Shiny Apples

The current market leader, Shiny Apples, is still enjoying steady sales from the buzz created by the Shiny Station, its new generation console launched 2 years ago. This console features the fastest chip in the business, which apparently cost hundreds of millions dollars to develop.  It is by far the most powerful processor in the gaming market.  Shiny Apples takes great pride in the fact that game developers prefer to develop games using their proprietary software than that of other manufacturers, not only because it is simple, but because the graphics capability is so superb, allowing the imagination of developers to reach beyond anything conceivable in the industry even half a decade before.   Their controller is uniquely sophisticated in that it has an extra button under the base – the blast/jump button.  Gamers can ram this button onto their knees or stomach (if lying down) to generate a particularly massive attack – after earning the points to do so, of course.  Shiny Apples sound engineers had worked with a specialist sound group which had just won major awards for its contribution to the latest animated Hollywood blockbuster.  They believed that the quality of sound that the console could produce was better than some top end receivers.  The console was also richly endowed with connections – the first HDMI connection in the industry, four controller slots and an option to extend controller slots further.  There were two USB 2 ports (for any MP3 players and cameras) and an Ethernet LAN port.  There was also a component and two SCART connection points as well as the 7.1 sound connection ports.  The console no longer resembled the small machines that characterized the industry 5 years before.  It was a veritable technological marvel.  It had a 60 GB hard drive for future downloading of movies off of the internet.

At a price tag of $660 a console it was rated as “well worth the buy” for the great quality gaming it offered.  Shiny Apples’ strategy was to supply the best machine – it left the development of the online community to its main developers.  The talk in the industry was that this was Shiny Apples Achilles heal – other competitors had exploited this factor to try and differentiate themselves given Shiny Apples awesome technological capabilities. It offered an acceptable level of online support to its customers.

 

Figure 6 – Sales & market shares by competitor