Soundwave said:
To Curl - Nah, Nintendo actually has reverted back to targetting an audience more like the 1980s: Basically this:
By '95 Nintendo was pretty much exclusively marketing to teen culture though because of the impact of Sega's marketing and Yamauchi giving Arakawa a giant public slap in the face by saying NOA had allowed Sega to make Nintendo look like a toy or something to that effect. After that Nintendo responded by greenlighting things like Killer Instinct and the "Play It Loud" marketing campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FArjEUhBgP4 This kinda peaked by the late 90s with the huge success of Rareware and GoldenEye https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqXZjDfnsbw I think this caused some internal strife at Nintendo because I think people like Miyamoto felt like Rare and NOA was gaining too much power (I remember reading he wasn't happy with the Conker peeing on things gamplay mechanic either) and GameCube kinda attempted to "re-kiddy-fy" Nintendo in a lot of ways at least from the Japanese side. @zorg1000 Sony's market read actually is fairly spot on. I think I remember seeing a show on the history of the Playstation brand, and I believe it was Phil Harrison saying that they did exstensive market research and what they learned was basically that the age 19 was the perfect target age. Reason being is younger kids want to be 19, and older people in their 20s/30s look back at that age, so they market everything to that age. And sure ... it still works today. |
Ya I was never saying it was a bad idea for Sony to target that demographic, just that it's a contradiction to say Nintendo is failing because of being stuck in 1995 while Sony is having a ton of success by doing what they did in 1995. That shows that acting like it's 1995 is not the reason for Nintendo failing, it comes down to other reasons than that.
When the herd loses its way, the shepard must kill the bull that leads them astray.
