Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Can Nintendo Weather The Recession?

Now, im no expert with a bachelors degree, im just a mature teenager with a GED, but one thing that seems pretty obvious to me is that the hard core gamers are the only ones you can be sure will keep buying games; and thats the one group that the Wii has basically left in the dust. While Microsoft and Sony have been busy keeping their core demographic happy, with large processors and awesome graphics, Nintendo went in the completely opposite direction. Now, while that has been working out for them so far, the worsening economy could mark a drastic change in that fact. Most hardcore gamers (Myself included) spend most of their free money on the newest and greatest games, and that isnt likely to change, because unlike the casual gamers the Wii is focusing on, us true gamers really only have one true hobby. Now, look at the Wii side of things. Their demographic is made up of young children, their parents, and teenagers with little interest in gaming other than passing some time. With jobs getting scarce, and more and more people loosing the ones they have now, this means less and less to be spent on entertainment, and while Microsoft and Sony can supply gamers with hundreds of hours of intense multiplayer (a few gamers have been known to spend over one hundred DAYS of playing time trying to break the top of the highscores listings-thats nearly 2,500 hours), Nintendo doesnt even come close to that. Which makes it much more likely that Nintendo's gamers will be out seeing a movie when the next big game linup rolls around, while Microsoft and Sony's are parked outside Gamestop.

Fortunatly for Nintendo, there is one bright star calling the hardcore to the Wii, and that star just happens to be a company that was formerly Nintendo's biggest rival-Sega. While all the major developers hustle to create casual games to try and break into the big new market, Sega has produced some games designed for more mature audiences, such as "MadWorld", “House of the Dead”, and the upcoming shooter “The Conduit”, which have seen some pretty good reviews from the gaming media-as well as true gamers themselves. Should this recession fall even lower, and more and more jobs dry up, will the Wii be able to keep its reign as the leader of this console war, or will Nintendo's legion of new players abondon them in its hour of need? Who knows, im just some teenager with internet access.

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