• Business 2.0 Magazine, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:45 AM

From out of absolutely nowhere, Nintendo swooped in to take control of the video game market--at less than half the cost. Its Nintendo Wii, on the market for about six months now, is cheaper, more accessible, and more fun than the higher-powered offerings of Sony and Microsoft.

Who needs more processing power and better graphics when you can have motion-control? Who needs the electricity-guzzling Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 when the pint-sized, low-powered Nintendo Wii can run for days without running up your electric bill? Who needs the complex controllers used by Sony and Microsoft when the layman can become a Wii expert in less than 15 minutes? Again, at half the cost. It's also outselling the competition (since January anyway), and, unlike the Xbox 360 and the PS3, Nintendo actually makes money from its next-gen game console.

Nintendo's lead is particularly sweet considering the Kyoto-based company's fall from grace in the console wars over the last 10 years. As Sony expanded the video game market to a $30 billion global industry, Nintendo saw its sales shrink to almost of what they had been in the days of the NES and the Super Nintendo. Nintendo cannily took control back by appealing to the masses--it even markets itself to AARP pubs-focusing on what made video games successful in the first place: accessibility and fun.

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