Diverse users demand diverse products -- Nintendo of Japan
More women than men play Nintendo in Japan.
According to the Fall 2007 Nintendo Conference, more than half of Japanese Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS players are female. Since Japan is to the video game industry what the Bay Area is to the web -- that is to say, it's the undisputed innovation center -- this is great news for those of us who care about video game diversity.
In 2008, I'm far less excited about playing my 50th menu-driven RPG than I am about finding another genre-shattering, barrier-breaking masterpiece like Katamari Damacy was and Spore hopes to be. And it seems that these unique games have much larger rapport with female audiences -- if only because they represent a new consumer base for games and as such are not entrenched in taxonomical comfort zones such as "Platformer", "Shooter", and "Beat Em Up".
Maybe this diversifying player base helps to explain why the last few years have included such paradigm shifting games as Brain Age, Cooking Mama, Trauma Center, and Elebits. It's not that unique games never existed before (a statement that would be logically fallacious anyway), but it seems to me that in my lifetime, unclassifiable games such as these have ever been nearly successful as they are at this moment. One can only hope it continues.
source
"13:56: For each household, the DS has 3.0 users, the Wii has 3.5 users. DS has a 53% female user base. Wii has a 51% female user base."
According to the Fall 2007 Nintendo Conference, more than half of Japanese Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS players are female. Since Japan is to the video game industry what the Bay Area is to the web -- that is to say, it's the undisputed innovation center -- this is great news for those of us who care about video game diversity.
In 2008, I'm far less excited about playing my 50th menu-driven RPG than I am about finding another genre-shattering, barrier-breaking masterpiece like Katamari Damacy was and Spore hopes to be. And it seems that these unique games have much larger rapport with female audiences -- if only because they represent a new consumer base for games and as such are not entrenched in taxonomical comfort zones such as "Platformer", "Shooter", and "Beat Em Up".
Maybe this diversifying player base helps to explain why the last few years have included such paradigm shifting games as Brain Age, Cooking Mama, Trauma Center, and Elebits. It's not that unique games never existed before (a statement that would be logically fallacious anyway), but it seems to me that in my lifetime, unclassifiable games such as these have ever been nearly successful as they are at this moment. One can only hope it continues.
source
"13:56: For each household, the DS has 3.0 users, the Wii has 3.5 users. DS has a 53% female user base. Wii has a 51% female user base."
Labels: ds, products, theory, video games, wii
posted by Kyle Wild at
3:08 AM
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