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Microsoft and Sony need to expand audience say Nintendo

by Steven Williamson on 29 May 2007, 11:30

Tags: Nintendo (TYO:7974), Xbox 360, PS3, Wii

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George Harrison belives Nintendo could take 50% marketshare



Nintendo of America's marketing chief, George Harrison spoke to 'Wired' this week and believes that the lifecycle of the so called 'next gen' consoles will last longer than usual, mainly due to the dwindling appeal in 'faster processors and better graphics'

"First of all, I'm not sure it's going to be a typical lifecycle. In the past, we've always had five- to six-year lifecycles which were sort of forced by someone jumping ahead and using a new piece of technology. And we're finding out now that the appeal of faster processors and better graphics is really sort of reaching a diminishing point, he said.

Harrison continued by saying that he believes Nintendo could take over 50% of the market share unless Microsoft and Sony pull their socks up and take a leaf out of their book when it comes to attracting a different audience of gamers.

"We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold...we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience.

"So far, they haven't spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we're having some success, they probably will. We can already see some of the things that they've tried. For last year's E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Piñata as their killer app for the Pokémon set. And neither of those worked really well. Part of it is, I think it's not in their DNA. They're really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have."

The pre-E3 conferences for this year's downscaled show have been announced earlier today, with Microsoft starting off the proceedings on the 10th July. Nintendo are second in line on the 11th July, and last, but not least, will be the Sony presentation.

Source :: Wired


HEXUS Forums :: 1 Comment

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Posted by Spud1 - Tue 29 May 2007 12:22
Exactly right :)

The PS3 will only appeal to a certain category of people, and an even smaller number of people will be actually afford the thing..or have space in their house to accomodate it (its the size of a small house itself!)

The 360 definitely has a wider appeal, but you still wouldn't catch my dad or my grandad going anywhere near it, and it still carries a hefty price tag.

Wii appeals to the rest of the market..ok so most 16-28 year olds (the people I would say the PS3 and 360 most appeal to) are generally not impressed by it, due to the lack of the now very repetetive and overly-extended GTA series and identical sports games, but if Nintendo have captured the rest of the market as they say they do (and the fact that everyone in my family from young to old has played with and enjoyed wii certainly suggests this) then they could be on to a winner.

Eventually some 3rd party manufactureres will come along and release all the fifa<insert year here> and WWE <insert powerful word here> games to keep the rest of the market happy, so more people might buy it..probably in addition to their 360/PS3 :)