Iwata: Kinect not “seriously” impacting Wii sales
Microsoft’s Kinect add-on will always be compared to the Wii Remote because they both offer motion-controlled gaming. Even so, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata believes that sales of Microsoft’s latest controller are not greatly impacting the Wii. Iwata told investors at a financial results briefing last week:
“I think the image of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is largely different between Japanese citizens and U.S. citizens. I think I can say that the Xbox 360 business has been in a good condition since last summer. On the other hand, when we talk about whether Kinect contributed to significantly expanding the number of Xbox users, as I have previously shown you the data on the graph, the number of Wii users has grown to about 10 million, but the growth in the number of Microsoft users is much smaller. Therefore, we feel that it would be rather unusual if Nintendo’s Wii market was taken over by the launch of Kinect, or if the users who were playing with Wii quit playing with it and started to play with other consoles. Of course, many users in the U.S. have multiple consoles at their homes. Many Wii users also have Xbox 360 and vice versa, so I am not saying that there is completely no effect in terms of use rate. However, hit titles are not being released continually every month for Kinect software, so we don’t believe Wii sales are being seriously affected.”
