Recently Reggie Fils-Amie has gone on the record to talk about the recent speculation about Wii HD happening, and about the future of Nintendo in general.
“[The] next step for Nintendo in terms of home consoles will not be simply to make it HD, but to add more and more capability and we’ll do that when we totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii and we are nowhere near doing that yet.”
Even with Wii Motion Plus and the upcoming “Vitality Sensor”… you really have to ask where can Nintendo truly go with the Wii? Are they going to give us more channels and services? It took them a while but we are finally getting a video streaming service like Wii No Ma in Japan, even though we have to pay a third party for that service.
Lets not forget that a lot of people thought that Nintendo tapped out and jumped the shark with the announcement of the Vitality Sensor during E3 last year. Yet, even then Nintendo does not have a good track record with their accessories. Only a few games are released that actually utilize them and even then they are usually an after thought during game development. Look at DS and Wii linking connectivity, voice chat and even WiFi.
Yet, Reggie is confident that the consumers are content with the Wii so far…
“more importantly than that, the consumer has voted. Over 26 million consumers have bought a Wii. The consumer is saying, for them, the quality of the visual is not nearly as important as the overall entertainment, the overall value of that experience and that is really what has propelled us.”
As the competition follows and improves upon what Nintendo started, it only seems like Nintendo would have to follow suit and include HD on their system to compete with them. Even if Nintendo is satisfied with the sales of the Wii; the sales of the console have slowed down. If they want to continue grasp at straws and say that “Sales are still strong!,” it was only due to the holiday season, and those sales will be diminishing soon.
Yet, honestly it isn’t what Nintendo wants, it’s what the consumer wants according to Reggie. So what do you really want?
