Hello Sean
Do you think this book offers the analysis of Nintendo as it should?
http://www.vertical-inc.com/books/nintendo.html
The way how these books are written is that the author is given ‘content’ in the form of anecdotes or personal stories from people inside Nintendo in order to make the book. It would be like writing a book about Apple and Steve Jobs giving you quotes and telling you some stories of what happened. The book will not be seen from the eyes of the consumer, however. Also, since the writer is Japanese and is about NCL, it will be unable to explain the American phenomenon that occurred with the Wii. Most Japanese writers on video games do not understand the Atari days or even the NES days in America. Video games are born in America, not in Japan which is how the Japanese writer will try to write it.
There is no way to look at the Nintendo business strategy for the seventh generation without acknowledging the Blue Ocean Strategy or Clayton Christenson’s “disruption”. I doubt either of these will be elaborated on within those short two hundred pages. I bet most of the two hundred pages will be about a bad dramatization of ‘inside stories’ inside Nintendo.
To be perfectly honest, what occurred within NCL or in the heads of Iwata and Miyamoto is irrelevant. What matters is what was occurring in the heads of the consumers. Consumer behavior has massively changed lately. The question behind the Seventh Generation is not how but why. WHY did the Wii succeed? How it succeeded is not interesting. Answering the how is nothing more than letting marketing flap their gums about how their tactics or how Nintendo developers made their games. The WHY is a far more interesting question.
I reject the view that what we are seeing with the Wii is something we have never seen before. It occurred with the NES. It occurred in the Atari Era. Heck, it occurred with the arcades. In many ways, the Wii was restoring what was lost from video games. The most dramatic portrayal of that is Mario 5 which illustrated how many 2d Mario fans there were out there and how Nintendo abandoned them for decades. The Wii Fit phenomenon is the only thing I would truly call ‘new’.
Do customers have any part in ‘Nintendo Magic’? I bet the content of the book will be about NCL ‘stories’ and personal hijinks while not exploring the consumer reactions to gaming both before and after the DS and Wii.