Nintendo Case Study

Case 24

Nintendo's Wii*

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was developed to stay current with the competitors. The Super Nintendo was released in 1991 and, when purchased, came with one game, Super Mario World. This was the successor to the previous Mario Brothers games that were played on the origi nal 8-bit NES. In 1996 Nintendo released N intendo 64, which caused the popularity of the Super Nintendo to decline. The Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's third-generation video game console and was named after the 64-bit processor. During its product life time, more than 30 million Nintendo 64 units were sold worldwide. 7 The N intendo 64, li ke its predecessors, used cartridges to play its games, but at the time, the competing systems of Sony and Sega were using COs for game storage. Cartridges could store 64 megabytes of data, while CDs could store around 700 megabytes of data. Also, COs were much cheaper to manufacture, distribute, and create; thus, many game developers that traditionally supported Nintendo platforms began creating games that would support the other platforms to increase profits. 8 At the time, the average cost of producing a Nintendo 64 cartridge was cited as $25, compared to I0 cents to produce a CD. Therefore, game producers passed the higher expense to the consumer, which explains why Nintendo 64 games tended to sell for higher prices than Sony PlayStation games. Whi le most Sony PlayStation games rarely exceeded $50, Nintendo 64 titles could reach $70. 9 Third-party developers naturally switched to the systems that used a less expensive CD platform (such as the PlayStation). In 2001 Nintendo released its GameCube, which was part of the sixth-generation era of video game systems. These systems included Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox, and Sega's Dreamcast. Although the GameCube did not use car tridges, Nintendo began producing its games using a proprietary optical-disk technology. This technology, while similar in appearance to...