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Navigate today's cutting-edge technology with the gurus from HowStuffWorks.
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Jonathan
Yes. Sad trombone.
Chris
Versus the BluRay player.
Jonathan
Which still sad trombone.
Chris
Yeah. But it’s funny though because that really – actually this puts the Wii into context because you can tell what these audiences are looking form. I mean, people that buy, or at least initially bought the X-Box 360 or initially bought the Playstation 3, they were looking for something that would do all of it. High definition, high quality gaming, they’re looking for something that can handle a lot of math, can show you realistic 3D interpretations of human beings. Basically 3D representations of human beings shooting at one another. And when you weren’t playing games, you were watching movies in high definition. The Wii is for a totally differen
t audience. It actually bundled a title with it, Wii Sports, which is not an accurate representation of a human being at all. They’re not shooting at one another. And you can’t watch even a DVD on it. So it’s a completely different group of people buying this machine at the outset. The people who bought Wii’s are people who wanted the game play that they could get with the Wii remote and the Nintendo characters. They wanted Mario, they wanted Link from the Zelda series. And sort of a new player in this case, Sega. Their relationship with Sega, and they wanted Sonic.
Jonathan
And they also wanted a game system that would let them play with other people in their living rooms.
Chris
True.
Jonathan
See, the thing about the Microsoft and Sony approaches – especially Microsoft and X-Box Live – was that the focus wasn’t as much get a whole bunch of people in your room and play video games. It was link up with people who are in their living room across the city and shoot at them for awhile or over the internet.
Chris
Yeah. They’re shooting across my city anyway, but they don’t really use game consoles for that.
Jonathan
Well, we do live in Atlanta.
Chris
True.
Jonathan
But for Nintendo, it was more about, “Hey, we got a party going on right here y’all, so why don’t you pick up a Wii-mote and play?” And so that had an appeal to a different group as well. Often we’ll call one group the hard-core gamers and the others the casual gamers, so hard-core gamers are the ones that are really focused on – especially say in X-Box, they’re focused on getting achievements, they’re focused on being the best they possibly can be on these games, and they want to dominate in various first-person shooters or strategy games. Very objective oriented. Then you could argue that the main audience for the Wii are more experience oriented. Not experience as in role playing games, but really like the experience of playing the game is more important than the outcome. And that’s just sort of an armchair psychology thing right there. But I mean, as an X-Box owner, part of that mentality as – still back then was part of that console as well. Some of the most popular games for the X-Box were these first person shooters and strategy games.