Xbox 360 vs. Playstation 3 vs. Nintendo Revolution: Growing the Market

"Growing the Market: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, together.

Nintendo's Satoru Iwata talked about the need to grow the market out to new demographics. Nintendo is obviously doing that very blatantly with things like DS and Revolution, while Sony is using things like SingStar to go out to new markets. However, in regards to Xbox 360, he used his family's experience with the system.

Satoru Iwata," I'll give you my own example - my own family, where my wife is not a huge fan of videogames, is not somebody that plays videogames. Yet, when I brought the Xbox 360 home and showed her for half an hour everything it could do, even without showing a game played, she was sold.

She loved the idea of a wireless controller. She loved the idea of the control mechanism for the device itself sitting on the couch. She loved the idea that she could put her MP3 player in, she loved the idea of the family photographs being on the screen, and having the slideshow mode with music streaming in the background. She loved the idea of being able to connect to the PC, whether it's running XP or Media Centre Edition, and being able to do things there that are stored on the hard drive of a PC, whether that's video, whether that's music, whether that's photographs.

So all of that, I think, brought my wife - a very difficult sell from a traditional videogame console point of view - very much into the Xbox 360 fold because of the things it could do from a digital entertainment point of view. I think consumers are demanding that now.

No matter how you're gonna gauge it - we said at E3, we want a billion consumers touched in this next generation by our industry. That was an industry message. Certainly, we can see Nintendo rallying to that cry and reiterating what Robbie said on May 16th; I heard the same words come from Iwata-san of Nintendo yesterday. Their attempt, of course, is to make gaming a little bit more simple, a little bit more approachable.

In the same way, we'll continue to do things like that within our games. We're looking at maybe simplified controls, looking at games that are easier to get into - of course, still difficult to master, but that get you into the gameplay a little easier.

But yeah - we need to grow as an industry. Having a simplified controller is one tactics in what is a larger strategic battle we need to face to grow this business""