to compete on the same set of values).

This allowed Nintendo to have high profit margins, because there was nothing else like them available. Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft were bleeding a lot of money. That's the underlying premise of the blue ocean strategy: Profit margins in the red ocean (the known market) get ever slimmer, so companies are better off in creating a new market instead of commiting commercial suicide (which is what Sega did with the Dreamcast). You can't combine the same values as your competition with different values without creating either an overly expensive product or a product that lags behind in terms of red ocean values which makes the decision to go red ocean absolutely pointless. Either way, you end up with a mess.

fair enough