Try talking the walk

If you compare unit sales of the Nintendo Wii, the dinky, low-tech games console with the cute hi-tech motion-sensing remotes, to those of the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft XBox 360, or the older PlayStation 2, you find some interesting trends.

For most of the last year, PS3 and XBox were level-pegging, which must be a considerable embarrassment for Microsoft, whose devices sell at retail for about half (depending on the model) the price of the flashy Sony unit. The older but cheaper PS2 is, not surprisingly, in decline, and the biggest growth story comes from the Nintendo Wii. It is distributed locally by the Core Group, the same bunch that secured the lucrative Apple agency in South Africa.

In lifetime sales, a similar picture emerges: the XBox, in two years since its local launch, managed 72 000 units, the PS3 racked up 45 500 in 18 months, and the Wii clocked in at 58 000 in just one year since its own launch. Draw those lines on a graph, and you'll notice Nintendo's line is much steeper than the other two.

The reason for all this? According to RJ van Spaandonk, the flamboyant face of Core's marketing team, the Wii does not compete with the PS3 or the Xbox. It addresses a different market, consisting of different people, who play different games, for different reasons.

So why, I beg of you, subject the media to half an hour of statistical analysis showing how well it competes with the heavyweights?

"Because analysts compare us to Sony and Microsoft," is RJ's response. This may be true, but shouldn't you be ignoring analysts if they get it so wrong? It's not like Mr Van Spaandonk, who gets away with wearing both a pink shirt and a pair of braces, is one to bow to convention. He jokes about the stories that Core Group executives take a helicopter to work, wondering why you'd do that if you can take a private jet. He counters accusations that the Wii is more expensive in South Africa than the Xbox (which at R3 500 at retail it is, for most models of Xbox) by explaining that unlike Microsoft, Core doesn't need to drop prices, because it is selling every unit it can lay its hands on. This argument may be unpopular, but it is valid.

The reasons Nintendo doesn't compete with Sony and Microsoft are simple. First, it tried and failed. It used to go head-to-head with Sony, back in the day, but Mario, the hero of Donkey Kong that became Nintendo's mascot character, got a sound kicking from Sonic, Sony's annoying hedgehog, which surfed the tremendous wave of the PlayStation mania of the 1990s. Nintendo almost went out of business, until it surprised everyone with the girly-white Wii.

This console didn't offer high-end graphics for life-like shoot-em-up games. Instead, it offered a clever motion-sensitive remote and guileless simplicity. Traditional gamers were horrified at the crude puppets and elementary games, but consumers lapped it up. In the States, the Wii outsells the Xbox and PS3 combined.

Van Spaandonk notes that the vast majority of households don't have a games console, and this is the market he wants. Stuff the "traditional gamer": he notes that almost half of Wii players are over 25, and almost half are female. Some of this surely reflects the changing demographics of game enthusiasts - many of whom got the bug when they were younger, and are still playing today on larger TVs - but he also points out that fully a third of Wii buyers are first-time gamers.

Not only do women dominate in online gaming, but future growth in gaming revenue is expected primarily from, you guessed it, the female market and online gaming.

Ivo Vegter, freelance journalist and columnist

He talks of a "blue ocean" strategy, of swimming well away from where the sharks (Sony and Microsoft) play. On the face of it, this sounds like a smart idea. Until you realise that you recognise those demographics. They look suspiciously like the numbers you hear about the market Nintendo really competes with.

With first-person shooters on consoles, men outnumber women by a margin of two to one. Online, however, this statistic is almost exactly reversed.

Not only do women dominate in online gaming, but future growth in gaming revenue is expected primarily from, you guessed it, the female market and online gaming. This is what the Wii is targeting. This is where Nintendo is really competing.

This is also the market about which we hear nothing from Van Spaandonk. Instead, we get lots of figures about how the Wii trounces consoles it doesn't compete with.

Perhaps it's a clever media strategy, though. Bash the stereotypical gamer, and the stereotypical gamers in the media who write about this sort of stuff will just shrug, and spite Core by ignoring the Wii. By challenging the spurious comparisons, Core turns down their volume, leaving it free to go after the growth market it really wants. The kind of market that won't complain about the lavish lifestyles of Core executives, because it will neither know nor care that the Wii costs more than some violent anti-social thing Microsoft pushes to spotty teenagers.

As a cherry on top, this media strategy also distracts attention from the real shark - online gaming - that is circling Nintendo's real market. Clever, indeed.