Nintendo: Wii U Needs Third-Party Support to be Complete

People buy Wii Us to play Nintendo games. Even if you hate motion controls or second screens, there’s just something special about a new 3D Mario game. The cast of memorable characters that the company has created has captivated the gaming community for many years, but without some sort of third-party support, Nintendo believes that its console cannot be complete.

IGN recently spoke to both Nintendo global president Satoru Iwata and Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime about the software support of the Wii U, and how best to grab back the attention of major publishers. Iwata wants third-party games on the console, but really, that comes secondary to Nintendo itself pushing interesting software.

"Our focus is, first of all, to regain the momentum of the Wii U towards the end of this year, and then we’ll try to establish successful third-party Wii U software titles. I believe in the importance of third-party support for Nintendo platforms. I’m very willing to change the current situation,” Iwata said.

Games like Pikmin 3 and Super Smash Bros. on Wii U should get people to start paying attention to Nintendo’s offerings, and in turn, attract publishers to the device.

“Looking at this through the prism of a business decision, if I’m a third-party publisher, what I want is that I want a large, diverse installed base to invest in my development and be able to monetize against that large installed base," Fils-Aime said. "That’s why, from a Nintendo first-party perspective, we have to drive the installed base. We need a diverse group of consumers.”

Will it be easy? That’s unlikely. Iwata acknowledges that his company can’t be good at everything, and that the console itself won’t be complete until other publishers support it.

"The fact of the matter is that there are some areas of game creation that Nintendo is very good at, but there are other things that Nintendo is not very good at,” Iwata said. “There are huge numbers of fans of Nintendo software, but at the same time, those types of players still sometimes want to play something else on our platform. Because of that, we always need third parties to support us, in order to make our platform complete."