| zorg1000 said: You're not explaining anything though, you are basically just repeating yourself without giving any context. If a video game where you build cardboard creations for engineering/programming purposes isnt a blue ocean game than i dont know what is. Labo did sell well in Japan, ~120k first week and reports are saying it looks like it will have a soft drop in week 2 and week 3 is a consumer holiday. In other words it will likely double or even triple its FW sales by the end of week 3.
So yeah i think your statements are based on a whole lot of nothing. |
What kind of context do you want exactly? I guess it's about my "the market didn't respond well to Labo" statement, in which case let me change it to this: The Japanese market didn't respond well to Labo factoring in the huge marketing push Nintendo gave it and, using the theoretical framework of Blue Ocean Products and disruptive Technology, I doubt Labo will fare much better in the long run worldwide. Does that sound better to you?
Labo is not Blue Ocean just because it mixes cardboard and games! Blue Ocean products create new markets (Labo isn't a new market, it just added something to an already existing toy concept - it's more a sustaining innovation), they are developed to avoid the competition (Nintendo isn't avoiding Sony and Microsoft with this one - it's just a single game that caters to an already existing market of products for kids), they create a new kind of demand (like the DS, which dramatically increased the pool of people interested in buying games with Nintendogs, Brain Training, etc. Labo doesn't do that, it just wants to have some of the kids toys cake), they dramatically change the expenses:profits formula for a company (the DS did that: bad and cheap graphics compared to the PSP, but created a new market and because of the weak CPU the hardware business made insane amounts of money for Nintendo, a novum in the market) and lastly the blue ocean strategy changes the direction of the whole company toward low costs and differentiation. Labo doesn't do that in the slightest, it's just a product that mixes cardboard and mini games and won't do anything for the Switch's direction in the long run.
Lastly, hey you could be right about Labo selling well over the long run, that's absolutely true. But my statements are certainly not based on nothing. If Labo sells well for the next year (without the big marketing push it's getting right now) then that's cool and I'll admit to being wrong. But the first week sales certainly haven't been as big as Nintendo expected - you don't flood Japan's stores with advertisements (and hire Bill Nye in the west) for 120k sales in Japan of two different Labo products combined.
Edit: And we have news that Labo only sold through 30% of its initial shipment in Japan (which would put the shipment at about 400k units). Clearly Nintendo, a company that is often conservative with its shipments (Switch, SNES Mini, Wii...), expected more of this.
Last edited by Louie - on 30 April 2018
