The Butterfly Effect: A World Without Nintendo

There has been a lot of discussion about Nintendo‘s next console launch, whether or not it will be successful, and what will happen if it’s not. This discussion is obviously brought about by the fact that their last console, the Wii U, was a tragic failure, and certainly affected Nintendo’s standing in the worldwide gaming market. This easily leads into imagining what that market would look like, should they just fold and resign from making consoles altogether.

The Console Wars: A Brief History of the Video Game Industry

Peter Moore recently spoke about the benefits of competition between console developers. Around the same time, Shigeru Miyamoto said he felt Nintendo is a “genre of its own“, probably referring to not only the lighthearted spirit of a great majority of Nintendo games but also the Japanese giant’s deviation from the general market of video games. While both are correct in their respective statements, there is much more to pay attention to than just whether there is competition or not – history has taught us that much. While gaming technology progresses on a well-meditated track, there is a lot that could go wrong for any single one of the big developers, and it takes a lot of business savvy as well as a predictable market situation to keep things on that track. To get a better view of how balanced things actually are at the moment, let’s take a look back a few decades.