Video games will be the highlight of this holiday shopping season with two brand new consoles being released by Sony and Microsoft. With Nintendo pushing out its console a year ago, it didn't create the same buzz that's been going on between the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases, but they expect that the Wii U will finally get noticed this holiday season and actually begin selling well.
Satoru Iwata, the CEO and president of Nintendo, gave his thoughts on how the upcoming next-generation console releases will give a jolt to the video game industry and actually help the company's year-old Wii U.
"...[T]he competition will heat up because new game consoles will come out and there will be a ‘war of the game consoles’ played out in media articles, we wonder if the target user will actually be the same."
Iwata goes on to list all the games released at the end of this calendar year, like Super Mario 3D World, another Mario and Sonic Olympics game, Wii Party U, Wii Fit U, and Wii Sports Club.
“Thus, in the sense that we attract consumers interested in this category of video games, I think the launch of other video game systems is also good for us because they energize the video game industry as a whole.”That's an interesting angle to take, but something that's clearly misguided.
To put it in layman's terms, Iwata believes that the family audience, which is what all those new games for the Wii U are aimed for, will all look toward Nintendo's new console instead of trying to compare PS4 and XBO.
Clearly Nintendo has the edge with that audience, but how willing are they to upgrade compared to the gamers that are more "hardcore?" In other words, gamers that actually spend some if not all of their time with video games and people who actually follow video games and do it as a hobby.
Wii Sports is by far the highest-selling game for the Wii, which was bundled with the console at launch. Nearly 50 million units down is Mario Kart Wii, which was later bundled with the Wii in specially marked boxes and was one of the rare games that actually moved consoles.
But those sales show that families are already not buying additional software for the console and are clearly not upgrading. However, the "hardcore" gaming crowd is much more prone to upgrading, especially with emergence of PC gaming thanks to Steam and the annual releases of popular series like Madden, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed.
Despite both the PS4 and XBO driving more people to shop video games during the holiday, will they really look at Nintendo's new console and software and decide that it's worth upgrading? They already aren't attracted by Nintendo with their lack of third-party support. And Nintendo's target audience clearly shows that they don't know what the big difference is with just a letter added at the end of a console name that they already own.
Let's not forget that the Wii U released at just $50 less than a brand-new, retailed-price edition of a PS4. Despite a price cut to $299, there's no chance in hell until the Wii U gets under the Wii's retail price of $250 at launch.
Nintendo's stubborn approach to the Wii U won't let that happen anytime soon, and most families will continue to walk past the new console during the holiday season.
[Source: Gamnesia]
[Image credit: Flickr]
