Nintendo's Success in Handheld Gaming and Struggles in Home Consoles

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This chapter explores how Nintendo dominated the handheld gaming market while facing challenges in the home console market, focusing on their creation of mobile free-to-play casual games, targeting the casual and kid segments, and benefiting from Atari and Sega's decline.

In the 1980’s Nintendo was on top of the world, with the NES achieving over 90% market share of home video games globally. So how did they fall ALL the way down to ~10% in just a few short console generations? And how did they then build themselves back up (and down and up again) to the top of the world again? Spoiler: it all hinged on one very small, yet very large and durable platform… the Game Boy. Fire up your favorite portable entertainment device and tune in for the epic story of Nintendo’s fall from grace and journey back to the top — capped off by our robust discussion of where they go from here, and whether this 130+ year old company may still (!) be misunderstood and mis-valued.

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Carve Outs:

Kara Swisher in Vanity Fair (and our old episode with her!)
Hardcore History (finally!)
The Tetris movie
Daryl Morey on Invest Like the Best

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