Game Innovation Goes to the Nintendogs

The new Nintendogs game from Nintendo was cheap to develop, sells with a fat margin, should appeal to nongamers and is looking like a major hit.

In other words, it's the kind of product the video-game industry almost never comes up with.

Nintendogs looks risky, at least at first glance. It's made solely for Nintendo's new handheld DS system, meaning that it doesn't yet have a large base of potential users like games for the PlayStation 2 or Game Boy Advance do. Further, it's the first game under that title and it doesn't have any celebrity voices or a movie tie-in.

Moreover, it's not a traditional game in the sense that players can't really "win" it and there's not really an end to it. Instead, users play it by nurturing their dog, virtually petting, feeding and playing with it. They can teach it tricks and arrange play dates with other virtual dogs.

Silly as all that may sound, the game is already a hit. Nintendo has sold 700,000 copies in Japan since April and another 250,000 in the U.S. in just the first week after it was released. That won't rival the sales of something like Electronic Arts' (ERTS Quote) Madden NFL football title, but considering that Nintendo has sold fewer than 2 million DS players so far in the U.S., it means that more than 1 in 8 DS owners here have already bought a copy of the game.