Fils-Aime champions Nintendo's "disruptive" approach

February 14th, 2006, 21:39 Posted By: wraggster

Nintendo of America vice president Reggie Fils-Aime has spoken out once more about the company's strategy, promoting the Nintendo DS and Revolution as "disruptive" devices - and confirming that the latter will be playable at E3.

Writing in a column for marketing news site Brandweek, Fils-Aime expresses the belief that the rapid technological progress in the home electronics and entertainment sector has overshot the market itself, leaving a major opportunity for devices with a different appeal to enter the space.

He compares the situation to the one in the portable music device space, where technological progress advanced far faster than the market's willingness to keep pace, and the eventual dominant platform was the iPod - whose advantages, he notes, were not that it was more powerful or higher capacity than its rivals, but that it was "cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently more convenient to use."

Similarly, the special effects blockbusters of the late 1970s, such as Star Wars and Jaws, triggered a revolution in the effects market - but in the following decades, special effects were no longer enough to sell a movie, and there were many costly flops as well as a wide range of "low-tech productions" which did extremely well.

What Fils-Aime is driving at, of course, is the fact that both the DS and Revolution have chosen to go down a low-tech route compared to competitors such as PSP and PS3, instead offering innovative and more accessible control methods and a lower price point - factors which, he believes, will lead to them being disruptive products for the whole market.

It sounds like the industry will get a chance to see this disruption first hand at E3, too; speaking to US website 1up, Fils-Aime revealed this week that Revolution will definitely be playable at the show, with the firm currently working on technical details to ensure that the controllers don't interfere with games being played on other nearby screens (and that they don't get stolen, for that matter).

Whether we'll see significantly more about the console before E3 or not, however, remains tightly under wraps - with the content of Satoru Iwata's keynote at the Game Developers Conference remaining a closely guarded secret.

"The battle for hearts and minds and hands of developers started last fall," Fils-Aime told The Mercury News, "and it comes to a head at GDC" - but whether this means that the final secrets of the Revolution will be laid bare in San Jose next month remains to be seen.

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