Nintendo Wii: the console that counted the people who did not play

The Wii went on sale in North America on 19 November 2006 at 249.99 dollars, with a motion-sensing remote and, outside Japan and South Korea, Wii Sports in the box. Two days earlier Sony had launched the PlayStation 3 at 499 and 599 dollars, a machine built around high-definition graphics and a Blu-ray drive. The Wii did not output high definition at all. Players swung the remote like a tennis racket or rolled it like a bowling ball, and people who had never held a gamepad joined in. Nintendo shipped 101.63 million Wii consoles over its life, one of the best results in the history of home consoles.

Under its president Satoru Iwata, Nintendo described the goal as gaming population expansion. From May 2005 the company ran surveys that split the public into active players, lapsed ones it called “sleeping”, and people who had never played. The Wii, like the DS handheld before it, was designed for the second and third groups.

A premise that started with the people outside

The method opens every value proposition with a premise: who the offer is for, who it is not for, and under what conditions. Most console makers wrote theirs for the active player, the person who already compared processors and frame rates. Nintendo’s surveys pointed the premise at the public that the rest of the industry treated as out of reach: parents, grandparents, lapsed players, and households where a console was something the children owned.

Choosing that recipient changed everything downstream. A remote that copies the gesture of a tennis swing needs no tutorial. A price at half the cheapest PlayStation 3 fits a family budget. A sports game included in the box gives the whole household a reason to stand up in the living room on the first evening. Each decision follows from the premise, and none of them would make sense under the old one.

Leaving the yardstick to the others

The books separate competition inside known rules, where the customer compares attributes everyone agrees on, from the space a company opens by redrawing which attributes matter. In 2006 the known rules were graphics and processing power, and Sony and Microsoft were fighting on them. The Wii lost that comparison by any measure, and it did not need to win it, because the people it was built for had never used that yardstick.

That is the advantage of moving the frame. When a rival is judged by the criteria you chose, every gain it makes on the old criteria counts for less. Sony and Microsoft both answered with motion controllers of their own a few years later, and by then the Wii had already reached tens of millions of homes.

The customers who leave first

A premise aimed at non-customers carries a particular risk. A customer who arrives for the novelty has no loyalty to the category, only to the moment. Novelty fades, and when smartphones spread they offered casual play to the same kind of audience, often for free, in a device people already carried.

Iwata said publicly in 2010 that people tire of entertainment and that Nintendo needed new ideas to keep the players the Wii and DS had attracted. The successor, the Wii U, launched in 2012 and sold 13.56 million units, the weakest result of any Nintendo home console. A large audience had been won and only partly kept. Nintendo recovered with its next console, the hybrid Switch, in 2017.

The Wii shows how much a premise can move: the same company, with weaker hardware, found tens of millions of buyers by deciding who the console was for before deciding what it could do. It also shows the work that follows, because a new public has to be given reasons to stay once the novelty is gone. If you want to choose your next audience with that second step already planned, see what we do.