I’m amazed that you Wii owners found the time to read this between playing all of that nothing that’s been releasing left and right on the console. Honestly, the Wii has become a paperweight for most hardcore gamers and, aside from two Nintendo titles arriving later this year, nothing is going to change that now. But in a recent investor meeting, Satoru Iwata admitted that the Wii has suffered from horrendous third party support, and he then vowed that Nintendo is working hard to ensure that issue does not carry over to the Wii U.
Iwata-san stated that both the Wii and DS suffered from a dearth of quality third party software in the early going. The DS eventually reversed that trend, but there was no such luck for the Wii. He laid much of the blame for this at the feet of industry analysts, claiming that they scared third parties into thinking that Nintendo was on their way out of the hardware biz. “Nintendo was driven to the edge of the ring,” he said.
“Software publishers put some effort into creating some titles, but the sales did not reach their expectations on the Wii, which made them think that they could not have high expectations for business on the Wii,” he noted. This resulted in many developers and publishers making the decision to shift gears over to other platforms. Nintendo tried to fill the release gaps on their own, but there are only so many games they can produce at a time. Iwata explained that as a result, “there were no other titles to fill up the gaps.”
Nintendo is determined to secure more third party support for the U, and is even “developing several titles in collaboration” with outside developers, said Iwata. He was not, however, willing to divulge precisely what those games are. “What we are aiming for with the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U is, platforms which have much more software and a wider variety of software than the former Nintendo DS or Wii.” Continuing, he informed the audience that the company is “prepared to invest in order to make this a reality.” Hopefully the strategy pays off, because Wii owners don’t deserve to be left out in the cold while PC, PS3 and 360 gamers have all the fun.
[Source: IGN]
[Image via Game Bandits.]
