Iwata (not laughing): ' We failed with the Wii'

[shams]

woopah said:

“We failed with the Wii. We were unable to continually release strong software, and let the nice mood cool. We were unable to show a new game to become ‘the next thing.’ In the game market, once you’ve lost the momentum, it takes time to recover. With the price drop, sales returned to a certain level, but they just did not reach the level of last year around this time. We decided that it would be difficult to sell enough to recover from the poor performance of the first half of the year. In order to reach it (20 million target), we’ll have to move quite a large quantity, but it’s a figure we released after having felt the momentum returning [based off the price drop].”

Its basically the competition. The Wii price was always unsustainable IMO - and the competition has closed in price-wise, and their hand was forced.

But they shouldn't feel bad - how many times did the PS2 drop its price in the first 3...4 years? Heaps.

I think its completely amazing, that heading into the 4th Xmas for the Wii they finally dropped the price (and not a big drop either).

...

Once the PS3 slim sales launch sales dry up (and its happening now, may be under 200k globally next year), the Wii will be back to a pretty dominant position - and both Sony/MS have just about done all the price cutting they can.

The other issue is simply the lag from last Xmas... both Animal Crossing & WiiMusic *failed*. WiiMusic was always a risk - but AC was a failure IMO. Either a dev failure, marketing failure - or both. They really needed to do more on it.