While it is true that it is hard to piss off the hardcore crowd, but what sane company would do so? It is one thing to dissapoint Like Mario Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion. People get over dissapointment. Look at NOAUS, over There my friends, is one pissed off customer base. No company should be treating any area like that. But it exists and thank god it only happens here.
not that adding features to a machine would directly anger the core customer base, but adding features would incariably change other variables like price, market perception. By increasing the casual proportion of your market share one might accidentally anger the hardcore. At this point you end up exchanging dependable customers with ones that are far less dependable while not gaining any market share.
One way to increase both the hardcore and the casual fan base is for Nintendo to work more closely with it's partners. In this generation Nintendo should have told Panasonic to release the Q to other terretories Even in a limited fashion would have a great publicity move if not a purely economic one. Cross adverting. IBM helps advertise GCs, Nintendo help advertise IBM. It was being done in Japan, but in a limited fasion along with that ATi sticker. Nintendo also needs to have a bigger market presence regardles of the actual market share. Xbox had survied due to one limitless pockets allowing them to project themselfs as a bigger player than they really were.
A theory I thought up of why Nintendo didn't release the Q any where else but Japan. It might have been that since the device was called the "Panasonic Q" or "Q", customers might have mistaken it for a coompeting console. Canabilising it's own market share. A simpl name change would have fixed this preceved problem. Something like "Nintendo Gamecube: Mod Q" or more generic "GCNQ". Of course maybe Nintendo didn't want to take the financal risk of eatting thier own market share and having to advertise this machine. We may never know.
With all that said and done how does that relate to the DS? Well Nintendo gets a fairly clean slate as to how to work the DS. They can mold the customer base into some thing that is more flexible with it's usual hardcore customers while allowing Nintendo to draw in new casual customers. Which in turn, by exposing these new people to a slightly diffenrent flavor of the Nintendo experience, would allow Nintendo to move them deeper into thier product range in hopes of converting some of them in to the hardcore catagory. Even if they don't go hardcore, once they move deeper into the product range they would be commited casuals meaning they like the system, they will buy the products found on the system, but they are not loyal. These guys are great for your current generation but don't nesscerely carry over to the next.
Topic: Rumor: Nintendo DS Specs? (Read 13100 times)
