Free Essay: The Role of Innovation in The Context of Nintendo Switch.

Literature Review

Over the last few decades, the gaming industry has witnessed unprecedented growth, with more firms venturing into the market. Succeeding in this highly competitive environment requires game developers to offer high-quality games and their consoles in the market. Identifying critical success factors of innovation is imperative in maintaining a competitive advantage for companies in this sector. This literature review provides the researcher with an overview of the research in this field and an opportunity to identify research gaps and evaluate the usefulness of previous studies to this research.

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Game Design Document Management

The game design document (GDD) refers to the output of the pre-production stage of the game development process. The GDD is used by the game development team who develops and edits it to organize their efforts and development process. Most researchers have explored the importance of the GDD and its management in the development process. Asuncion et al. (2011) emphasized the significance of the GDD by investigating the influence of features of engineering in the development process. The study involved interviewing 27 software and hardware engineers from different game-developing companies to get an insight into their development process. Asuncion et al. (2011) concluded that the engineers used approaches that are advised by the engineering features of the final product. In research with similar objectives, Assink suggested issues rooted in the transformation of pre-production documents to the final product are the main reason why many games fail. He proposed to game development companies to use game prototyping to eliminate such problems hence better game designs. Nintendo company made effective use of GDD to better understand the game design process in the development of the Nintendo Switch. Design document also uses cognitive game development to explain the definition of gameplay. Developing good quality games requires proper management of game design documents. Hence, this study identifies GDD as one of its independent variables.

Game Asset Management

Game assets refers to anything that adds to the visual appearance of a game such as music, dialogue, sound effects, and artwork. Because of increased competition in the industry, gaming companies include hardware components as part of game assets. Much of the existing literature on game assets focuses on audio processing, animation, and content generation. Studies conducted on animation maintain that different genres of games should use different animation models. For instance, Pena (2011) investigated the better animation model for multiplayer games. The research compared two characteristics of animation models including memory load and frames per second. Their study found that bone-based or skeletal frameworks are better than keyframe models. Rieber reviewed the use of 3D accelerators common in the latest gaming consoles for graphics animation. By evaluating a variety of graphics cards available for gaming companies, the researchers revealed the benefits and limitations of application program interfaces (APIs) such as DirectX and OpenGL. Modern gaming consoles have pre-installed modules for asset management. From the two studies reviewed, this research considers game asset management to be a crucial independent variable that impacts the development process.

Quality of Game Architecture

Game architecture aims at providing support during gameplay by defining challenges through identifying constraints, exploration, and testing. In this sense, game architecture refers to the blueprint for the primary sophisticated hardware and software modules. Developers use architecture to perform trade-off analysis, delineate design, and assess system properties. While various aspects of the game architecture have been researched several times, only Pena’s (2011) study has explored the importance of game architecture in the development process. They established that software architecture is crucial in achieving modifiability and high performance. According to the researchers, the game development process uses game-specific engines and middleware. These findings are in line with Bosser’s research which identifies the features of a reliable game architecture, including reusability, modularity, tractability, and robustness. Game developers can make use of various development frameworks to define their architecture. Like Bosser (2014), Keith and Clinton (2010) focused on the development framework focusing on vital features that the proposed frameworks should have. They named three subsystems including game logic, graphic, and input processing systems. The researchers advise game developers to separate these subsystems to work independently.

Additionally, they proposed a model-view-controller pattern for game architecture. The authors created the model by dividing the application into the three components reflecting the three subsystems. Ultimately, the code connected with each subsystem’s logic will operate in the desired manner. Therefore, game developers can use the collaboration among the different components in their development process.

