... Abstract Nintendo has been a major contender in the video game industry for the past several decades, and has faced the challenge of developing and maintaining competitive advantage over the years. With the introduction of the Nintendo Wii console, the company gained a stronghold as a leader in the video gaming industry. However, competitors Sony and Microsoft are quickly gaining on Nintendo’s competitive advantage, forcing the company to monitor and reevaluate its strategies. To maintain a competitive advantage, Nintendo must look toward influencing the customers of Sony and Microsoft, continue developing innovative technologies, and also consider the impact of social networking and mobile devices on the gaming industry. 3 History of Nintendo Nintendo Co. Ltd began its long history at the turn of the twentieth century as a Japanese manufacturer of playing cards. The company went public in the 1960s, and by the 1970s Nintendo had begun directing its focus toward electronic toys and video games. Nintendo became a leader in the video game industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s with its home video game consoles and popular game titles. Competitors began to emerge in the ‘90s; the release of Sony’s PlayStation platform broadened the video game market, and the rising popularity and improvement of PC technology led to the use of PCs as gaming platforms. Capitalizing on the popularity of PC gaming, Microsoft developed its Xbox game console in the early 2000s. While the competition focused...
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... Abstract Nintendo has been a major contender in the video game industry for the past several decades, and has faced the challenge of developing and maintaining competitive advantage over the years. With the introduction of the Nintendo Wii console, the company gained a stronghold as a leader in the video gaming industry. However, competitors Sony and Microsoft are quickly gaining on Nintendo’s competitive advantage, forcing the company to monitor and reevaluate its strategies. To maintain a competitive advantage, Nintendo must look toward influencing the customers of Sony and Microsoft, continue developing innovative technologies, and also consider the impact of social networking and mobile devices on the gaming industry. 3 History of Nintendo Nintendo Co. Ltd began its long history at the turn of the twentieth century as a Japanese manufacturer of playing cards. The company went public in the 1960s, and by the 1970s Nintendo had begun directing its focus toward electronic toys and video games. Nintendo became a leader in the video game industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s with its home video game consoles and popular game titles. Competitors began to emerge in the ‘90s; the release of Sony’s PlayStation platform broadened the video game market, and the rising popularity and improvement of PC technology led to the use of PCs as gaming platforms. Capitalizing on the popularity of PC gaming, Microsoft developed its Xbox game console in the early 2000s. While the competition focused...
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...1. Environnemental scanning Macro Environment Macro environment is said to be the most general layer of the environment. This consists of broad environmental factors that have an impact on the organization. The PESTEL framework helps us to identify the future trends which might impinge on Nintendo and therefore identify the key drivers of change. On the other hand the five forces framework helps to understand how the competitive dynamics within and around the video game industry are changing. PESTEL Framework: This categorizes environmental influences into six main types: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. Political: Factors such as taxation policies, foreign trade regulations and social welfare policies influence the video game industry. Video games have a tendency to play with the emotions of people which inturn can threaten peace and law, a country being multicultural. Therefore Government has the authority to control the contents of the video game frames. Economic: Places such as US and Japan are largely dominated by the video game business. Therefore contributing towards the GDP of their countries. Interest rates have not much impact on the video game business as they manufacture their own units. The disposable income of the consumers in the video game industry has an effect on their buying behavior. For example people who fall under a low income range may not afford to buy a video game of a high price. Nintendo’s low manufacturing...
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...Summary Nintendo entered the video game market in 1979 and has been a top competitor ever since. In 2006, with the release of the Nintendo Wii, they secured their competitive advantage in the video game industry. The Wii was created to establish a new standard in game control, using innovative and unprecedented interface with the Wii remote. The remote’s motion sensor capabilities allowed the user to interact and manipulate objects on the screen by moving and pointing the remote in various directions. It really changed the way games were played. In 2010, they were the market leader of that generation of video console sales growth, ahead of Microsoft and Sony. By the fall of 2010, Sony and Microsoft were starting to gain on Nintendo’s competitive advantage when they came out with their own gaming systems that had innovative controllers along with much better graphics. If Nintendo wants to keep their competitive advantage, they will need to reevaluate their strategies. External Environment If a company does not keep up with changes in the external environment, it becomes difficult to sustain competitive advantages. There are two components to the external environment to analyze. The general environment, which consists of demographic, sociocultural, political/legal, technological, economic and global conditions; and the competitive environment, which includes rivals, suppliers, customers and other factors that may directly affect a company’s success. Nintendo used...
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...MACRO AND MICRO ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS FOR NINTENDO Macro Environment Macro environment is said to be the most general layer of the environment. This consists of broad environmental factors that have an impact on the organisation. The PESTEL framework helps us to identify the future trends which might impinge on Nintendo and therefore identify the key drivers of change. On the other hand the five forces framework helps to understand how the competitive dynamics within and around the video game industry are changing. The two frameworks are discussed below: PESTEL Framework: This categorises environmental influences into six main types, namely: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. A PESTEL analysis on the video game industry is carried out below: Political: Factors such as taxation policies, foreign trade regulations and social welfare policies influence the video game industry. Video games have a tendency to play with the emotions of people which inturn can threaten peace and law, a country being multicultural. Therefore Government has the authority to control the contents of the video game frames. Economic: Places such as U.S and Japan are largely dominated by the video game business. Therefore contributing towards the GDP of their countries. Interest rates have not much impact on the video game business as they manufacture their own units. The disposable income of the consumers in the video game industry has an effect on their...
