Behind the Scene: The Untold Story of Wii


Gaming freaks and gadget freaks among you by now know of Wii. The revolution its creating in the world of console games and how its making the two big boys of the industry lick their wounds(Sony for PS3 and Microsoft for X-Box360). Those of you in the gaming world are already familiar with this can skip and go to the last paragraph to get to a link which details on the story behind Wii., but to others let me give you a brief background on the kind of impact Wii from Nintendo had and is having on the other two.

In a world few months back no body gave chance to Nintendo in the world of Gaming. It was distant third to the leader Sony and runner up Microsoft. Both the big players had power beasts in the lineup to their blockbuster products PS2 and X-Box. Every one was waiting anxious to see which of these two will win the war this time round. And then the war started in fag end of 2006. X-Box 360, followed by "Wii" and PS3. Till this point the going was perfect, it was as per the script laid down by all those experts. However, something happened which very few anticipated. That was Wii scoring over both X-Box360 and PS3.

Now how did a product from a company which was barely surviving beat the biggies. XBox 360 and PS3 both were beasts in terms of computing power and the host of features they provided. I would not like to delve into the features they provided but to give you a brief, consider this. IBM has come up with a server based on the Cell processor, the heart of PS3. A more interesting article on how an XBox 360, was turned into a laptop can be found here on Make. The point I am trying to make is these two machines were not just gaming consoles but did many more things from playing your DVDs, Blu-Ray's, connecting to net, and host of other things.

Now you might ask why not let me play my game. Why do you want to include all that stuff which I might hardly use. The idea behind this was to increase the user base. How's that? By making the family and friends of the users who are not hardcore gamers to be able to use these machines. Wow sounds good? Yes indeed. But then they missed a point. If I want to watch a DVD on my TV I would very well use my existing DVD player than use a 400$ or more machine. And same goes with listening to music, downloading from net and so on.

Coming back to where we started, now what has Wii done differently that made it a huge success. Nothing much, but they got some simple things right. Nintendo also focused on increasing its market share. However, the way they went about it was different. They understood that irrespective of the age, people like playing games, only that the games and the needs were different. This is the market they tapped in. Wii is very user friendly in learning. Literally there is no learning curve involved to use the console. Then they came up with a wireless motion sensor, which I would say is a big jump in the world of design. And then they priced it at just 250$ way less than PS3~600$ and XBox360~400$.

Now if we thought that Wii was possible all of sudden with a master stroke of genius we would be wrong. It was a slow visionary approach taken by Nintendo's CEO Satoru Iwata and the legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto over five year. Yest Five years, it sounds to long in a world where new products are launched over night. But that's the fact. For a complete story on how Nintendo struck back, read the following article on CNN Money. A must read for any one to do with products. I am sure this story of Wii is going to be as legendary as a Walkman or an iPod.

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