@Legend you say he contradicts himself without ever considering that 1 post in his blog is not stand alone, it's based on months or years of comments.

If I don't understand his context I don't even read the rest of his post.

However just so you know the election was actually very close, I believe the polls damn near 50%.

The electorate was what made the land slide decision for Obama. But had the popular shown a McCain win Malstrom would still have been wrong, and he still would of said. 'I was wrong'

@ dib8rman

umm 10 million votes diffference isnt close at all 53/54 percent to 46/47 percent

Hmm I remember seeing the popular vote being being 53/47.

Wow 10 million is the number, hmm 50% of Americans don't vote Obama targets a chunk of that 50% allegedly the younger college going group, bah that election was closer than I thought considering as far as Popular goes. (10 million out of 250 million that is.)

My point is that the man was wrong and he admitted being wrong.

So umm Bingo what does 53/54 to 46/47 have to do with Sean Malstrom?

Actually, I doubt that very much. The thing that happened is that Nintendo sold a lot of consoles and made a lot of money.

But where exactly is the "disruption" from textbooks? Where is the conquest of the core markets by those values introduced by the extended one ( that he defines "touch instead of sight", "easy to pick up and play", "games closer to everyday's life" )? The disruption theory requires this movement to replace the previous solutions.

Instead, what change trends have we seen in the high-end market in the last 3 years? Big games are still big. Online is ever more central, as are gamers communities and communicaion. DLC is growing in importance, and episodic content + digital distribution seem to be a relief for the high development costs. Does any of this come from the alleged disruptor? To me it seems like the hints are coming from the PC world.

What I see is a great success story with little of the "disruption" shifting and flowing, unless you want to shoehorn facts into an a-priori interpretation. I see a console tapping into a huge, mostly untouched market right from the start, and with no competition from two adversaries that had moved towards a spec war, fighting for an entirely different goal (the console/media-center market).

This extended market has been stormed by the Wii, and to this day it exists as an almost completely orthogonal market to the "traditional" one, save for very few bridge titles. A "blue ocean" strategy for sure, though it's going to become red as the dust settles on the high-end plains.

But where is the disruption? "Core" titles are to this day selling as much as they did before the success of the Wii, and though we'll never know, I doubt that the hardware sales of the Wii impacted the sales of the HD consoles but marginally.

That's the kind of details that I would like to see tested against the real data. Saying "the Wii will be disruptive of the whole game market thus it will win in sales" and then "the Wii won in sales, thus it was disruptive of the whole game market" is a logical fallacy. But I'm ready to change my mind in the face of actual evidence.

the numbers i got  were 53 to 46 for the popular votes of the election. This has nothing to do with malstrom

its 10 million of around 130 million of the people who voted. thats a decent size chunk

if the rest of the US had voted who knows how it would of gone. Maybe bigger gap....maybe closer election who knows

@WereKitten

Nice post, that was a cool read.

Disruption happened the moment the Wii was placed on the market allegedly. His reasoning for this is simple:

Compared to the HD Twins:

Wii is crappy and Targets consumers the HD Twins had no intention of going after when the Wii went after them.

What your talking about is a paradigm shift, Malstrom did actually hit on that subject I'm not certain anymore, I just remember him writing something about paradigm shifts.

But basically that would be where Asymmetrical business judo would begin, and his entire point is to SEE WHAT NINTENDO WILL DO TO RESPOND TO THE EMERGING MOTION TECH of the competitors.

Malstrom believes that the onset of the shift would be when Sony and Microsoft responded with Motion Controls.

He admitted not knowing much about Natal until later where he said it would be a Wii answer project. The contradiction may occur based on when he gathered information; at least he doesn't ninja edit =P.

Looking at it at first one could think that Microsoft answered Sony's answer for the Wiimote, but that's just plain silly, however I remember a post on this site from Gamasutra I believe where an undisclosed investor made vocal in 2007 I believe that he though Microsoft was fighting ghosts in the form of Sony, he went very in depth with certain bits of info, I think the link is on this forum.

But your stance is very very reasonable, I can see the logic. =)

Actually the core is being slowly conquered, you'll see it start to accelerate with the introduction of Wii motion plus and more core games that take advantage of that, all this is happening right now, Just look at the lineup for the Wii in the Summer and fall,look at Wii sports resort, this is the perfect example of a game that will help move many of the current downstream gamers upstream, people that play swordfighting and Archery in sports resort will probably be interested in trying Red Steel 2 and Zelda Wii, not to mention these games will be directly targeting the core.  Look at NSMB Wii another example of a game that hits not only at the core, but is likely to help move many people upstream, due to its cooperative play and the ability to skip over difficult areas.

Ok, guys I'm out of this thread for a while: ^_^ Life and the such.

To end.

Don't confuse what others are saying and referring to Malstrom to what Malstrom says. That the telephone conversation problem right there.

To understand Malstrom you need to read darn near everything he writes with an open mind to say, well it may be BS but at least he makes for an interesting read.

(Similar to what I thought of your stuff Werekitten, that was a nice read.)

There's more but again, life. Caio

the one thing you are missing is the whole high definition thing. Who will be first with HD graphics and motion controls?? SONY. Microsoft isnt coming onto Nintendo's battlefield but instead of trying to get to the next one. Which is the fusion of Wii and HD graphics. Nintendo still has to prove they can do HD. MS has to prove they can motion controls. Sony has set a date for when they will be doing both, Q1 2010

@dib8rman
What I can't accept in his stance ("disruption happened as soon as the Wii was introduced") is that the real disruption described in books (I only read "the innovator's dilemma", maybe the formulation changed in following works) is not an event, it is a process.
The very first and most famous chart in that book has time as the X axis!

Introducing a novel idea to tap into a different, "lower end" market is not it. That's simply market segmentation or layering, or whatever the correct business term is :) The disruption process should imply that with time this new solution satisfies more and more layers, and that's what I can't see happening (yet?).

Which brings me to...

@Avinash
"the core is slowly being conquered" implies it is happening in the present, or happened in the immediate past. All your examples point to future lineups, future games, future possible shifts.

Do we have any statistical evidence of a userbase that was captured to the "new games" through the simplest ones and then moved to "new" RPGs, or action-adventures, or strategic games? Because my grandma read cheap mystery books all her life long. It was great for her, coming from an age when most country girls could not even read. She read thousands of them, but she never moved to Flaubert or essays.