Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata said that the company staggered its Wii U launch titles over a period of a few months to spread out their releases and allow each game the opportunity to bring in word of mouth for the upcoming Wii U console.
He made his statements at a recent investor conference call, in which he also explained the company’s decision not to make paid DLC for Animal Crossing 3DS.
Iwata-san cited the success of Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii, explaining how the game helped to spread word about the console’s offerings. In contrast, games released on the 3DS were unable to carry that same word of mouth as players had to experience the titles first hand.
He elaborated:
In retrospect, one important aspect of Wii was that it came bundled with “Wii Sports” for everyone who purchased the system in the overseas markets to experience. Of course there were some people who praised “Wii Sports” as being revolutionary even before its launch, but if we had simply expected everyone who bought a Wii system to play, say, a Zelda game, to also buy “Wii Sports,” I don’t think we would have been able to deliver this title to everyone.
However, at the risk of sounding extreme, everyone in the overseas markets received a copy of “Wii Sports” even if they did not want to as it was bundled with Wii hardware for quite some time. And it was only natural for them to have a go at the game at least once since they had it in their possession. It was not hard to see instantly that “Wii Sports” was vastly different from any game they had played before, and it was also very easy to pick up and play.
People who purchase new gaming platforms are usually the ones in the family that love games, and they purchase them because they have a game in mind that they want to play. But with “Wii Sports,” they started to engage others to play and have fun together, and as things turned out, I think this chain of new consumers was the reason behind why things progressed well with Wii.
It would indeed be nice if we could say that we planned everything from the start. But the truth of the matter is that we did not know how to attract everyone to “Wii Sports,” but we thought about how we could achieve it, and came up with some ideas. I would be lying if I said that we had a firm belief of what was going to happen, but this is our analysis of what has happened with Wii.
As for Nintendo 3DS, the problem was that consumers could not experience 3D unless they actually took it in their hands. We could not advertise it on TV as TV images did not pop out. So, we concluded that if we could have people experience and be excited about Nintendo 3DS, they would share their excitement with others.
As is the case with any new product, the first people to buy a new platform are the ones that are eager to experience new things. Then it gradually spreads to other consumers, but there are two types of consumers: those we can directly deliver our messages to, and those who don’t have the intention of listening to our messages in the first place. Among the second category of consumers, some are nevertheless interested in what other people are doing around them.
I think the difference between Wii and Nintendo 3DS was that while Wii resonated well with such consumers too, Nintendo 3DS did not. For a product to achieve a high level of market penetration, this is a hurdle that it must overcome, and in Japan we are already past that stage, and in a sense, more and more people are saying that Nintendo 3DS is the platform to play games.
If you look at how pre-orders are doing at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wii U is sure to sell well in this holiday season, as many of you are probably thinking. But we realize the biggest challenge is to make sure that Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season, and we are working on that too. Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen.
Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year. We are also looking to have many people experience “Nintendo Land,” which comes bundled with the Wii U DELUXE SET in the overseas markets, as this is a title that the actual players will appreciate more than the spectators.
While we have no way of telling whether “Nintendo Land” will do what “Wii Sports” did, we are hoping to promote word-of-mouth communication among consumers, and at the same time, we will continue to supply software to provide new content that consumers will talk about even after January. The combination of these two things is what we think will keep our momentum going after January next year.
The official Nintendo presentation is available online here.
