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. ...