The Nintendo DSi has been selling in Japan for the past 5 months. During the first few days they sold literally hundreds of thousands of consoles, but sales have slowed down. The reasons for this have as much to do with the global recession as they do with the fact that sales always boom when a new console goes out and then slows down gradually as the early adopters have all already got one and sales seem to stabilise, at least until the holiday season.
One of the ways that companies insure they continue to drum up media coverage and consumer attention is to continually release the models with slight changes and modifications. One of these changes, is to offer additional colours. This is exactly what Nintendo are well known to do, and are actually doing at the moment.
When sell my nintendo DSi console first launched in Japan, there were only two colours available. These were Black and White, and both of these were matted colours (i.e. none sheen). Nintendo then announced that when the Nintendo dsi was launched in the colours on offer would be Black and a new Blue colour, and when it launched in the the colours would be the same, that is, white and black.
After a few months, Nintendo announced that they would be selling some new colours of the Nintendo DSi console. These colours are Pink, Blue and Lime Green. Now will Nintendo also start to offer these colours to the western markets, or will they offer different colours. It is strange why a company would offer different colours to different geographical areas. You would think that they would offer the same colours everywhere, see what sells in each area, and then optimise based on that.
Even before last week’s announcement from Sony (SNE), it seemed nearly certain that company’s dominance in the PlayStation 2 generation of video game consoles would give way to a much more level playing field for the PS3 generation. This time around, Sony faces much stiffer competition from both Microsoft (MSFT) and Nintendo (NTDOY).
While the Nintendo name is most closely associated with a video game platform (the NES), the company’s real focus has always been the games rather than the platform. Herein lies the true distinction between Nintendo and its two larger rivals. Nintendo seeks to make good games. Microsoft and Sony seek to control a distribution channel.