Wednesday, February 8, 2012

A Changing Market for Video Games

In the past few years, the overall market for popular video games has been expanding rapidly.  With the technological advances in mobile phones and other handheld devices, such as tablets, the gaming industry has started to have many new, easy to access substitutes.  Many of these new substitutes tend to focus on the market of the casual gamer, someone who is looking for a simple to understand game for a cheap price.  These casual gamer can now go to the App store or the Android market and, for sometimes as little as 99 cents, pick up a popular and fun to play game.

What does this mean for the big name video game companies on the market?   For the more traditional video game companies, such as Nintendo, this is starting to cause them some problems.  No longer are people as willing to spend the asking prices for the consul games when there are these close substitutes for such a drastically lower price.  In January, Nintendo announced that this was its worst financial year since the company started around three decades ago.  

In order to help create a larger market for their consuls, video game companies are starting to focus not just on the game playing, but on adding enticing features, like movie capabilities, to the consuls to attempt to regain a place in the market.   The new Wii U, which is scheduled to be released soon, will have features like a wireless credit card reader in order to attract the online shoppers. 

Will the expansion of their uses help secure a niche in the market for these consuls or will the video gaming industry be forced to lower prices in order to be more competitive with their much cheaper substitutes?

Source:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/nintendo-needs-a-hit-in-a-hurry-02022012.html

1 comment:

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