Nintendo Wii: Nintendo President Admits That The Wii Online Isn’t That Great, Will Be Better With Wii 2

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has conceded that the online aspect of the Nintendo Wii isn’t up to par with rival companies offerings such as Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network.

Speaking to investors Iwata explained that ultimately the Nintendo Wii didn’t have a good networking infrastructure. Satoru Iwata also admitted that the company would have been much better partnering with outside companies in the field of network services.

“Honestly speaking, Wii’s future could have been different if Nintendo had made better partnerships with outside companies in the field of network services at the early stages of the penetration of Wii,” he said. “In other words, Nintendo might have been a little obsessed with the policy “Jimae-shugi” [“doing things by one’s bootstraps”] at that time. Although we have already put ourselves back on track, we would like to clearly differentiate what is our true strength from what we can basically do by ourselves but can be done better by more skillful outside specialists in order not to fall into that trap again. You may be aware of some features which I am implying now in relation to the future developments of Nintendo 3DS and Wii’s successor system that we announced yesterday. I am sorry I cannot say anything more specific today.”

“In the field of networks in particular, however, I admit that we cannot do business in pace with the changes in the world and the requests from consumers only within our company and with development companies we have long been in touch with. I am not sure which term suits us as collaborations for this purpose, M&A [merger and acquisition] or partnership. Anyway, I feel that we would spoil the party in a negative way if ‘we sticked to create everything by ourselves’ based on the policy ‘Jimae-shugi,’ and eventually it would make our business slow.”

” Wii is good in some areas but not in others, so especially for games like Call of Duty, the Wii version sold pretty well, but the unit sales were very different from the versions of other platforms, and I assume that one of the reasons is the issue with the graphical representations which you mentioned before, and also, the consumers who like that kind of game will have other platforms at home as well, which led to this result.”

Of course, we would like to cooperate with software developers for Wii’s successor, and as I am repeatedly saying, I don’t believe Nintendo can carry out everything alone. I am saying that we are responsible for building up the market, but I don’t think that Nintendo can maintain the market alone; We are aiming for creating a situation where software publishers will be willing to cooperate. As for commenting on such things as the performance, I already stated in the beginning that I would not mention any specific plans. Thank you for your understanding.”

– Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata

Source