| Squilliam said: My opinion on the Wii is that Nintendo never intended it to be more than a successful niche product and they priced and specced it accordingly. Sure they probably felt it would outsell the Gamecube but I doubt that they even thought it would outpace the PS2 in like for like terms over the first few years of its life. It was both underpriced for the demand and underspecced to leave its niche. Nintendo painted themselves into this corner because they never believed that their product would sell 70M consoles by late 2010 or be sold out so consistantly over the first 2 years of its life. Remember they initially were going to sell the console for $199 U.S.D. which would have been even more inadequate and they only raised the price when they found out how much the PS3 was going to cost. Im certainly not saying that Nintendo were unsuccessful with their Wii. However it does appear that they failed to back their console appropriately. Even minor changes relatively could have made big improvements to how the Wii responded to the current market conditions. Something as minor as making the analogue stick the 5th button to hand and installing a 2-4* more powerful CPU and slapping in a little more RAM and a modern GPU which could have raised the Bill of Materials $30-40 which would diminish over time and given them at least port compatibility with >50% of the DX9 console markets games could have been all they would have needed. Developers could have designed games which are compatible to all 3 had it actually been realistic for them to do so. The major cost in not doing so is the fact that their market is so hit driven on the Wii. Either you strike or you strike out whereas on the DX9 consoles there are enough people who buy 5-10 games a year to allow niche games to at least bring back some revenue. |
I really think Nintendo was not planning on a life cycle of much more than 5 years for the Wii, making hardware spec constraints far less of an issue than releasing a relatively inexpensive yet profitable hardware platform that offered something a bit off the main path.
The specs were not much of an issue since I don't believe Nintendo was shopping for direct ports of third party games, but rather original games that made use of the different control scheme that was supposed to be the main selling point of the console.
I would also say that making the console a updated version of the GC made it easy for anyone who was a GC developer to port their titles to the Wii and set a low learning curve when developing new titles for the platform.
And yes, I'm sure there are plenty of bean counters at Nintendo who have beaten their heads over the fact that even at $250, the Wii was underpriced relative to demand.
In regards to third party sales performance, barring franchises that sold well on EVERY platform, I seriously doubt Nintendo ever had issue with the fact that none of them really offered much competition to Nintendo's own titles in terms of sales. I'm quite sure that they would rather have a Wii owner buy their games than third party ones.
