Breeding Copycats
Posted by Dustin Britt on September 17, 2010
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Consider Red Bull
Red Bull introduces a bold new concept to market – a small can + funny tasting energy drink. Huge success. Monster jumps in next with their version of the energy drink, only in a giant can. Then 5 Hour Energy enters the market with the tiny shot. And how does the originator of the category, Red Bull, respond? They introduce a tiny can too. Not so brave.
Now the motion gaming copycats begin
While Xbox & Playstation were duking out the heavy graphics war, Nintendo was working on a Manhattan project of their own – a bomb Sony & Microsoft weren't expecting. Wii came to market and changed the way people think about video gaming. Now even grandma is a gamer. And with that enormous success, here come the copycats to take a slice of Nintendo's pie. Enter Playstation Move (coming to a store near you this month) as well as Microsoft's Kinect (releasing this November just in time for Christmas). Both seemingly jumping on the Wii's game-changing success. I wonder who will be brave enough to take the next move of innovation and differentiate, with motion gaming no longer a true distinctive? Someone will. Hats off to the one who's brave enough to take it there.
Alana Dy
Alvin Diec
Becky O'Mara
Blake Howard
Craig Johnson
Jason Orme
John Bowles
Staci Janik
4 Comments
"I can't believe they are chasing Nintendo's coat tails. Nintendo's already had three years to work on the new innovation for family friendly gaming. Sad to see reactionary (crap, they did it so we need to do it) product development."
- Blake Howard
"I wonder if they're strategy is not to try and directly attack Ninendo, but just leverage a new category of gaming by extending their existing customers over to this new way of gaming and capturing a little more of their current customer's wallet."
- Craig Johnson
"It will be interesting to see how well Sony and Microsoft do in this arena. Microsoft has apparently changed things up a bit in that you don't actually hold any controller when you make your motions, and Sony's system sounds like it is supposed to be extremely lifelike in how it interprets your motions. Neither of these systems typically create family friendly games that would lend themselves well to the motion gaming world, and I feel like having two different types of games (traditional and motion sensing games) could lead to confusion and failure.
However, this whole argument of copycats makes me thing of the phone world. Apple invents a touchscreen phone and the multitouch concept. Now almost every phone has a touch screen and many laptops are copying the mutitouch trackpad design."
- Jason Smith
"Perhaps the bold brave next move will have something to do with going outside and getting away from the television. Spoken like a dad with two young boy, eh?"
- Rick Fossum