Andre Yoskowitz
29 May 2007 5:06
Nintendo America boss George Harrison took some time to talk about his competitors and how he feels they dont understand the gaming market. Harrison believes Sony and Microsoft lack the "DNA" necessary to understand the market, one he feels wants a more rewarding gaming experience than "just the next version of Halo or Grand Theft Auto."
"So far they haven't spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we're having some success, they probably will," commented Harrison to Wired.
"We can already see some of the things they've tried. For last year's E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Piñata as their killer app for the Pokemon set. And neither of those worked really well.
"Part of this is, I think it's not in their DNA. They're really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have," said the senior vice president of marketing and communications.
So far the Wii and DS consoles have dominated sales and Harrison said he felt confident that Nintendo could take as large as a 50 percent market share for the "next gen" lineup of consoles.
"We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45 per cent of the hardware that's being sold. But on the other hand, we could get over 50 per cent. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do," he stated.
"If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience," he added.
Those are very strong beliefs by Mr Harrsion and I hope to see Microsoft and Sony respond to this latest war of words.
Source:
GI.biz