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SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER | TESTS | CONSOLE GAMES
You got
game!
Store, or platforms like Steam, a games portal with
over a 100 million active users. This has been
the route for many of the biggest success
stories of the past few years, most notably
Sweden’s Minecraft.
While Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo
have traditionally been good at delivering
blockbuster games from the big game studios,
today it’s not enough; they need to be able to
deal with small, creative studios to make sure their
consoles have a full portfolio of games for fastidious
gaming consumers.
Sony seems to have taken this to heart more than
Microsoft and has a multitude of indie titles at its
online store. It has also been able to make deals
with several of the best-known indie games and indie
game producers. However, Microsoft took a major
step in that direction when it recently acquired
Mojang, the company behind Minecraft. Developed
by Markus “Notch” Persson, Minecraft has sales of
60 million and over 100 million players.
Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for Mojang, which is
a lot, but several experts say the price could have
been higher if Mojang and Notch had pushed for it.
Since Minecraft is now Microsoft property, its future
on the PS4 is uncertain.
NINTENDO,
WHAT ARE U
When Nintendo was about to announce
its successor to the Wii expectations were
high. Since its release in 2006, the Wii had
revolutionized how we play games through
motion-sensitive technology. With over 100
million units sold, the Wii has brought a whole
new audience to gaming.
But in June 2011, with the release of the Wii
U at the E3 video-game conference in Los Angeles,
things went sideways. After the press
conference a confused crowd of journalists
and bloggers tried to figure out what they
just had heard and seen. Was the Wii U
merely a new hand control that looked like
a tablet connected to a Wii Or was it a
new game console
And why, in that case, had Nintendo used
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to render the gameplay
films
Japanese investors weren’t just confused,
they were alarmed, and Nintendo’s shares
nosedived for the first time in years. To this
day, Nintendo hasn’t been able to communicate
to consumers that the Wii and the Wii U
are two totally separate things.
Sales of the Wii U are so poor that it’s estimated
to sell only a tenth of the 100 million
the original Wii managed.
SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER | DECEMBER 2014
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