Ail said:
That's putting a lot of hope on things unlikely to happen. First redesign, Nintendo has never been a whiz about making crazy design hardware that everyone wants, they are not Apple.... Colors really aren't a big deal for home console the way they are for handhelds because you don't carry them everywhere so the cool factor of I have this neat pink Wii really doesn't come into play much... As for price, they just dropped it by 50$ and had one of the weakest reaction to a price drop any console has ever seen in Japan...
The main issue the Wii has is that aside from motion control most of its hardware is looking really old and that is affecting sales in a country where people like new tech toys that are on the edge ( Japanese had web surfing cell phones way before the rest of the world, HD is already adopted there and many people have a Blu Ray writer for example ). Aside from Nintendo core customers, the huge majority of the Wii releases in Japan just don't bring a WoW factor to the majority of the Japanese users.........
You're looking at this like a Nintendo fan, take a breather and look at it from the point of view of someone that has not purchased a Wii yet and why should he jump and make the purchase right now... One example would be commercials. They usually rely heavilly on graphics as motion control is something hard to translate into a visual. And due to this most commercials for new Nintendo games looke like Toys R Us commercials and really fail to give that WoW factor to users that might push them to make an impulse buy...
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I think you've misunderstood me, I'm not talking about hopes. I'm not even pushing what's likely or not, I'm just suggesting options. Price drops, alternate colors and case redesigns are ALL proven hardware drivers, and they're all options that Nintendo's barely utilized if at all yet.
I'd also suggest you buff up on industry history... every Nintendo console except GameCube has seen a redesign (unless you count Wii, which at it's core is repurposed GameCube). N64's was admittedly limited and demographically targeted, but Nintendo's market leading consoles (FC/NES & SFC/SNES) all had full case redesigns like PSone or the slim PS2 and PS3. At launch Nintendo even talked about introducing an alternate DVD-playing Wii later on, a new model is clearly something they've been at least considering.
Colors are also proven hardware drivers for consoles in Japan. They did it repeatedly for PS2, and the black Wii (coinciding with MH3) spiked Wii sales dramatically on release. 3 years in and Wii's only had it's first alternate color too, PS2 had over 10 by this point in it's cycle.
And the price drop, while not as successful as hoped (in Japan only) still had the net effect of basically doubling sustained weekly sales. It's actually almost identical to the effect of PSP3k's price drop, so I'm not sure where you're getting it being "one of the weakest reaction to a price drop any console has ever seen in Japan"? And again, I'd like to point out Wii's gone a record 3 years before it's first drop, PS2 had 2 drops by this point, PS3's already had a record 4.
I also think you're vastly overestimating visuals in Wii's Japanese downfall. You're really coming into this with western sensibilities and the truth is, high end visuals just aren't as important to the Japanese. If they were, DS wouldn't be the dominant platform there with the vast majority of 3rd party support and record breaking hardware and software sales. I'd suggest you take a step back and come look at where the Japanese market really is... DS is the new defacto main platform (it's basically the new Famicom or PlayStation), PSP is a solid second with some notable hits (and it's games actually sell in Japan), Wii is now clearly struggling after an amazing 1.5 years (and some record breaking software itself), and PS3 just avoided total system failure but it's still just barely outselling the troubled Wii at a steep loss and with the best year of software it'll likely ever see. I see a lot of trumpeting of PS3's pyrrhic victory but it's a little misplaced imo... from my perspective all consoles seem to be fucked this gen in Japan, while handhelds reign.
