RSS
Kotaku
Newsweek writer N'Gai Croal presents "Fall of the Video King", a thoughtful and in-depth article about Japan's struggle to maintain a western audience for its videogames. Just kidding, the article is classic fluff: some contextless data shoehorned into a premise, and needing a proofread to boot. Though he does take a shot at Nintendo's VP of ass-kicking and name-taking, Reggie Fils-Aime, so the article isn't a total loss. The two choicest quotes and a link to the article after the jump.
Was Nintendo trying to recapture the glory days, back in 1998, when it owned a quarter of the U.S. market and sold five of the top 10 videogame-console games?Yes sir, glory is short-lived— why, last year, Nintendo only sold four of the top ten games, with Pokemon selling enough to be both #2 and #3.
Sony's PlayStation in 1995 convinced preteens that gaming was cool, and this generation is still playing into their 30s.Now, I'm not going to say that the market share and revenue figures that precede this particular sentence are wrong; the market has definitely become more competitive. But the numbers that he does put out there become more than a little suspect when he follows up by saying that kids who were 12 nine years ago are now somehow in their 30s.
Fall of the Video King [Newsweek/MSNBC]
