Nintendo’s stock at the moment is taking a bit of a hammering with the recent price cut of the 3DS pointing out that it wasn’t doing as well as expected and that plans have been forced to change to try and ensure the 3DS doesn’t become another N-Gage.
Whether the price cut will save it or not is still up for debate but what Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata, is no worried about is that the price cut may also have an affect on initial sales of the upcoming Wii-U.
Will it lead people into thinking that it’s better to hold out a couple of months after a release for that initial price cut rather than picking it up at launch? A mass decision like that from the gaming community could cause the Wii-U to also fail and not many companies in the world could handle two massive failures one after the other.
To avoid this Nintendo are now going to be exceptionally quiet about the Wii-U to avoid anyone thinking about it while they are talking about the 3DS price cut and to ensure the media doesn’t continuously hound them about release dates and prices they have announced already that there is no chance of us seeing the Wii-U before the end of March 2012 and when they are closer to having a release date they will let us know.
Whether this tactic will work or not is up for debate but so is whether the Wii-U has a market in the community at the moment. There are a lot of people inside and outside the gaming industry who still don’t really know what the Wii-U is. Is it just a nice attachment to the current Wii or is it just an upgraded Wii with a fancy controller?
Well Iwata says that it’s neither of those and is in fact a whole new concept and vision
the Wii U is not simply a Wii with a different user interface and we are not proposing to society a performance-enhanced Wii, rather we are proposing hardware with a totally different concept and vision
Being a bit of a gaming nut I can’t wait to see what they do with the Wii-U but at the same time I’m far from sold on it being the future.
Last Updated: August 4, 2011