Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Nintendo is looking a Wii bit sharp

Opening up the Wii to outside, independent developers is a brilliant move by Nintendo as they’re clearly differentiating themselves from Sony and Microsoft. As our culture moves towards user generated content (see YouTube), it only makes sense that some users will likely create highly popular games as well with small capital requirements. Games do not have to be developed on the scale of Halo – look at Tetris or … GNU Chess … err, maybe not. Anyway, I love the move by Nintendo and I suspect it will only be a matter of time (and lost market share) before Sony or Microsoft follow suit. I suspect Sony would be the one to gain the most from doing something similar, but seeing what they’ve done to limit the impact of Linux/PS3 (see video drivers), it’s clear they’re intent on controlling the gaming content and don’t want end user competition. A poor move if you ask me; this is how market leaders fall.