Console Hardware - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 148

of the most dedicated consumers, but on concepts of the general nature of
entertainment for a video game console that could fi t in the family living
room and be accessible to everyone. For example, to avoid solutions biased
by heuristics of existing technological product attributes of game consoles,
Iwata set directions for the console to be the size of only two or three stacked
DVD cases and with limited power consumption so that the console could
be in twenty-four-hour working mode. These limitations in directions forced
the engineers to think about the project's engineering ef ort in a new way.
The managerial directions were initially met with some doubts and resis-
tance among the engineering team; it ran counter to existing engineers'
heuristics of how to pursue development as well as the expectations from
partners in the company's business network (Nintendo 2006a). Hence,
both intra-fi rm and external sources provided barriers to the discontinuous
product development.
In terms of engineering heuristics, routine practices in industry were to
use technological road maps whereby the implementation of more powerful
component could be precisely forecasted in terms of price/performance for
development according to exponential trends such as Moore's law (Mol-
lick 2006). Accordingly, engineers were used to focus their ef orts on solv-
ing problems of how to optimize established technological performance
attributes using the plan in the technological road map. Abandoning these
analytical road maps with clear end goals and instead exploring other more
open-ended performance attributes was an uncertain ef ort that took con-
siderable time for the engineering team to be comfortable with. It was an
interpretative process whereby comfort in the new directions emerged fi rst
when direct experience of how the new path would af ect the game experi-
ence reduced the uncertainty. According to Kou Shiota from Nintendo's
Integrated Research and Development Division:
There was some confl ict. To be honest, I even felt quite anxious about
it. After all, it takes a lot of courage to divert from the Roadmaps. I was
especially concerned when it was still not very clear to me what could
be done with such a machine. The hurdle of reducing power consump-
tion could be overcome. We were certain that we could achieve this
goal in the early stages of development. But the confl ict and concern
did not go away until it was clear how this would change the gaming
experience. (Nintendo 2006a)
In terms of Nintendo's business network, some of the game software
development partners requested the company to follow the existing path of
increasing processing and graphic power (Nintendo 2006a). It is likely that
several factors, such as the extensive in-house game development capac-
ity, extensive fi nancial resources and the deeply held views of the value of
surprising customers, made Nintendo more risk-prone and less exposed to
these external infl uences.