Individual Entry
Listening to Your Customers
Time magazine has a story about Nintendo at E3, its direction, and some first hand contact with WarioWare Wii. The article is illicitly making its way around the internet. What stood out to me, more than any revelations about the hardware and the games, is one paragraph.
But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds."
The article then concluded with a trendy Nintendo+Apple comparison, which reminded me of something Signal vs. Noise posted once: looking back at an original iPod announcement thread with the hindsight that we have now. Their (sarcastic) comment then? Apple should have just listened to their customers and never released the iPod.
Thank you for putting this in perspective. I'm still not used to the name of Nintendo's next console, but I'm not about to join in the fun of poking holes in Nintendo's strategy.
That quote from Iwata is important because it describes the announcement and subsequent launch of the DS as well – and look how things have turned out. I think Iwata is exactly right saying that they purposefully ignore the “hardcore�, because they are simply cannibalizing an existing market. They want to reach out and create new gamers, not simply update graphics for their existing audience, which the PS3 and 360 are clearly doing. No game announcement to date has tweaked my interest enough to warrant the purchase of either console.
It's easier to dismiss something where the benefits aren't readily apparent. Awesome graphics? Well, the console must be good, then.
May 8, 2006 12:17 PM. Posted by: gatmog.