Posted in: Games, Movies, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, games, nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, video games, wii u

Miyamoto Talks About Why He Thinks The Wii U Has Struggled

Shigeru Miyamoto is possibly the most recognisable game designer in the world. The Mario creator has been the face of Nintendo for a long, long time and his contributions to video game are pretty much unrivalled.

He was out at E3 this week showing off Nintendo's wares, and in doing so, stopped off by NPR for an interview. In it, he interestingly opened up about the lackluster sales of the Wii U and why he thinks the console struggled. He said quite candidly, and lengthly:

So I don't think it's just price, because if the system is appealing enough, people will buy it even if the price is a little bit high. I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn't understand the system. But also I think that we had a system that's very unique — and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up. And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you're playing on a device that's connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play.

I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them. So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we're constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they're not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we're hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.

The Wii U really is a unique little console and I enjoy owning one. I just wish there were more frequent reasons to play it. Honestly, I think that is the main thing holding back this console form being a success. There have just been too few and far between reasons to own one with the infrequent first party blockbuster. the lack of third party support smarts too.

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