| SJReiter said: So Miyamoto recently did a huge interview with NPR. One of the questions was about if the Wii U's price was the reason it hasn't sold well. Here's his response: "So I don’t think it’s just price, because if the system is appealing enough, people will buy it even if the price is a little bit high. I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn’t understand the system. But also I think that we had a system that’s very unique — and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up. And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you’re playing on a device that’s connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play. I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii U system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them. So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we’re constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they’re not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we’re hoping that next time it will be a very big hit."
Really interesting stuff if you ask me. Basically he confirmed that the GamePad did not appeal to anyone because tablets evolved so much from 2010-2012. I'm actually impressed that he gave such a blunt answer and didn't just give usual PR nonsense. What do you guys think of this answer? |
So, here' what I get from this statement:
1) They're done with tablet controllers and won't have a Gamepad as the primary controller for their next system.
2) They realized people didn't see the appeal of the gamepad. This could be good, if Nintendo gets that people just didn't like it. Or it could be bad if they think "costumers are just too stupid to get our ideas".
3) He thinks a high price is ok. This is actually bad, because Nintendo systems have never been high tech machines and historically have been sold at a low price. You'd think they learned from the 3DS and Wii U launches, when people thought the consoles were too pricey.
4) Nintendo (finally?!) acknowledges the importance of technology. Their system didn't fail because its "unique idea" wasn't understood by the market. It failed because their technology wasn't good enough to compete. (I'm not talking about system specs!)
5) Their next console will have a unique feature, too. Depending on what they've learned from this generation this could be either very good or very bad. The next 12 months will be very interesting!
