Crafting a Deployment Strategy
1. What factors do you think enabled Sega to break Nintendo’s near monopoly of the U.S. video game console market in the late 1980s?
2. Why did Nintendo choose not to make its early video game consoles backward compatible? What were the advantages and disadvantages of this
strategy?
3. What strengths and weaknesses did Sony have when it entered the video
game market in 1995? What strengths and weaknesses did Microsoft have
when it entered the video game market in 2001?
4. In what ways did Nintendo’s Wii break with the norms of competition in the video game industry? How defensible was its position?
5. Comparing the deployment strategies used by the firms in each of the
generations, can you identify any timing, licensing, pricing, marketing, or
distribution strategies that appear to have influenced firms’ success and failure in the video game industry?
