Nintendo Wii Case Study

CASE ANALYSIS

Nintendo’s Wii

COMPANY NAME: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

INDUSTRY: Video Games

COMPANY WEBSITE: (www.nintendo.com)

COMPANY BACKGROUND:

Nintendo was founded as Marufuku Company, Ltd. by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889 and initially produced playing cards used in a Japanese game called Hanafuda. It was not until 1951 when the company changed its name to Nintendo Playing Card Company, Ltd. [ (Nintendo Company, Ltd. - Company History, 2005) ]. In 1979, Nintendo developed their first video game systems, TV Game 15 and TV Game 6. Quickly following the success of these systems, the first portable LCD video game with a microprocessor was developed by Nintendo in 1980 [ (Dess, Lumpkin, & Eisner, 2010) ]. Nintendo’s first major success and entrance in the video game console market came with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, which sold more than 60 million units worldwide. Nintendo’s current CEO is Satoru Iwata. For the 2010 fiscal year, according to Bloomberg, “Net income slumped 66 percent to 77.6 billion yen ($946 million) in the year ended in March…”(Nintendo Forecasts, 2011). The company plans to push sales of the handheld Nintendo 3DS to combat Sony’s portable gaming device, the PSP, to help bring profits back up to expectations.

SWOT ANALYSIS:

Strengths: The biggest strength that the case study seemed to stress was Nintendo’s ability to appeal to a very wide demographic.

Rather than focusing on leading-edge, high-definition graphics, like their competitors Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo focused on creating games that were fun to play for people of all ages. “Nintendo’s goal was to create games that everyone could play and a system that would appeal to women and people who had never played video games in the past (Dess, Lumkin & Isner, 2010, p. C273).

Weaknesses: Ironically, their strategy also seems to be their biggest weakness. As Dess, Lumkin & Isner (2010) said, “Although the Nintendo games were easily played by a...