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...Project: Team A DeVry University - Online Technology, Society, and Culture HUMN 432 Aimee James 19 February, 2012 Abstract Here we as a six-member team collaborate to delve into this fascinating industry, taking a trip from describing the technology and its graphics, through its myriad history. Furthering these endeavors continues this journey into the influences surrounding this titanic industry, exploring political, legal, physical, and both positive and negative influences alike. Then taking a decidedly tactic turn into the economic questions and considerations, exploring the aspects of economic growth, prediction of future growth in the industry, as well as showing there is a consistency in the overall economy of this industry, and then traveling into the various changes this specialty has changed the economy as a whole. Continuing further we explore the psychological considerations and sociological effects of this industry, summarizing that it all comes down to personal responsibility and accountability when it comes to making choices in any and all things in life. Furthermore, the topic of violence in video games and the tendencies they create, plus the ever continuing debate this topic will forever have shrouded around it, gets a dose of reality. Admitting gaming addiction and denying a link to increased aggression due to video games is also pondered. The next section after this is all about the technology we so love and admire as a society in all its...
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...Recycling and “Going Green” has become a rising phenomenon in today’s society. According to Go Green Recycling Inc., the average American discards seven and a half pounds of garbage every day. Most of the garbage goes into landfills, which in turn produces large amounts of greenhouse gases. In an effort to repair the damage to the environment, large amount of consumers prefer to purchase eco-friendly, recyclable and biodegradable products, claiming that they will only purchase items from companies that is involved in environmentally friendly practices. Seeing that trend these days is towards being environmentally conscious, I have created a furniture line called “Green Home Décor”, which sells recycled and biodegradable furniture. The recyclable furniture is unwanted and discarded furniture, which is repaired and refurbished. The objected of selling recycled furniture is to prevent relatively usable furniture to be wasted. The biodegradable furniture is designed to break down naturally once its lifetime is over. The objective of selling biodegradable furniture is to prevent further polluting the environment. Technological Advances (Technology/Video Game Console App) Throughout the years, our society has been experiencing a drastic change in the world of...
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...over the past few years, games have gone from social outsider to the sweethearts of the media, technology, and now educational industries. In 1973 John Daleske and Silas Warner created a simple space-craft war, your ship controlled by typed commands. This is thought to be the first ever networked multiplayer game (running on the PLATO network), before the internt as we now know it (Mark 2011). E-learning educators in particular stand to learn a lot about building next-generation learning environments from games. While online courses are usually little more than "online course notes," games offer entire worlds to explore (Gee 2005). While educators wonder if it is possible to create good online learning communities, game designers create virtual societies with their own cultures, languages, political systems, and economies. While completion rates for online courses barely reach 50%, gamers spend hundreds of hours mastering games, writing lengthy texts, and even setting up their own virtual "universities" to teach others to play games (Gee 2005). In short, games have developed a reputation for being fun, engaging, and immersive, requiring deep thinking and complex problem solving. These facts make functional and interactive games a necessity it the modern everyday classroom in schools or online. Implications, Uses, and Capabilities Some educators may still be suspicious of online learning games because of the amount of negative publicity video games have acquired from the educational...
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...WORKPLACE Employee training Changing the game: Introducing the business world to video games Last Updated: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 | 8:21 AM ET By Blaine Kyllo, special to CBC News Calgary's 3DInternet created a training simulator to help technicians learn to fix problems with power lines. (CBC) David Edery thinks the business world needs more video games. They are better than any other medium for enhancing employee productivity and training, says the co-author of Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business. "There are certain jobs which, frankly, are not very exciting," he said in a phone interview, citing factory assembly-line work as a good example. But by layering game-play mechanics over the job — making the application of rivets seem like solving a puzzle in an adventure maze, for example — even repetitive, menial tasks can become less onerous, perhaps even fun. "It can dramatically improve employee morale and retention," said Edery. '"If you want to train them [younger people] with simulators or if you want them to do next-generation type things like manufacturing in a manual environment, what do you think their sense of interface is going to be? Is it going to be from MS Word and Excel or is it going to be from Half-Life?" —Ben SawyerThis is especially with younger generations. Ben Sawyer, founder of the Serious Games Initiative, said companies have to consider what employees of the future will be familiar with...
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...growing up too fast because of the modern technology which people are enjoying and at the same time helpful in their everyday lives. The fact that most of the children today tend to choose staying at home playing computer games or any other gadgets instead of playing outside, making friends with other children and exercise their mind and body which is very helpful to their health. One of the main reasons why students are attracted to computers is because of computer games. Modern technology is now very accessible to people especially students, they can easily go to computer shops near the school to play and most of them spend the whole time with it and forgot their responsibilities as a student which is one of the disadvantages of playing video games. There are also good things that a student can benefit in playing computer games because there is also other types of video games that are educational which can help them enlighten their minds, discover new knowledge,improve their thinking skills, stuffs that they think it never existed and experience new things that they have never encountered in their entire life. Educational computer games can enhance students’ motivation to learn, but only depends on how they play. Some students get hooked on to playing computer games so much so that they tend to lose interest in other more important things like studies. Some of them who don’t have any knowledge about computer games before are now addicted to it because they...
