Iwata: Wii Music hasn’t reached full potential, Nintendo didn’t fail with the game
“I agree that Wii Music, as of now, has not achieved its true potential. On the other hand, I feel that “Wii Music” is a software that elicits largely two extremely different reaction from consumers. There are people who highly appreciate it and those who do not appreciate it at all. Usually for other software, if there is a fair amount of people who evaluate the software positively, the appreciation level of that software becomes slightly skewed toward a positive note, but on the other hand, if a number of people evaluate it poorly, the overall reaction to the software is bad. For “Wii Music,” the impression seems to completely depend on each individual player. It is unfortunate that “Wii Music” was not immediately appealing enough to some consumers, but it simply might have not been the right game for them.” – Satoru Iwata
“Currently, I think that the appeal of “Wii Music” has not yet been fully conveyed and accepted by those who could be interested. We do not like to think that we failed with Wii Music nor that we should abandon sales support. If we had approached “Brain Training” with that mentality, the software would have not achieved the current sales situation. The first week unit sales of the original “Brain Training” in Japan was just around 45,000. We should not have the attitude that a game does not have sales potential because the first week or first month sales were small.” – Satoru Iwata
Nintendo hasn’t exactly failed with Wii Music, but I don’t think the game has performed as well as the company may have initially hoped. Compared to Wii Sports and Wii Fit, Wii Music just doesn’t seem to be garnering as great a response from the public and critics.
