Comment: DS Lite will widen Nintendo's demographic even further
They've sold well over 13 million of them - and now they'd like you all to buy another one.
Looked at from one point of view that's certainly how you could categorise Nintendo's decision to launch a new version of the Nintendo DS handheld in Japan less than a year after the first iteration arrived in Europe. Look through any internet forum and you'll doubtless find plenty of criticism of the firm's decision to redesign the handheld so early in its life.
This will be water off a duck's back to the company's executives, of course. They've been here before - with the GBA SP, most notably, which fixed glaring flaws with the original GBA that many users felt should have been picked up before the first piece of hardware ever hit the market. Nonetheless, it sold like hot cakes right from its launch through to the present day, when even the arrival of the DS on the market has not extinguished the success of its predecessor.
As long as these products continue to be commercially successful, Nintendo feels no need to answer its critics - and quite rightly so. In recent years, the firm has developed a knack for creating hardware that consumers want despite already owning a system that plays the same games - one has to wonder if the hardware team in Kyoto has been taking their lessons from the creators of the iPod in Cupertino. They've got a long way to go in design terms, as the perfectly functional but clunky original DS proved, but their concepts are sound.
After all, Nintendo is in business to make money, and despite their projection of an image as a company that loves innovation and often panders to the child-like sense of fun in all of us, the firm knows how to be hard-nosed and unapologetic when it comes to the bottom line. They're good at it, too; this year they'll rake in over half a billion Euro in net profits, which tends to suggest that their business model isn't exactly unsuccessful.
Making products that consumers want is good business, even if it annoys those consumers who already bought an iteration of that product. It's important to remember that Nintendo isn't doing anything underhanded - like somehow disabling existing DS consoles to force users to upgrade, which is the highly questionable practice being used by certain videogames companies who wish to turn off the online support for their old games to make people buy new ones.
More importantly from a publisher point of view, launching the DS Lite will expand the demographic reach of the console even further than its already impressive base - partially because the more attractive model will appeal to customers who found the original ugly, but mostly because of what will happen to the millions of existing DS consoles that will be replaced. Still perfectly functional, they won't disappear from the market - they'll be passed on to younger siblings, or perhaps to parents enthralled by Brain Training or Nintendogs, or to casual gamers who can't justify the purchase of a new console to themselves.
We'd already confidently predicted that 2006 would be a great year for the Nintendo DS. Ignore the rumblings of discontent from the vocal minority - DS Lite, with its Revolution-esque styling and diminutive form factor, is a fat layer of tasty icing on a cake which was already looking very good indeed.