Tachikoma said:
Segas success was founded on the weighted bias of gamers wanting to associate more with adult / grown-up games than "kiddy games". Nintendo can't poke fun at XB/PS using that same tact, or they will look stupid, nor can then try to use "haha look at those stupid adult games, kiddy games are where its at" because the general populace still much prefers adult oriented games as a large majority. Getting celebritys to help try and sell the system as "cool" wont work, celebrity endorsements for the most part only work on something that was relatively popular to begin with, something the WiiU is not. |
"Cool" is something that can be marketed and changed. Depends on how good your marketing department is.
People actually don't give Sega a lot of credit. What they did with the Genesis is the greatest marketing campaign in the history of video gaming IMO. People I don't think really understand how big of an underdog Sega was in those days -- they couldn't even get major chains like Wal-Mart to carry the Genesis at the time.
That marketing campaign was so successful that Yamauchi basically ripped his own son-in-law (Arakawa) in Japan's biggest newspaper and threatened to fire him, incensed that he had allowed Sega to paint Nintendo as a child's toy, lol.
After that is when Nintendo turned the tide by marketing more heavily to the MTV audience and uncensoring Mortal Kombat 2.
But image is what you make it. Candy Crush is considered cool and hip and trendy. It's on Jimmy Fallon. That's not a violent action game. Even the Wii early on was cool and hip for a while. A lot of times what's "cool" doesn't make any sense, look at the music industry there's always some break out artist that doesn't seem to fit what the current trend is. Bruno Mars is a throwback to James Brown/Michael Jackson style R&B funk, but that wasn't really popular a few years ago, but he's even more popular because he comes off as being unique.
Your marketing focus matters, and really what's Nintendo got to lose? Sega had nothing to lose, that's why they went for it, I'm just I'd try a similar tactic. Women actually do tend to like the Nintendo brand anyway, so why not push it as something for the "cool kids" and paint MS/Sony for dorky enthusiasts, implying they never get laid. Of course do it in a funny way, but I'd have given it a shot. We don't graduate high school as much as we think, what the "hot girls in school" think is cool is always automatically cool.
