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Understanding Nintendo’s success with the Wii

June 10th, 2007 by tim finin

game console sales Nintendo has had a big hit with the Wii, which has been outselling PS3 and Xbox combined this Spring. An article in the New York Times, Putting the We Back in Wii, attributes this, in part, to a new willingness on Nintendo’s part to collaborate with other makers of game software.

“Nintendo is known for turning out hits with memorable characters like Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Bros., but it has had a reputation for cold-shouldering game software developers because it preferred to make both its hardware and software internally. …
The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles.
The new Nintendo surprised employees at the software maker Namco Bandai Games when during a routine meeting at Namco Bandaiâ€™s Tokyo headquarters a year and a half ago, Nintendoâ€™s usually aloof executives made a sudden appeal for their support. The Nintendo group had come to demonstrate a prototype of the Wii, which had not then been released. They handed Namco Bandai employees the unique wand-like controllers and as the developers tested a fly fishing game, the Nintendo team urged them to build game software for the console, listing arguments about why Wii would be a chance for both companies to make money.”

Another reason is that developing games for the multi-core parallel processors at the heart of the PS3 and Xbox is more difficult, so new titles have been slower to come to market.

“The Wiiâ€™s simplicity is also the selling point for software makers. Mr. Wada said developers had been slower to write games for PlayStation 3 because of the greater complexity of the consoleâ€™s main processor, the high-speed multi-core Cell Chip. He said PlayStation 3â€™s production delays had also made Sony slow to provide developers with the basic codes and software needed to write games for the new console.
At Namco Bandai, Mr. Unozawa said PlayStation 3 was so complex, with its faster speeds and more advanced graphics, that it might take 100 programmers a year to create a single game, at a cost of about $10 million. Creating a game for Wii costs only a third as much and requires only a third as many writers, he said.

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