Week 2 EOC: Boston Consulting Group - Video Games

In the video game world, you have your heavy hitters which are the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and mobile gaming. The two most dominating systems of the video game market. Then you have your handhelds and other home consoles via the PS Vita, Nintendo DS and Nintendo's Wii which usually don't do well in the market. The star of the video gaming world I would say is mobile gaming on iPhones and Android powered devices. No matter where you go, you see people on their phones, playing some game that is very fun and addictive, just a time filler. "According to Mobile Gaming 2012, the latest report from leading market research company, The NPD Group, among all app gamers, 59 percent of total game play is done on a mobile device."(https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/industry-expertise/video-games/). Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have been battling it out in the past couple years in terms of sales. This has always been a huge rivalry in the video game market. These two systems are cash cows especially the Xbox 360 due to the Red Ring of Death ultimately making consumers purchase multiple systems if they did not fix them. Just recently Sony released a smaller version of the PS3 in Europe which has boosted company sales by a huge amount.  "According the MCV, Sony saw a 138% increase in PlayStation 3 sales with the release of its smaller, lighter game console in the United Kingdom. What’s more, MCV says that the 500GB model also accounted for 37% of all PlayStation 3 sales last week, which is particularly impressive since the slimmer model was only released this past Friday."(http://bgr.com/2012/10/02/new-playstation-3-sales-sony-sees-138-percent-increase/) Handheld consoles are easily getting erased from the video game market. With the uprise in mobile gaming, you see fewer and fewer handheld systems in public. Nintendo who has been a huge factor in the video game world is rapidly falling behind. The Wii started out strong, outselling the Xbox 360 and the PS3 when they were first released, but the consumers did not grab on for a long ride. "Nintendo decided that they couldn’t win the hardcore gamers away from Sony and Microsoft, and instead went in a different direction, targeting the extremely large pool of non-gamers, instead of creating a new, powerful console with great online play and a traditional controller." (http://www.nintendojo.com/features/editorials/early-abandonment-how-wii-failed-hardcore-gamers).