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Nintendo will do things differently with Wii2

by on27 April 2011


Iwata has regrets over the way Wii was marketed
Despite how successful the Wii has been for Nintendo, CEO Satoru Iwata told investors that he has some regrets on how things were done. This is despite the Nintendo Wii selling over 86 million units.

Iwata, for example, highlighted the fact that he now believes that it was a mistake not to partner with a marketing company to work on the console’s marketing. He claims this is a mistake that the company will not make again in the future.

The comment suggests that Nintendo will partner with marketing firms to strengthen the marketing for the 3DS and Wii2 going forward. Sources tell us that we can expect a more aggressive and robust campaign to appeal to more than the core Wii audience. We suspect that this is code that Nintendo will be going after harder core games and titles that appeal to older gamers, who are the target audience for both Microsoft and Sony.

No matter how much Nintendo strengthens its marketing, it will take excellent 3rd party software support for the 3DS and Wii2 to be as successful as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 going forward, and that will take some doing.

Third party developers have complained that despite Nintendo moving 86+ million consoles, for the most part the console is not a money maker for the majority of 3rd party developers. In fact, many of the best “M” rated titles for the Wii platform simply didn’t sell, but when the same game was brought to another platform, the titles did perform better.

Many in the development sector blame the demographics that the Wii was targeted at and an inability for 3rd party titles on the Wii to find an audience and make revenue from the sale of titles. Nintendo is going to have to reach out to these developers and get them to develop for the 3DS and Wii2.

It will be very interesting to see what Nintendo has to show for the new Wii2 at E3. Software will be key for both the Wii2 and 3DS to be successful; and in the case of the 3DS, so far we have not seen enough of it.
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