Microsoft and Nintendo: Get a room, guys

11:10 PM on 02.26.2007   |   Chad Concelmo

29 comments

The love fest between Microsoft’s Peter Moore and Nintendo (in particular, the Wii) continues.

Taking a break from drawing hearts on his Super Mario Bros. notebook and nervously calling Iwata just to hear his voice and hang up, Moore has revealed to Game Informer that he, like, totally wants to get to third base with the Wii. Translation: he really respects Nintendo’s new console and what the company is doing to make the Wii so easily accessible to the mainstream.

He likes Ninty’s strategy so much, in fact, that he plans on taking the Xbox 360 down a similar path in late 2007.

Although his comments lack any real details, Moore did reveal that there will be some surprising announcements in the next couple of months.

Hit the jump for "Moore" (ha ha ... ugh).

When asked about Microsoft appealing to non-hardcore gamers:

Moore: It’s a great question. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next month or two. We have always had the focus on what we called—I don’t know whether I’ve sat down and talked about the first two holiday campaigns with you, but when we started building the strategy back in 2003, early 2004, we realized that the first 15 months, knowing what our ship date was even back then, would be critical to continue to recapture what’s called the hardcore gamer, and we want to make sure that we continue to have that sort of person on our side, because they’re very important to the overall ecosystem.

Then, coming into this holiday, we realized we needed to build an approachability story that was going to be important as we were attracting a different consumer in holiday 2007 and on to 2008. This is even before the Wii—the Wii was still the Revolution, and nobody knew anything about it. We recognized that both our strengths with Xbox became our Achilles’ heel with Xbox 360 in that we had built a very legitimate gaming device that had been taken to heart by the hardcore guys who when Microsoft announced the Xbox were very skeptical about our ability to deliver real gaming experiences on the console. I think we put all of that to rest very, very effectively and repositioned the brand. We went from black to white—it’s brighter and more optimistic brand. We’ve done an incredible amount of work with the third-party development community to make sure we’re well positioned to have all of the right content, the E and T content that’s going to be important in the out years in our platform. From a first-party point of view, it’s not just about E-rated games, it’s going to be about the experience that, quite frankly, Nintendo has done a tremendous job in capturing, in bringing back fun—if you will—to the gaming platforms. But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve as well to be able to do that. It’s not something that we’re going to be shy about, and it’s not something that we’re not painfully aware of that needs to be changed by this holiday. That has been the strategy all along, and we’ll be making some more announcements in the coming month or two. I think you’ll see how serious we are about that.

What do you think? Are you excited about Microsoft’s proposed change in direction? Or will you kill yourself the minute the Xbox 360 controller sports motion sensing capabilities?