Nintendo Case Study

Nintendo had pertained to other industries before it rose in popularity within the video game market. The company became very familiar with business tactics as well as marketing long before it entered the gaming industry as it was founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in Japan. Their products varied, beginning with producing Japanese playing cards to branching off into the toy market, establishing the company’s future direction. By 1981, Nintendo began to test the waters by releasing their first coin-operated arcade machine game, Donkey Kong, which had proved to become extremely popular. (https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Corporate/Nintendo-History/Nintendo-History-625945.html)

Nintendo’s release of arcade machines became their first

Sega had stemmed as far back as 1940 when it was referred to as Standard Games producing coin operated games in Hawaii and slot machines for military bases. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sega-Corporation). By 1952, the company moved to Japan and became known as Service Games. However, it had dramatically shifted once more, merging with an arcade importing business, Rosen Enterprises to become what is known as Sega today. Their first products as the new company would consist of arcade machines from the 60s up until the late 80s. Before Sega produced their own console, they had created software for other platforms including the Atari 2600 in the 70s often being perceived to be their test in the waters before becoming dedicated to compete. Even though most of their titles were ports of their arcade games, it had indicated a strong interest and discovery that they were able to become an independent establishment producing software rather than importing. By 1983, the games have become flooded on shelves and led to oversaturation, meaning only a fraction of the games released would succeed while the rest failed. As a result, the gaming industry crashed in 1983 and several companies, including Sega, lost over a hundred million dollars in revenue. The company was in a position where it needed to take a new

From that point forward Sega had discovered that their marketing and advertisements were crucial to their product’s overall sales performance in the market which led to their revised approach to expose their consoles and appeal to the consumer aggressively through social and cultural structures as well as releasing their consoles internationally. By 1989, Sega released their next console referred to as the Mega Drive in Japan and Sega Genesis in North America as a start of a new era for the company’s approach in attempt to compete with Nintendo’s second generation console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) released in 1991. Consoles are released by what are known by generations, allowing the console manufacturer to improve on the constantly evolving hardware to avoid fading into obscurity.

The launch of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis caused intense marketing to the extent in which the second console generation was declared as the “Console War”among the gaming community. Both companies consisted of marketing aggressively on television, magazines, and campaigns along with their competing hardware and software lineup throughout the 80s and 90s making it difficult to conclude