NIS America finds Wii U interesting, not planning more 3DS titles currently, finds market to be poor
Haru Akenga, President of NIS America, has provided some commentary about the Wii U and 3DS.
First, Akenga was asked about Wii U:
“That’s interesting. It’s an interesting system. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any information about Wii U until the morning of the press conference. Maybe, we’re going to think about it, moving forward. At this moment, we have no plans to develop for the platform.”
Akenga was then asked if NIS America is planning on releasing additional 3DS titles. Akenga said:
“Not right now. Do you think we should? The market is not great now.”
Well, I can’t exactly say he’s wrong about the 3DS sales situation right now. Sales of the system haven’t been up to snuff just yet and games aren’t lighting the sales charts on fire. Then again, there haven’t been a whole lot of high-quality releases for the portable. Will things change with Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (we’ve seen Japan sales, though NPD data won’t be available for a couple of weeks)? And how will third-parties fair in the future? These are just a couple of questions I personally have in mind.
id Software’s John Carmack has commented on Wii U a few times now. But perhaps the statements below are the most supportive he’s sounded thus far. Carmack even went as far as to say that “It should be a slam dunk to move over to Tech 5 games” to Wii U.
“Pretty early on we had a pretty negative experience with Nintendo back in the Super Nintendo days. They were a different company then. They were very much about tightening, controlling the sorts of things that they want to have happen on their consoles. But that’s long in the past. The issues in the current time have just been technology missteps, where we’re out of step with them; we were at a clear point where designing for the 360, PS3 and PC made lots of sense. But you couldn’t have one content development project naturally bridge the gap. If anything, I’m much more inclined to want to develop something for Nintendo now because I’ve got a 6-year-old son and we play Wii and DS games all the time. I’d be happy to do something there. It just hasn’t been the right fit for where id Software is with our projects and technologies.
It should be a slam dunk to move over to Tech 5 games on there. We haven’t had that discussion yet as a company, but it seems technically like it’s a valid target, so I’m always happy to go ahead and get a new box in and see what it takes to bring it up and see the pros and cons of the choices they made. I think they probably made a fairly intelligent decision with the Wii U.
I think there may be more good uses of that [Wii U tablet] than [there are for] the current generation with Kinect and Move… there’s clearly a subset of games for which things like that are appropriate for. We’ve been going on with how can we use those types of motion things with Rage and it’s hard to take a game that’s fundamentally designed around a controller and get value out of doing some of those other things, while adding extra touch interfaces there, that seems like something that almost every game could make some use of without it being just like, ‘Oh, we have to do something like this.’ Because if you remember, when the DS came out, there was a lot of talk about how, ‘Isn’t this going to be just a gimmick?’ But really it did turn out to be quite a good interface to build on.”
Professor Layton fans, get ready. The first movie based on the popular video game franchise is finally coming to North America. It was originally released in Japan in late 2009 and Europe last year.
Viz Media, a company that dabbles in all things Japanese-related, will be bringing the movie stateside. More details will be shared later this year.
