Nintendo President Satoru Iwata worked to clear up a misunderstanding in a Q&A session with investors following the company's most recent financial briefing. He says the Wii was never intended to be a casual console.
"There was a misunderstanding that Nintendo was dedicated to such games at some stage of the lifespans of the Wii and the Nintendo DS," he said. "We have made efforts to develop video games that are in tune with various consumer tastes; however, we have not been able to gain adequate consumer understanding regarding our intentions, while in the common perception there are no or few core users playing Nintendo platforms, which is not the case."
Iwata goes on to say unless the industry works to create a flow that takes gamers from beginners to advanced gamers, the player base will shrink. Is that what they're hung up on?
I'm sure that if it were up to Nintendo, they would have all the core gamer support that the PS3 and Xbox 360 does now. While Nintendo does release first-party titles that would definitely fall under the core game umbrella, it's likely the limited third-party support for the system that makes the Wii look like a mostly casual system. While many core gamers own a Wii, they're not playing any of the hot third-party franchise games on it.
Iwata on Wii Misperceptions [IGN]
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
2:30 PM on 11.01.2011 | 
At least the wii has cod tho
I have a full shelf of Wii games, and many of them are 3rd party hardcore games. They just don't happen to be ports of HD games available elsewhere. Instead, they are original and creative efforts that CAN'T be found elsewhere. Funny how no credit is given to the console for it uniqueness and content that is DOES offer, as opposed to what it lacks.
Again, most are simpletons and everything falls to the lowest common denominator, so the casual VS. Hardcore debate rages on with idiocy.
A game like Muramasa The Demon Blade, No More Heroes, Madworld, WarioLand or Little Kings Story are more powerful and interesting than most HD games that it may have " missed". So if people want to talk hardcore, THAT is hardcore. To find hidden gems and play them regardless of what console is on,
To be hardcore is to not care if your peer group says you should play Call of Duty, and instead have a great time playing some really unknown title on the Wii.
To be hardcore is to go against the grain and not care if you look like a dork. Hardcore is not military kill simulators. That is just douchey.
Casual does not automatically have to have a bad connotation. Nintendo, distilled, provides fun, easy to enter experiences like the new Kirby. That's been their mission statement pretty much since the NES.
Kirby may be easy, but I'll be damned if it isn't more fun than most 360/PS3 games released this year.
Of course, there are only 4-5 Nintendo games worth buying that's year...but that's another issue. Iwata should have said something like "casual does not mean the experience is not deep."
This is just Nintendo doing some disaster recovery, with Iwata probably fighting for his job.
And Europe.
And Australia.
Come to think of it, maybe Iwata and Reggie should have a chat.
Personally, I'm mostly a Wii gamer. Got Kirby in the mail yesterday, and imported Xenoblade 2 months ago. I still download VC and Wiiware games constantly. I can't complain.
The question is, how did they think that was going to happen? That the biggest developers were going to hold back their offerings on the other consoles so that the Wii could have the same experiences? That was never going to happen.
I would love to know what their expected outcome was. It's strange to say, but the Wii, even with its incredible financial success, might end up as an example of shortsightedness by Nintendo. There is a chance that long-term damage has been done to the brand. We'll see how the Wii U fares, and if Nintendo does win back the 'core'.
First of all, those hidden gems are nice, but I'd hardly call them "amazing." Those hidden gems usually hover around 8/10 material AT THEIR HIGHEST and you aren't missing much if you miss out on them. Meanwhile the other consoles have hidden gems ALONG with awesome 10/10 caliber material.
Also, how many of those games you listed prominently benefit from motion controls? I haven't played all of them, so I can't say so for sure, but it seems like all of the good games people list for wii, motion controls are used simply for some kind of quick time event or just to activate a function which a button could do just as well. I'm not convinced that all of those games you mentioned couldn't work fine with a normal controller on other consoles.
