[arg_discuss] Wii/Designing towards the hardcore

[Leslie Nassar]

I'm reminded of a quote from Steve Jobs; "It's really hard to design 
products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they 
want until you show it to them."

In Wii's case, not listening to the customers is probably a good thing.  
It wasn't so good in the N64 days though, when customers were screaming 
for discs but Nintendo insisted on cartridges.  That decision may have 
satisfied the consumer's need for Mario64, but it was up to Sony to 
surprise people.

Ah, hindsight...


Michael Monello wrote:
> There is an interesting article in the upcoming TIME Magazine about 
> Nintendo's new console, Wii. Nintendo's strategy jumped out at me as 
> relevant to recent conversations here:
>
> But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two 
> important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, 
> Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is 
> extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to 
> them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] 
> was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was 
> unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are 
> simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their 
> needs, but you can never surprise them."
>
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191861-1,00.html
>
> Best,
>
> Mike
> __________
> haxan | films | http://www.haxan.com
>
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