Walk your own path

I had to write an article for my companies newsletter so obviously I chose gaming in relation to business. I thought some of you might enjoy it so here it is..

It was announced yesterday that the Nintendo Wii is going to be launched in South Africa at the rAge expo at the end of September. So what is this Nintendo Wii?

The Nintendo Wii is what happens when you give yourself some time to step out of the race to be the best and start thinking about what exactly your core values are and what you originally wanted to achieve.

As you most probably know Nintendo was the undisputed leader in console gaming in the 80?s and early nineties. Then Sony came along and started bragging about how its console was much more powerful than the competition. In the next iteration of consoles Sony won hands down with its PlayStation 1. Nintendo reacted by attempting to match Sony head 2 head with power and performance. How many people do you know with a GameCube compared to a PlayStation 2? Yeah they failed miserably.

For the next generation while Sony and Microsoft were telling the world how great and powerful their systems were going to be, Nintendo announced that they were going to building a system which had sub standard graphics, no movie playback, no surround sound and they were doing away with the standard controller and using a motion sensitive remote instead. Everyone laughed and wrote them out of the next generation.

The Nintendo Wii launched in the States and Europe at the same time as the all powerful and all conquering PlayStation 3… At the time of writing the Wii had outsold the PS3 by 2.5:1 in total and consistently outsells the PS3 by as much as 6:1 in certain areas. Nintendo as a company is now worth more than the entire Sony conglomerate.

Sony is not laughing anymore.

Last Updated: August 28, 2007