I agree. While I enjoy Nintendo's first party games, as stated, I usually only buy the 2-5 that release per year. Outside of that, my Wii kind of just sits there. So why did Nintendo screw up third party support?
Partially, that's because Nintendo's online infrastructure is atriciously bad; both on the Wii and 3DS. There have been numerous times where I'll casually buy something on XBLA or PSN because of how easy it is to transfer funds/buy stuff online. The Wii? They're barely even exploring those options, about 6 years after Microsoft debuted them. That's part of the reason why they're starting to fail.
Additionally, someone mentioned the lack of hardware power - combined with a lack of unified online play, I find myself getting a number of "multi-platform" releases on the 360/PS3. I say multi-platform in quotes, because the Wii version is usually either incredibly dulled down visually, or lacking in content (see COD: Black Ops, which straight cut out content on the Wii version).
If Nintendo had bothered to actually try when it came to their online component, and a few other things Sony/Microsoft had taken care of years ago, they'd be seeing that long term success. As it stands, there is no one to blame but Nintendo's antiquated business practices, and their refusal to enter the digital age.
The Wii and DS have plenty of great, niche, hardcore games (Radiant Historia, Infinite Space, etc.), but CASUAL gamers today are so busy playing the mainstream "AAA" games every fall that they miss out on these games.
In my eyes, the gamer sitting there playing Battlefield 3 is just as casual as the grandma playing Wii Fit because they are both playing games the media tells them their demographic should be playing rather than venturing outside of their comfort zones. The grandma is afraid to try a game with more than 2 buttons and the FPS zombie is afraid to try a game outside of the first person perspective.
Thing is, they say they’re trying to hook the core crowd back in but it just looks like more gimmicky stuff is in store for the Wii U, if they try to go for everything they could end up with nothing.
The 3DS is having similar issues since Nintendo pushed the 3D aspect so hard, which is a fad that a lot of people are becoming disinterested in, while having little to show in the software side of things also didn't help. Nubageddon was also a sign that the 3DS was just plain not ready to go.
Bottom line, the core audience wants the games, and they want reliable controls. Nintendo is falling into an apparent "Hey this sounds like a good idea for 5 minutes, throw it in" mode. What's sad is that there's several games (Op Rainfall) that are pretty much already finished but are being refused release in North America.
This is the broken record thing to say, but a good first step (and face-saving move for Iwata) would be to replace Reggie. The marketing department isn't the ideal place to promote from.
The PS3 and 360 do what Nintendon't
The typical gamer's problem with Reggie isn't the PR, it's how he shoehorns his own personal taste into whether a game should be localized or not. Plenty of games have already been translated into English and only need the greenlight to ship in North America, but he rejects them solely because *he* doesn't enjoy them.
Even when a movement like Rainfall gains significant support, he offers a canned answer that essentially says "I know what you want better than you do."
All software? I'd be ok with it.
it's all 3rd party support so you idiots bashing Nintendo don't even try to deny it. look what kind of games were offered by 3rd parties on Wii even multiplatform releases weren't as good as games from last gen consoles - just look at NFS games, outside of NFS Nitro they were all terrible.
people bought few early games from 3rd parties that turned out to be quick cashgrabs to fund projects for HD consoles as was stated by publishers themselves and they decided to stick with Nintendo which also hurt publishers who were putting quality products from the very beginning.
i had several friends who bought few 3rd party games, got burned by them and never picked anything outside of Nintendo again.
if 3rd parties actually supported Wii from the very beginning there wouldn't be any problem with software sales especially that Wii games didn't have to had giant budgets - most of high quality core games on the wii made profit after selling messy 100-150k. Ubisoft itself admitted that aside of Red Steel they flooded the market with "fast and dirty" ports, like they called their own games because they didn't want to support the wii from the very beginning not knowing if it would succeed.
Until then, any endeavor taken by a third party will either result in a shitty version of a game found on another (COD) system or an undertaking that would have sold more if done for better systems (Epic Mickey).
