Is Microsoft’s Natal a threat to Nintendo’s Wii?

This year’s E3 was the most exciting one since 2006 when Nintendo showed off their Revolution with a heap of playable games. Microsoft and Sony both unveiled their motion control devices, but the company behind Windows generated a lot more buzz. That’s why I will ignore Sony’s wand in this post, because the vast majority of people usually do the same.

Natal definitely has a lot of potential, but that’s all it has at the moment. “Where were the games?”, you ask. I’ll tell you why they only had tech demos on stage and a video of the developers’ vision. Microsoft’s goal at E3 was to sell Natal to third party developers. Get the crowd excited about a new way to play games and convince Activision-Blizzard, EA etc. that this is going to be the next big thing in gaming.

And it worked. The fact that Natal made numerous appearances on TV shows helped a lot too. Development kits have been sent out and third parties are enthusiastic about the possibilities. Natal is going to be a huge success. At this point Microsoft can probably rely entirely on third parties to drive adoption of its innovative peripheral, like they planned all along, because otherwise we would have seen more than simple tech demos from them.

Historically third parties never had a problem to carry the burden of driving sales of a console or an add-on. I can’t recall any instance in which a publisher would have openly asked a console manufacturer to cut the price or something along those lines. Third parties know that it’s their job to drive hardware sales and they gladly accept this fact. They wouldn’t promise support, if they didn’t really mean it.

2010 is going to be a rough year for the Wii. It has been nearly three years since the Nintendo console was launched and third parties still aren’t embracing it, despite it being the fastest selling home console in gaming history. Things could have been very different, if the big N had only managed to get third parties excited about the Wii right from the start. Just imagine what that could have meant. The Wii could have had good games!

All depends on the price.

No.

And to say third parties "still aren't embracing" Wii, is to ignore the growing list of third party games that are coming to the system.

exactly look at all the good third party titles coming out like:

Red Steel 2, Monster Hunter 3, House of the Dead Overkill 2&3, Dead Space: Extraction, No More Heros:Desperate Struggle, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles, Madden NFL 10, Dirt: 2, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Nba 2K10, Fifa 10, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, CoD: Modern Warfare 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Crystal Bearers, Fragile and etc.....

now thats alot of good games only from third party and these are the ones releasing in 09   

lol, hell no. Maybe in future gens, but not anytime soon. Parents don't update their gaming knowledge all too often.

No.

No. Nintendo's Natal is not a threat Microsoft's Wii.

Somebody is either confused, drunk or high, maybe all of them at once even.

No, the Wii is like a cultural item to get.

Yes