>>Absolutely right. Sony stole the market with the PS and even more so with PS2, something Nintendo didn't see coming in their arrogance. They even developed the PlayStation with Sony! But no, cartridges were the way forward.

>>Nintendo did it right because instead of listening to the fanbase, they OBSERVE the customers behavior. What people say they want and what they really want are way different. By observing the market they can focus on consoles and games that are aimed to perform jobs rather than please customers

i know that nintendo is making lots of money but how much i want numbers§!!!

It's easy to say Nintendo innovated because they were last, but check out Sega. They tried to innovate with Dreamcast, but failed to do so to a high enough degree to even begin enticing the mainstream.

No, Nintendo was able to change because they got a visionary leader. He didn't want to change the market because Nintendo was last, but because he saw the whole VG market in trouble.

And it's easy to call it all a reaction to Sony, but their reaction was to move away from what Sony was doing, and move back to their own strategy of the 80s that they had slowly wandered from. And their first move was with DS, in the handheld arena they still dominated.

And in the meantime, Sony was trying to capture Nintendo's traditional advantages by increasing their first party studios and creating their own handheld system. Those were the things that got Nintendo through the lean years, and Sony wanted them.

And lastly, the overall point is not that Nintendo ignores their customers, but that they value their non-customers just as much. They still made TP, Brawl and Galaxy this gen; their three biggest projects ever, all intended to surprise their existing customers and keep them excited.

But they know they can't grow just by competing for existing customers. So they looked for the barriers keeping non-customers from playing games, and sought ways to remove them.

Well, handheld and home consoles are different beasts. Back then, when the first 3D consoles were released (PS1, N64) the CD was necessary. Textures, FMV and digital audio could barely fit on a cartridge, but the CD had a large enough capacity and helped Sony and the PS1. The handhelds are quite different. You don't need high quality graphics, powerful CPUs or optical disc based media. Disc drives are more power hungry than solid state memory. Nintendo going with cartridges kept the DS running longer with a single battery charge, just as the gameboy had an amazing battery life, by having a greyscale screen and lower spec hardware than the competing handhelds. Disc drives are fine on home consoles, because they are plugged in the AC outlet.

I sure do love it when a company ignores the consumer!

Strange thread.

          100%.

          But it is still comical in an ironic sort of way to me!

False: The hardcore know exactly what they want, just not the casuals. The casuals are close to unpredictable. Why? I can bet money that the nintendocore would have bought the wii anyway if it was the same price as the 360, had no motion controls, and had SMG, SSBB, Zelda, Metroid, etc because this is what they want and they know it. The nintendocore certaingly didn't need wii fit and wii sports to convince them to buy a wii.

you didn't understand. Knowing what you want is one thing, but expressing what you want is totally diferent. As humans, we don't have enough words to express what we like or not 100%, there are misunderstanding and misconcepts. In many cases what you want is nor necessarily what you get beacause of this.

Wow, the OP is pretty silly. The internet is treated as an individual itself, rather than a collective of them. To be perfectly honest, the moment I heard the name Wii I knew Nintendo had a brilliantly mass-markettable product on their hands and that they'd end up neck-and-neck with the PS3 or beating it (though I never knew it'd be this badly). If I would have had the money to invest then, it would have gone straight to Nintendo.

Also, when I saw WiiFit my first thought was "Oh, this is the Wii's brain training." So while most people on the net may have not seen it coming, some of us knew Nintendo's fortunes were all gold.

Now, as for Nintendo ignoring their customers - well, that's just silly. They do no such thing. They just happen to know their customers better than we do. We represent only a small part of their customer base, and they have to provide for the needs of their less vocal customers as much as they do for us. More, really, since they are a bigger slice of the pie.