Carried by the ever-popular Wii, Nintendo Corporation (still) enjoys the position of top dog in the video game console market (sorry, Denis). With more console units sold (and climbing) than its flashier counterparts, Microsoft’s XBOX 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3, Nintendo has managed to revive itself from the dark years of the late 90s and early 2000s. As reported before on the Wikinomics blog, one of the most interesting components behind the Nintendo revival story is just where they have managed to drum up their new-found success.

Shunning the highly sought after “hardcore gamer”, Nintendo’s marketing genius has been in expanding the gaming world to capture the minds of millions of non-traditional gamers, which includes more women, parents and older purchasers, and even younger children than ever before – almost completely avoiding the Wizard teenage boys.

With such titles as Guitar Hero, many have become console owners ONLY to play one game. Additional titles, such as Brain Age can be seen captivating both young children and “big kids” alike (try and go a full commute on Toronto’s public transit system without seeing a suit playing with their vibrantly-coloured Nintendo DS) as Nintendo is transforming the gaming world from one of saving the princess to enriching your mind.

Now all this seems great for Nintendo, except for the paradox that is their game sales record. Despite industry leading sales in the console market, Nintendo’s performance in the games department is much less impressive, with Wii owners buying fully one less game per year than their PS3 and XBOX counterparts (Wii at 3.7 games/per year vs. PS3 at 4.6 and XBOX at 4.7).

The Wii’s overwhelming success has managed to uncover a new breed of gamer, but in this case, the new gamer is much more content with fewer games, and to the dismay of the gaming sales team they are often quite content with just the game that comes bundled with their console, Wii Sports (and sometimes the creatively bundled Wii Play, which most only purchase for the additional Wii remote that is included with the game).

This flies in the face of traditional video game economics where consoles are sold en masse as loss leaders to encourage game spending. As pointed out by some critics, the cause for such poor game sales performance is that non-traditional gamers have yet to be effectively targeted with non-traditional gaming marketing strategies, such as radio and newspaper promotion. (While it is not as likely that mom and dad are watching Saturday morning cartoons, you can bet they are reading the Saturday morning paper)

Thank goodness for gamers like Señor Williamson who will be in line overnight to get his copy of MarioKart 2 and fitness gurus like Hagai Fleiman who are counting down the moments to sweatin’ to the oldies with the imminent release of Wii Fitness or else our Nintendo friends could be heading for trouble.

But alas, with all this education and fitness coming from our gaming systems, who is saving poor Princess Peach?