BigShinyThing

The games company is second only to Toyota in terms of market capitalisation. Shares in Nintendo closed up 3.1 per cent to ¥59,200 bringing its market value to ¥8,390bn ($73.2bn), surpassing Canon’s market cap of ¥8,120bn.

The Japanese games maker’s shares have more than quadrupled over the past two years as the family-friendly Wii console has trounced Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to become the best-selling next-generation games machine in the world.

The surge in Ninteno’s market cap comes as Microsoft eagerly awaits the results of the much-hyped launch of Halo 3, the latest version of its blockbuster video game. Microsoft last month cut the price of its most popular Xbox 360 model by $50, following a similar move by Sony, which had cut the price of its PS3 console in the US to boost sales.

Nintendo is now back at the top of the console market, a position it last held 17 years ago with the Nintendo and Super Nintendo consoles. Observers attribute Nintendo’s success to Satoru Iwata, the company’s president, who joined the games maker in 2002. Mr Iwata is credited with forcing Nintendo to revamp its strategy by not trying to compete directly with Sony or Microsoft. Instead, the games maker has created a market in so-called ‘casual gaming’ by trying to woo adults as well as children.

Nintendo’s reclaimed supremacy was underlined in July when it leapfrogged Sony, the consumer electronics group, in terms of market capitalisation for the first time.

Sony disappointed gamers last week when it said the launch of Home, its virtual reality world, would be delayed until the spring.

The Wii costs $249 compared with $300-$400 for the Xbox 360 and $599 for the PS3. Anlaysts say prices of all three consoles are expected to drop by the crucial holiday shopping season.

Source: Financial Times

According to a report in The Times, the Nintendo Wii – which is currently outselling Sony’s PlayStation 3 by three to one – has begun to “steal” prime-time television audiences in Japan.

The Nintendo machine, which was specifically designed to repackage video gaming as a family-oriented affair - otherwise known as ‘casual gaming’, is believed by media insiders to be responsible for an unprecedented decline in early-evening viewing figures for Japan’s top-rated shows.

According to one senior executive of the country’s largest commercial television channel, Fuji TV, families who used to tune in to its colourful diet of soap operas, panel games and comedy variety shows may, instead, be drifting away and choosing to spend the same, economically-critical “golden hour” time playing on their Wii.

His comments come as Japanese television executives are reeling in horror at recent figures from Japan’s audience-tracking firms: last week was the first in nearly two decades where no single show on any commercial station attracted more than a 9 per cent audience share.

“The quality of programming has always been a little cyclical in Japan, but there has never been a period of decline like the one we are seeing now. There are outside factors at work. One is people watching TV on their cell phones where we can’t track them, but the really big factor is the time people are spending on the Wii,” an executive of TBS, another major commercial channel, said. He added that the “theft” of audiences was taking place because television producers and programming directors were used only to the idea of competing for time with other channels.

Parents – the critical decision-makers of family entertainment between 7pm and 9pm – were being wooed by something more interactive than television offers at present.

Investors have already shown their excitement over the Wii, despite the fact that it has yet to produce a range of titles that appeal to so-called “hard-core” games enthusiasts (you could say that it doesn’t need to). Nintendo’s stock has soared of late and the company now commands a greater market capitalisation than Sony – a rival that has a massive portfolio of businesses and eight times the global revenues of Nintendo. Sony has however encountered massive problems with the launch of its much-anticipated Sony Playstation 3 and a raft of PR blunders. By contrast, the Wii has even managed to turn negative PR to its advantage, with reports of Wii-related injuries just proving how compelling (and compulsive) the user experience is.

The Wii console, which is controlled by a motion-sensitive baton, has introduced a range of new experiences to the $30 billion (£15 billion)-a-year games industry. Because the controller can be used to simulate everything from a bowling ball to a battle-axe, software designers have come up with a range of titles that encourage gaming in a wider target audience than Nintendo’s old constituency of eight-to-16-year-olds. It has also put paid to the image of the coach-potato gamer.

Analysts at Nomura, for example, pin high hopes on a forthcoming Wii game with the working title of “Wii Health”. The game is expected to offer its users a full range of workouts and fitness activities using the motion-sensitive controller; it is also expected to snatch market share from the many fitness and health shows that dominate the daytime television schedules. Given the versatility of the Wii controller – it could simulate any kitchen utensil from a fish slice to an egg whisk – the Wii might also stage an assault on that bastion of prime-time Japanese television, the celebrity chef cookery show.

We are clearly witnessing the advent of a new type of leisure activity - the rise of ‘casual gaming’. Traditional TV has even more problems than we thought …

Writing in Wired, Wright’s take on modern, non-linear games echoes that of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You:

[Gaming is] a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. And it’s a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents.

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset — the fact that they are learning in a totally new way — means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

In other words, gaming is — at its best — science by another name: learning, hypothesis testing, and application of past observations and deduction to future problems.

Well, maybe. Wright and his co-developers are certainly risking the company on his beliefs: their next game, Spore, involves taking a single-celled creature up the evolutionary ladder, through life on land, tribal- and city-based cultures and on to galactic empire, as demonstrated in a strangely compelling walk-through viewable online. After the best part of an hour spent coaxing his beasties out of the pond and up the chain of existence to life amongst the stars, Wright comments [paraphrased] that ‘this is where the game really starts — up to here we’ve just been getting people to learn the controls.’ Lordy. As noted by GameSpy:

The important thing to take away from this is not “Will Wright is making a cool game,” but the way that he is making the game. He’s sidestepped the whole idea of massive teams of content creators in favor of a system of building games based on player-content and emergence.

You can read Spore as simulated Evolution, a creepy gaming take on Intelligent Design, or The Sims with tentatcles, claws and death rays. But whatever, it looks gorgeous, and the attention to the minutae of creature and object design sets a new high for God-games (as they’re known). We’ll have to wait til it hits the streets to see what effect this take on Creation has on our next generation of real-world creators.