Reggie talks more about Wii U sales, third-parties, won’t just refresh and start over
Interviews continue to pour out of E3, with the latest one coming from Kotaku. The publication spoke with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime about Wii U sales, third-parties, and Nintendo’s commitment to the console.
Check out Reggie’s comments below and Kotaku’s full piece here.
Stephen Totilo, Kotaku: [Regarding the] Wii U, I saw a lot of titles announced for it. Coming into the show—and you’ve seen this as well—a lot of people would say, ‘Why is Nintendo still even backing the Wii U? It is not doing well enough. It is not a Wii-level phenomenon.’ Some consider it a failure.
Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America: Oh, by the way, there’s been only one platform that has been anything close to the Wii level of long-term success. [laughs] Just look at home consoles. There aren’t many home consoles that do north of 100 million units.
Totilo: Right. But you guys don’t have much third-party support right now.
Fils-Aime: Right now being the operative word.
Totilo: You had more before. You had Yves Guillemot saying to Brian Crecente—who I believe is a reputable reporter—that they’re actually holding back finished software until you guys can build the installed basis. And, in general, the attention is on very big sales figures for the Xbox One and the PS4. And so I don’t know what Nintendo would do about that… and I had a hard time imagining that Nintendo would just bail out on the console, and instead what I saw [at this E3] was more commitment to it at least through 2015. How do you see the Wii U’s position right now? It has struggled, I think you wouldn’t deny that, but how do you see it?
Fils-Aime: I wouldn’t use that word.
Totilo: What word would you use?
Fils-Aime: Look, we’ve been very clear that the number of games that we’ve launched essentially July through the end of last year, a number of those games we had hoped they would be launch window games, everything from Pikmin to Wii Party U, we wanted all of that content to launch much sooner.
Our belief is that software is what drives hardware and if that would have come earlier we might be having a different conversation. But the fact is we are where we are.
The last numbers we announced at the end of March is that the Wii U had sold north of six million units on a worldwide basis. Our goal is to provide compelling content to drive that installed base. Because we know only with a large and vibrant installed base will third part really jump in with the range of their content.
Totilo: The company has lost money lately, which is unusual in its long history, and if you look at 3DS it started sluggishly, there was a dramatic price cut and that helped turn that business around. If someone comes to you and says, ‘Reggie, just refresh, just start over, do a new console, do-over,’ You say?
Fils-Aime: I say, ‘No.’ And the reason I say that is because we believe the Wii U has a very long life ahead of it. It’s got great content coming that will help define the platform. For us, we think the 3DS is a very illustrative example. It wasn’t just the price cut. It was having great content that started with Kart 7 and 3D Land and then progressed and created a larger and larger footprint.
We just launched Tomodachi Life. The Tomodachi Life numbers were significantly stronger than we had forecasted and planned. That’s because it’s a vibrant platform. That’s exactly what we need to do with the Wii U, and we do believe that content like Splatoon, content like Hyrule Warriors, content like Mario Kart 8 that we just launched, content like Smash Bros. for Wii U, that is what is going to drive the installed base.
Totilo: I don’t know if it’s going to drive the installed base, but Captain Toad [for Wii U] is my kind of game.
Fils-Aime: Captain Toad is a phenomenal game. A game I fought for to make sure we included it in this year’s E3 is Yoshi’s Wooly World. I saw that when I went to Japan earlier in the year. It’s a fantastic game. And what’s interesting is that for many more advanced gamers are going to say ‘-pbbbbt-, I don’t want to play that.’ But it’s amazingly deep. There’s a lot to that game that we haven’t even shown yet. For me that’s one of my personal favorites.