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...There’s a burly line between video games and simulations but there are key differences. First off video games are made with entertainment in mind and simulations are made mostly for training. The military has been using simulations to train soldiers for a while and now they are using video games to train soldiers. They are quickly changing the way the Army trains and “On the upside, specialized games and simulators have become cheap and effective virtual training grounds that supplement the usual physical drills.”(Jeremy Hsu 2010). Another key difference is that simulations tend to be more realistic then videogames. The surgery video game Trauma Center for the Wii has graphics that are cartoons like and uses a controller, while the company ENT Simulation Technologies Ltd has an ultra-realistic simulator “The simulator uses a haptic arm, a 3d visor mounted on a stand, and a computer to closely mimic an actual surgical procedure”( ENT SimTech 2010). There are more differences but now I will discuss some video games that are a close to being simulators. Proflight Simulator is a video game that you can play online with others but learn how to fly at the same. It has realistic graphics, real time maps, many different planes to fly and many challenges to complete. I downloaded the demo and it was I was playing a video game instead training a simulator. Another video game that comes to mind is Nintedogs + Cats for the Nintendo DS. First you to choose between a puppy or kitten and...
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...The video game industry is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video games. It encompasses numbers of job disciplines and employs a lot of people worldwide. It includes video game consoles, game software, handheld devices, mobile games and online games. Console is the largest segment in the industry. In recent years, the video gaming industry has been growing rapidly and it may grow in the future. The three main competitor companies in this industry are Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation that specialize in software such as Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite. But what is more important they are best known for their consumer products Xbox. Sony is one of the biggest manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, video game consoles, and information technology products for the consumer. The latest generation of its console game products is the Playstation 3 which replaced Playsation 2.Finally Nintendo is one of the largest Japanese technology companies well known for its console games. Its latest and the most successful console Wii was able to outshine Microsoft’s’s Xbox and Sony’s PS3. Analysis of the competitive industry Organizations view competition in an industry as a crucial issue that needs to be analyzed. In terms of economic theory (cited by Johnsons et al.) industry may be defined as “a group of firms producing the same principal products”...
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...The history of video games and virtual reality can be first talked about in the early 1960’s. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there were two computer science laboratories of world renown, the Lincoln Laboratory and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was at the Lincoln Laboratory that housed a custom built transistorized computer called the TX-0. The TX-0 could be operated with fewer instructions than more powerful and cumbersome computers at the time. This was appealing to students at MIT and was often used during off peak hours often at night. This appeal attracted a group of engineering students in a club called the “Tech Model Railroad club.” They termed themselves as “hackers”, where the root word “hack,” which...
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...Neuron Perspective Children, Wired: For Better and for Worse Daphne Bavelier,1,* C. Shawn Green,2 and Matthew W.G. Dye3 of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA 3Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA *Correspondence: daphne@bcs.rochester.edu DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.08.035 2Department 1Department Children encounter technology constantly at home and in school. Television, DVDs, video games, the Internet, and smart phones all play a formative role in children’s development. The term ‘‘technology’’ subsumes a large variety of somewhat independent items, and it is no surprise that current research indicates causes for both optimism and concern depending upon the content of the technology, the context in which the technology immerses the user, and the user’s developmental stage. Furthermore, because the field is still in its infancy, results can be surprising: video games designed to be reasonably mindless result in widespread enhancements of various abilities, acting, we will argue, as exemplary learning tools. Counterintuitive outcomes like these, besides being practically relevant, challenge and eventually lead to refinement of theories concerning fundamental principles of brain plasticity and learning. Introduction It is Monday morning at 7:58 a.m....
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...continue GameStop’s aggressive growth in the industry against the risk of emerging technology and the changing taste of consumers. Executive Summary: The objective of this analysis is to design a strategy that will continue GameStop’s growth as the largest retail gaming store in the industry despite threats from alternate methods of gaming and changes in consumer taste. Analysis will show that the retail gaming industry is an unattractive industry since the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers are high, barrier into the industry are low, and competitors are numerous. GameStop uses a broad differentiation strategy by offering a wide selection of new and used games and consoles. Its marketing strategy and reputation gives the firm a sustainable competitive advantage but its research and development give the firm a competitive parity. The environment of the retail gaming industry possesses the threat of technological and sociocultural risks. GameStop can address these risks by merging with online social media sites and contracting with its suppliers to increase barrier for new entrants in the industry. April 20, 2013 Introduction After the acquisition of EB Games, GameStop rose as the leading video game retailer in its industry. In an effort to sustain their position, GameStop will have to tackle several technological and sociocultural issues that have arisen from its competitive environment. The strategic objective we wish to accomplish in this analysis is to formulate...
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