Nintendo is a company that polarises the technology market. On the one hand, the company is highly experimental and develops and sells revolutionary fashionable devices to the unsuspecting generation. On the other hand, the company has been rather slow in adopting new and innovative ideas, such as those that have helped its competitors to stay ahead.
It is this comparison that fuels a lot of discussion between business enthusiasts and skeptics in many online chat rooms. Is the company a smart innovator that the market can count on for change? Or is it just too presumptuous to take modest but additional measures?
It’s amazing that the answer can be as consistent as a business dilemma. The truth about the Japanese technology giant is that he is not advancing or retreating into the console market. Instead, Nintendo simply invented the wheel with its equipment to attract new and old players.
The moment Nintendo makes history
When Nintendo decided that its future lay in console games, the company managed to rekindle the spark of the dying Western industry after a devastating market collapse. In 1985, it introduced its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Western stores and set a new standard for hardware and software.
Shortly afterwards, other Japanese companies such as SEGA and Sony followed with their own offering and a new generation of consoles was available.
But along the way, Nintendo seems to have begun to stop innovating and focus on improving the technology that helped set industry standards. The company has even circumvented other standards introduced by other companies, but not completely.
Dirty Little Secret Nintendo
In the early 2000s, Nintendo had a revelation that changed and advanced the entire gaming industry.
The company realized that it could no longer bring ordinary playground equipment onto the market. At the same time, it also put into practice its past game concepts, which still had considerable value for the market.
It will therefore recycle its patents in order to obtain new possibilities for integration in its new consoles and portable devices.
It would even go so far as to design these devices based on these features in the hope of providing consumers with a new and memorable experience.
Nintendo’s greatest successes and failures
It all started in the seventh generation with the Nintendo DS handheld and the Wii console. The handheld system has a design similar to the popular Nintendo Game & Watch electronic games and features two screens. The top screen showed the main game and the bottom screen – the touch and pen controls for the interactive elements of the game. No wonder that the PDA was a great success in the market and was only realized with the old concept.
The Wii console has had the same success, but more surprisingly.
The design gives priority to gameplay with centralized motion control. That, too, was part of a patent that Nintendo had filed for previous generations of systems. But what’s special about the Wii console is that the peripherals best use this function as a remote control.
Like its peripheral predecessors, the Wii Remote wasn’t perfect, but it worked for the most part and helped the graphically weak outsiders outperform their competitors. It has even become the best-selling console in the history of the company.
Although Nintendo’s approach to console games is not entirely new, in some cases it seemed like a direct home run for the company, but there have been some unexpected failures.
It was the eighth generation of the Nintendo Wii U console.
This time, Nintendo opted for a basic system with a non-basic device in the form of a tablet that allows video games to be transferred from the TV to the screen. Nintendo did something similar with the GBA link, but connected the Game Boy Advance handheld to the GameCube. The results are upside down as the GBA titles were broadcast on television.
Unfortunately, this revitalised concept wasn’t properly communicated to consumers due to an incredibly poor marketing campaign, and Wii U fell apart. Sales of consoles were quite poor, and the library remained meagre after third parties began to withdraw support for their software in response.
Looking back, Wii U is still a big disgrace for Nintendo today.
Now, in our ninth generation, we have the Nintendo Switch with a design that essentially combines the concepts of its two predecessors. Despite its complex design, which combines the tablet with two removable controllers and a docking station, it is incredibly intuitive and easy to understand. Nintendo has once again proven its gold mine as sales have grown rapidly since the introduction of the switch and can continue to grow throughout the life cycle of the device.
At the time, many people had realised that Nintendo’s strategy was very popular and had been lost. The big advantage, however, is that the company can do this very successfully.
As a result, Nintendo doesn’t always have to be innovative, so it seems slow to accept new ideas.
Conclusion
In the end, Nintendo reached an intermediate level that largely met its needs. For skeptics who claim that the technological giant is not innovative, the truth is that it is always evolving, but strictly within its own niche. And while the company may not be able to maintain this trick for decades to come, the positive side is that the company can learn from its mistakes and eventually adopt new trends.
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