Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, claims his company is not competing against Sony and Microsoft, talks Wii price and urges LucasArts to come up with a Star Wars Wii game so that everyone can get a chance to duel the dark forces wielding a light-saber.
Following Nintendo's E3 2006 success, company President Satoru Iwata has pulled off a daring exercise in omnipresence by appearing in multiple online publications simultaneously. The exclusive stories aim to get Mr. Iwata's impression of E3 and his feelings on how the next-generation market is shaping up.
Asked about the USD 600 price tag of the 60 GB PS3, in an interview for the Seattle Times, Iwata-san refused to comment officially but added that as a consumer he found it expensive. In an interview for The Street.com however, the Nintendo boss had no such qualms and did not miss a chance to comment claiming, if we put the PS3 as the standard price point, any price point is going to be affordable.
In the Seattle Times story, when Mr. Iwata was asked about the technical issues involved in getting a speaker on the controller, he suddenly decides to ask; we really want [George] Lucas to think about making a game where this can be used as a light saber. It should be fun. Since the conversation was centered on the controller speaker at the time we assume Nintendo has plans to have it emit a light buzzing sound, as any self-respecting light saber should. The question that no one put to Mr. Iwata however, is how a battery operated device will work using Bluetooth and will power a speaker, a rumble device and its motion and controller functions without running out of juice on an hourly basis.
Even with the, expected, 1.1 GHz CPU under its hood the Wii is considerably underpowered when considering its rivals but Mr. Iwata does not seem concerned. Nintendo's philosophy, he stresses, is that market expansion can only come through innovation and not by simply increasing visual quality. The Wii will bring visual improvements compared to the previous generation of gaming according to the Nintendo President and will still appeal to hardcore gamers; If we had not shown Legend of Zelda or if we had not shown Red Steel during the [E3] briefing ...then I'm afraid that people might have misunderstood Nintendo's [motives]. If all they had seen was Wii Sports or something like that, people [might] say, 'Oh, Nintendo has already lost interest toward the games for the serious gamer'. The fact of the matter is it's not the case. By taking advantage of the unique controller and very unique play style of Wii, we will not only invite the newcomers but also excite the existing gamers. Now that's the kind of message we really wanted to deliver.
So is Nintendo competing with the PS3 and the XBox 360 or not? If Nintendo is making a gaming console which plays video games and plans to target hardcore gamers it sounds like it will be competing with Sony and MS.
This far we have read Microsoft's Peter Moore suggesting that everyone will want a Wii and an XBox 360, then we read Sony's Phil Harrison stating that everyone will want a PS3 and a Wii and now Mr. Iwata claims that the Wii will not be competing with the other two. It seems that Sony and Microsoft want to convince gamers that Nintendo is not a complete gaming console while Mr. Iwata is trying to say that once you have Wii you won't want anything else. How exactly gamers and non-gamers alike will experience the Wii in order to not want to go back is another matter altogether which ...requires us [Nintendo] to be smart with the marketing.