He's telling us that the public perception that the Wii is for casuals only is wrong. "We have not been able to gain adequate consumer understanding regarding our intentions" is the polite Japanese way of saying that most Wii critics don't know what they're talking about.
To be honest, a lot of what he says is right, a gaming console SHOULD have experiences that the beginning and intermediate gamer can enjoy. However, the Wii just does not have the variety or sheer number of games intended for the advanced gamer he mentions that the other two consoles bring to the table. That's the problem, and if the thinks it isn't, then he has his head in the sand. At least he does talk about third-party publishers and developers being important going forward, which is vital for the success of the Wii U.
lol, ps2 was the weakest console last games where launch games from xbox and GC still looked better than best looking ps2 games - if 3rd parties actually supported Wii it would easily live alongside HD consoles with similar support and amount of quality core titles from other publishers and not just Nintendo. ESPECIALLY that most of those publishers were making money only on games from nintendo platforms while both 360 and ps3 were basically sinking those publishers and developers which resulted in the death of over 50 different development studios that worked on ps360 games in comparison none of the studios that worked on wii games was closed down.
and once again we're talking about 3RD PARTIES.
the graphical disparity between PS2 & Xbox/GC is nowhere near as vast as Wii to 360/PS3. So shut up and stop that comparison now before you look like an even bigger fool. Secondly, Nintendo has had a rep of being rough on 3rd parties dating back to roughly the N64. You think 3rd party groups are going to jump in bed with Nintendo when their system is technologically inferior to the competition and sports one of the worst online infrastructures in the history of gaming?
Furthermore, third parties like ea and ubisoft used the wii to make quick cash that they could use to fund 360/ps3 game projects.
If you look back, the companies that followed this business model are still around, while others that didn't, like pandemic and the timesplitters dev (free radical?), are gone.
If you don't think the manufacturer of a console bears a good amount of the responsibility for carving out a market for itself, then you also have your head in the sand.
Sony bought and opened studios that developed an extremely wide range of games, from platformers to shooters. Microsoft worked to secure big budget exclusives like Halo and Gears of War. They didn't sit back and hope that third-party developers and publishers would work to make their console relevant across genres.
Like it or not, Nintendo made some poor decisions, just like Sony and (brace yourself) Microsoft have. Stop kidding yourself.
If he could, explain why a publisher would put up a AAA budget game for a platform that rarely breaks 500k sold on anything outside of first party offerings? How many generations has it been since third party games sold well on a Nintendo platform? Sony and Microsoft contribute to the marketing of the major third-party releases on the PS3 and 360, something Nintendo never does.
And the major AAA releases on the other platforms that could score big on the system aren't there for the pure fact that the hardware is incapable of running them. This isn't a matter of porting, a developer would have to build a completely new project from scratch, with all of the associated costs, and that is flat out not going to happen. If the publisher puts up a $25 million budget for a game and it goes on to sell only 200,000 copies, great job, the company just lost $15 million.
Nintendo wants to sell consoles and their first-party releases, they don't bother with the third-party as they see no direct monetary gain from it. That's one reason they stay in the black while MS and Sony each spend several years in the red before breaking even. The two competitors try to build an audience and score in the long-term, while Nintendo is in to score profits every single quarter.
nuff said, why dont these websites report About Sony stock, yesterday it droped 6% in 24h, WHERE IS THE FUCKING ARTICLE!!!!. Where are the people saying SONY IS DOOOOOOMED :D
*yawn*
Can't exactly blame you fully though. Sony and MS seem to get away with murder sometimes, while Nintendo can't even sneeze without a doom and gloom prediction.
All I'm going to say is, all 3 console makers are screwed up on their own way. If they joined together to make one consoles using each companies strengths and covering the weaknesses of the other, it would most likely be the perfect console.
lol sorry i wont make spam, i wont post the comment in other articles, but its really unfair to talk shit only about nintendo, and more when theres another company in the same problem (sony) and its not because they are dooomed :/ its a problem in all japanese companys