Sony and Microsoft fail to understand our market, says Nintendo

Sony's Sixaxis controller and Viva Piñata for Xbox 360 are both failed attempts to capture the traditional Nintendo customer, according to NoA boss George Harrison.

He believes that the two rival companies lack the "DNA" to understand a market that wants more from a gaming experience than just the next version of Halo or Grand Theft Auto.

"So far they haven't spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we're having some success, they probably will," commented Harrison to Wired.

"We can already see some of the things they've tried. For last year's E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Piñata as their killer app for the Pokemon set. And neither of those worked really well.

"Part of this is, I think it's not in their DNA. They're really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have," said the senior vice president of marketing and communications.

With the sales of Wii and DS hardware crushing the competition in the US, Harrison is confident that Nintendo could take up to as much as 50 per cent of the market for this latest 'next-gen' cycle.

"We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45 per cent of the hardware that's being sold. But on the other hand, we could get over 50 per cent. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do," he stated.

"If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience," he said.