Iwata on lack of recent Wii games, Wii U stacking up to PS3/360 successors
For the past couple of years, Wii releases have been very low. Third-parties have, for the most part, ended its efforts to bring core experiences to the console and Nintendo has only developed a handful of titles.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata acknowledged the situation in a Q&A session with investors last week. He said that a lack of third-party titles and the company’s own initiatives with the 3DS and Wii U caused the Wii to suffer from a drop in momentum.
In the same response, Iwata replied to a question regarding a concern that the Wii U will miss out on future games if it is unable to compete with the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 successors due to a lack of power. While he can’t “promise that the Wii U will never be excluded from multiplatform software for eternity”, Iwata believes that it “will not have such a big difference as the Wii had in comparison to how, on other platforms, developers could expect very different graphic capabilities of generating HD-applicable high-resolution graphics. He later discussed the benefits that the Wii U and GameTablet bring to the industry.
We’ve posted Iwata’s full response below.
We have not successfully kept the momentum of the Wii for about the last two years because third-party publishers have released a smaller number of game titles and Nintendo has also decreased new games for the platform in preparation for the launch of the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U. As the Wii has no such system as the “Miiverse” in the Nintendo Network mentioned earlier today, in which consumers have a chance to encounter new games in communication with others, the momentum temporarily provoked by a new game has easily been diminished.
We cannot promise that the Wii U will never be excluded from multiplatform software for eternity, but we can at least assure you that the Wii U will not have such a big difference as the Wii had in comparison to how, on other platforms, developers could expect very different graphic capabilities of generating HD-applicable high-resolution graphics. Other companies might launch a next-generation console with more power, but we don’t necessarily think that the difference between the Wii U and such console will be as drastic as what you felt it was between the Wii and the other consoles because there will be fewer and fewer differentiators in graphics. Naturally some consumers are very sensitive about such a small difference in graphics so that we will make efforts to make the most of the performance of the Wii U to keep up with technological innovations and not to make the system out-of-date soon. However, as the structure of the product called the Wii U is as if we are including both a video game console and a handheld device, if we were not careful about how luxurious both of them were, we could end up having to offer the price of the two hardware systems combined, which would not be an acceptable price for the consumers. We had to design it by balancing the performance and the costs.
I am not sure this is an appropriate expression, but video game consoles have long been “parasites” of TV sets at home. In other words, game consoles have used TV sets in a family instead of being equipped with their own screen. However, the Wii U will be the first console free from TV sets, in which you can play the Wii U while someone else is watching TV or you yourself can watch TV while using the Wii U. As you can experience deeper entertainment with both the Wii U GamePad and the TV screen, we would like to enrich it but, at the same time, we hope to furnish it with games you can enjoy only with the Wii U GamePad. In addition, games on two screens are not just the same with what we did for the Nintendo DS. As the TV screen can be distant from the Wii U GamePad, not like the Nintendo 3DS, we can offer different options for use. Also, in multiplayer games, a player with the Wii U GamePad will play a different role from those with Wii Remote controllers. We are thinking of what we call “asymmetric game play,” in which players have different roles in one game, like in Tag. The player with the Wii U GamePad will be able to know what other players are doing when they are playing on the TV screen. The Wii U GamePad will work as a window where you can communicate with other players in their living rooms. We say that the Wii U GamePad could be a “Social Window,” or a window to link your living rooms to others’.
Furthermore, the Wii U can change the way you use the TV set in your living room, although the Wii U is a video game system in its nature and this is just an added component. More specifically, there are currently many videos on the Internet, many of which are very interesting and suitable for family entertainment. You have seen them by PC, smartphones or tablets, but with the Wii U you can search a good movie on the Wii U GamePad, tell everyone there to see it and easily move it to the TV screen. In this way, a video-sharing website can be a great form of entertainment. In addition, the Wii U can make it easier to use video-on-demand services, where you can enjoy films and TV programs through the Internet and which are more popular overseas than in Japan. Not only by competing with other platforms only in regard to the machines’ spec. figures but proposing various ways of using the Wii U, we would like to create a future so even family members who have never touched any video game systems will consider the Wii U something that is convenient to use so that we can maintain its competitiveness for a long time.
