Oh don’t you mind me. I’m just sitting here with my coffee checking out the gaming news and thinking “My God, Nintendo. You just owned everyone’s ass”.
Yesterday Nintendo were dead.
You remember, right? You remember how every single gamer in the entire world said, “Nintendo just won’t be able to compete with Sony and Microsoft”.
You made a fair point.
Honestly.
Little Nintendo facing off against multi-billion dollar Sony and Microsoft? That’s like David versus Golliath without a slingshot.
And when the Wii U failed to mount an offense against the PS4 and Xbox One (well… the PS4 mostly, because the Xbox One… let’s not go there, it puts a bitter taste in my mouth). You thought Nintendo were dead.
And then, as though they suddenly hulked-up, Nintendo turned their entire PR game around in the space of two days.
Yeah. Two days. Forty Eight hours. For some that’s two days of work. For me it’s about two chapters on my new novel. For Nintendo, that’s forty Eight little hours in which they took the entire world by the balls, sent that bitch to Suplex City, and laid the smacketh down on the entire gaming industry.
Nintendo’s master plan began a couple of days ago when Miitomo hit number one on the Japanese app store
You remember two days ago? I was working on Youtube videos. You were maybe playing The Division. Nintendo? Oh, Nintendo were celebrating. Because that was the day Nintendo immediately jumped to the top of the Japanese app store with Miitomo, their free social networking app. Now you might be thinking “But it’s free. How much money have they really made off of it?”
But here’s the deal. By releasing a free product Nintendo made the app extremely accessible, made the market come to them, and made app lovers fall head over heels in love with them. With this one single app, Nintendo have ingratiated themselves with the app market.
You want to know the result?
It’s great news for Nintendo fans, because Nintendo’s stock price has jumped so high it looks like Mario jumping on a trampoline. It’s through the roof. According to Bloomberg, “shares jumped 8.2 percent to close at 16,515 yen in Tokyo on Tuesday”.
Bet you wish you’d invested in Nintendo stock now… I wish I had. Sigh.
Hang on, just having some coffee here…
Right. That was stage one of Nintendo’s plan.
Stage two. This whole “We’re stopping production of Wii U. No we’re not” thing.
Genius.
Actually, this might have been a total accident. Either way it has seriously worked in Nintendo’s favor.
It started yesterday when Japanese game website Nikkei announced that Nintendo would be stopping production of the Wii U.
Immediately Nintendo fans panicked. They couldn’t lose their beloved Nintendo. Because we all love Nintendo. And as soon as we heard the “we’re stopping Wii U production” news, we panicked and thought “Oh no, is Nintendo in trouble, we cannot lose them!”
The mere threat of losing Nintendo made us all fall in love with them again, the same kinda way that any time there’s trouble in your relationship you suddenly realize how much that other person means to you.
So with this one news announcement we all suddenly felt so much more love for Nintendo.
And then today Nintendo said “Yeah. That’s not happening.”
The result? You will see increased Wii U sales over the next month.
What Nintendo did here is the oldest move in the book. You want people to value something, tell them there’s a limited supply. All those limited-time offers, limited-edition everything… the only reason for that is to make people believe something is more valuable than it is.
The possible loss of the Wii U made it seem that much more valuable.
Be honest with yourself. When you heard the news that the Wii U would be coming to an end, you said “I need to get one now before it’s too late!”
Nintendo. They just owned your ass.
Two days of N-tanglement, N-chantment, and N-sanity, and Nintendo is at the top of the news, with stock investors buying Nintendo stocks all over the place, with the Wii U looking more valuable than ever, with Nintendo back on top.
Now that is how you make it work.
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