EOC Week 2: Boston Consulting Group - Video Games

According to the Boston Consulting Group items can be analyzed both by market growth rate and relative market share, which are defined by the following four categories: Star, Question Mark, Cash Cow, and Dog. The Star has a high market growth and a high market share. Essentially you'd want a Star for an item to be completely successful. An example of a Star item would be Apps for the iPhone. "There are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple's iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year" (Om Malik). It's completely successful, convenient and it works. An example of a Question Mark would be Nintendo's Wii; it has a high growth rate, but a low market share. "Worldwide sales of the [Wii] have nearly reach 30 million - not that much less than Xbox 360 and PS3 sales combined" (Tom Bramwell). Lots of households have a Wii but is it really making money?? No, we're waiting on the next big thing that we can do with it. Xbox would fall under the Cash Cow because it has a high market share but low growth rate. An Xbox forum online stated that "Xbox's market share has jumped 4% in the Japanese Market." Not many people own Xbox's, therefore there is no growth but because of their popular games Call of Duty series, their market share is high. Lastly, a console that would be considered a Dog is the Nintendo DS. It has a low market growth rate and a low market share. Not many people own DS's because there really isn't anything that exciting that make people want to pick it up and play with it. Therefore concluding that there's no growth leading to a low market share. Video games are not that popular anymore because phone applications are what's making money and growing day by day.