Innovation Assessment

The process of assessing how quickly or not people get intensively involved with innovation is crucial for technology companies because it determines whether they accept it or not. Accordingly, the most suitable tool to innovation assessment is determining the consumer perception. Innovation acceptance rises from favorable perception and is strongly determined by the formation of mental scenarios about an innovation’s impact on everyday life. Arts and colleagues (2011), maintained that habit reflects the duration of time from the first use of the product. Accordingly, the researchers developed a measurement scale of 3 known as the Performance Expectancy Scale. Scale 1 represents the lowest (The use of a Nintendo console is a habit), Scale 2 indicates addiction, and Scale 3 showing dependence on a product. Research illustrates that companies that accept and use innovation are likely to grow considerably if their use matches the preexisting consumer habits. Nintendo Switch console uses motion-sensitive remote innovation that requires people to depend on body movements that are natural to them, including rolling a bowling ball or swinging a tennis racket when playing.

Product Differentiation

Venkatesh et al. (2012) introduced an approach to assessing the impact of innovation on technology products known as Effort Expectancy Scale. This method is firmly based on the use-of-use construct. Ease-of-use refers to the degree to which the user of a particular product believes using it would be free of effort. This definition is based on the idea that effort is a limited resource that is used economically. People associate their self-efficacy beliefs and procedural knowledge on how to use a product with the perceived ease of use effectively. Nintendo Switch reflects a company’s innovation that seeks to balance the traditional console games with the new population that demands smart gaming devices. The differentiation strategy employed by the company combines tensions of play meant for the conventional Nintendo users with improved portability, reflecting the ease-of-use standards of a modern gamer. Nintendo Switch was also introduced in the market as a hybrid device that naturally challenged the use of tablets in the home or on holidays.

Summary

After reviewing the literature on technological innovation, this study identifies Game Design Document Management, Game Asset Management, and Quality of Game Architecture as the primary success factors of gaming consoles. Proper management of the GDD positively affects the overall game development process, while Game Asset Management enhances the process. The quality of game architecture has a positive impact on the enhanced process. Innovation also impacts customer perception of a product, thereby effectively influencing the customer’s behavior.

Bibliography

Aleem, Saiqa, Luiz Fernando Capretz, and Faheem Ahmed. "Critical success factors to improve the game development process from a developer’s perspective." Journal of Computer Science and Technology 31, no. 5 (2016): 925-950. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04293

Arts, Joep WC, Ruud T. Frambach, and Tammo HA Bijmolt. "Generalizations on consumer innovation adoption: A meta-analysis on drivers of intention and behavior." International Journal of Research in Marketing 28, no. 2 (2011): 134-144.

Asuncion, Hazeline, David Socha, Kelvin Sung, Scott Berfield, and Wanda Gregory. "Serious game development as an iterative user-centered agile software project." In Proceedings of the 1st International workshop on games and software engineering, pp. 44-47. 2011. https://gpreview.kingborn.net/342000/948ba906a3694f559815d2a03a74db71.pdf

Bosser, Anne-Gwenn. "Massively multiplayer games: Matching game design with technical design." In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, pp. 263-268. 2014. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1067343.1067378

Keith, Clinton. Agile game development with Scrum. Pearson Education, 2010. https://gpreview.kingborn.net/342000/948ba906a3694f559815d2a03a74db71.pdf

Pena, Jorge. "Collaborative framework for browser games development." In Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Open Source and Design of Communication, pp. 65-72. 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2016716.2016734

Rubera, Gaia, Andrea Ordanini, and David A. Griffith. "Incorporating cultural values for understanding the influence of perceived product creativity on the intention to buy: An examination in Italy and the US." Journal of International Business Studies 42, no. 4 (2011): 459-476. http://www.academia.edu/download/42058050/Rubera__Ordanini_and_Griffith_2011_JIBS.pdf

Venkatesh, Viswanath, James YL Thong, and Xin Xu. "Consumer acceptance and use of information technology: extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology." MIS Quarterly (2012): 157-178. http://www.academia.edu/download/36422124/Venkatesh_utaut2.pdf

Vogt, Dennis. "Innovation Perception from a Customer Perspective." Ph.D. diss., University of St. Gallen, 2013. http://verdi.unisg.ch/www/edis.nsf/SysLkpByIdentifier/4189/$FILE/dis4189.pdf