NINTENDO POWER: AN EXAMINATION OF CONSUMER PURCHASING BEHAVIOR AND VIDEO GAMES

Abstract

This study examined the Nintendo brand of video games from a retail perspective by analyzing the purchasing behavior and perceptions of the people who purchase and play them. Concepts such as nostalgia, value and loyalty were defined based on secondary consumer research, and an online survey questionnaire was developed to measure these concepts within a gaming context. The research question was “Do consumers continue to buy older Nintendo games that have now been rereleased in some form because they are driven by nostalgia, which evokes fond memories of value they perceived in the past, in order to experience that same value they felt in those memories by purchasing the games again?” According to the survey results, consumers do repurchase Nintendo games, and they do perceive a degree of both nostalgia and value. However, the results do not suggest that nostalgia is strongly connected to the repurchasing behavior. The type of value perceived by most consumers of Nintendo games is believed to be hedonic value, although there are many other factors to be considered such as specific characteristics about the games, the people whom these consumers play the games with and the intellectual properties that these games are based on. Although it is not believed that consumers are loyal to the Nintendo brand, they continue to repeatedly purchase newly released games to this day for a variety of reasons.