Reflection point: Assumptions and failures
When I was reading the brief for this assignment and one of the examples for business products we could use was Google Glass for some reason I immediately thought of the failed gaming system from Nintendo, Virtual Boy. In 1995 the product was estimated by Nintendo to sell 3 million hardware units in Japan by March of 1996. The total worldwide sales of the Virtual Boy was around 770,000. This was easily Nintendo’s biggest failure.
Virtual Boy failed because Nintendo didn’t do the proper user research and just used assumptions to launch this product. The first assumption was that they estimated off the brand name alone would push sales into the millions. It is actually a pretty good assumption at the time for that since mid 90s Nintendo was the top brand for the video game industry. However, they didn’t do the market research to see how the consumer would feel about this product they were going to try to sell.
The design of the product’s hardware and software was not built well. The console was on stilts and the user had to bend their neck down to look into the goggles to play the video game. Physically this was not good for the user. On top of that they used a monochrome red display for the games which was not appealing to anyone at that time. Besides all of that their biggest fail might have been the user experience. This was a time when kids were gaming with their friends because the gaming consoles allowed up to 4 players for most systems at that time. They used the assumption that the Nintendo Gameboy was popular because it was portable and users could play games anywhere. Virtual Boy teased that same theory with a bigger gaming console feel. What they got was a product that was bulky and not portable, uncomfortable to use, strained the eyes, and the social aspect was missing as it was a console that was made for one person to play.
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/virtual-boy/ This is an interesting article I suggest that looks into the architecture of this gaming console.
