How Nintendo has established itself in the video game market since its creation?
The origins:
Nintendo is a Japanese multinational company founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889 near Kyoto in Japan. It’s now directed by Shuntaro Furukawa.
At the beginning, Nintendo was producing japanese playing cards: “Hanafuda”. It’s only in the 70’s that Nintendo started to enter the video game market by creating video games for arcade.
The beginning of the success:
The first successful Nintendo console in Europa and America was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), released in 1985 in USA and in 1986 in Europa and Canada.
This console has sold more than 60 million copies thanks to games like the first “Super Mario Bros” which is now the second game the most sold in the world behind “Wii Sport”another game of Nintendo.
It’s on the NES that big Nintendo video games licenses were born like “The legend of Zelda” (1986). At this time Nintendo was controlling 90% of the video game market.
Many successes of Nintendo
Nintendo has continued to released new consoles for new generations:
- The Super NES which was an upgraded version of the NES (1990).
- The first eternal Game Boy, which was the first portable console released by Nintendo (1989). This console has sold more than 118 million copies.
- The Nintendo DS (2004), with its new concept of the double screen has sold more than 154 million copies. With this portable console you can play with a touch screen and this was aiming young and old people.
- The Wii (2006), with 101 million copies sold was a huge success too with a new gameplay concept for some games: “the movement” which permitted to realise actions in the game. That was a revolution.
- The Nintendo Switch (2017), which is today the last console released by Nintendo, can afford you to play anywhere, anytime, at big video games of the moment like FIFA or Fortnite. With almost 20 million copies sold the success keep growing.
Why such a success?
Indeed, these consoles were less powerful than the competitors but they were proposing something original like new concepts of gameplay. Nintendo released exclusive games for their own consoles like Mario, Pokémon or Zelda.
Those games can be played by anyone because they weren’t violent and they were easy to understand. That’s why these consoles have a lot of success because they attract people of all ages. Nintendo use their video game symbol Mario to embody their products.
That’s why Nintendo has success because their video game characters are very famous in the world like Disney characters.
Some failures of Nintendo:
- The Virtual Boy (1995), was supposed to immerge players in full 3D but it was uncomfortable and too expensive.
- The Wii U (2012), with only 9 million copies sold, was just an upgraded version of the Wii with a controller with a touch screen. This console was destroyed by its competitors Sony and Microsoft a year later with the release of the PS4 and the Xbox One.
At the end:
These failures didn’t prevent Nintendo from establishing itself in the video game market. Nintendo is still in the competition and we hope for a very long time.
Samuel BEZ
