Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America, recently sat down with David M. Ewalt at
Forbes to talk about the company's upcoming console.
Check out the full interview below.
David Ewalt: How do you explain the Wii U to people who haven’t had a chance to play with it?
Reggie Fils-Aime: What we are doing with Wii U is creating an ability for games to leverage two different screens; the big screen in your room, and the smaller handheld screen in front of you. By doing so it opens up all of these different experiences. The experience I use to describe it to someone is to imagine a first person shooter, where instead of constantly having to look at the screen, now I’ve got things happening all around me.
It’s a great experience. I don’t think it’s going to be a hard sell. I think that communicating to consumers through the magic of the second window, you can have a totally unique experience, with another player still in the room… I don’t think it’s a difficult sell.
The Wii and the Wii U are going to be on sale in stores at the same time. How will you market two consoles?
This is a device that will launch in 2012, after April 1st, so we will deal with that situation at the appropriate time. What I can tell you is when we launched the original Wii, there was an overlap with Gamecube. When we launched the original DS there was an overlap with the Gameboy Advance. I actually think maybe that one is more applicable, because Gameboy Advance was a tremendous, tremendous platform in its own right, and yet it sold side by side to the original DS, at least here in the US, for almost two full years.
So as long as the content is there, and as long as the way to differentiate the two is there, I think they can survive side by side for a period of time. Certainly we’re going to get to a point where [The Wii U] is the one standalone system, especially given all the backward compatibility.
You don’t think consumers will be confused by two Nintendo consoles on shelves?
They are different machines, and they’re going to have their own separate software. Even though the Wii software is backward compatible to Wii U, the branding will be a little bit different, the messaging will be a little bit different. I think we’ve had enough experiences separating out consoles in a transitional period to make that happen.
But isn’t your product line getting complicated? There’s a lot of different models of the DS handheld, and now two different Wii’s.
Well, first off, Wii U is an enlargement of our platform. If you look at our handheld space what I would tell you is we have a clearly differentiated line of products. We’ve got DS Lite, which I would argue is appealing to young kids as well as older consumers who play Brain Age and things of that nature… DSi and DSi XL users are playing that robust library of DS games, it really has a very broad footprint. And then we’ve got the 3DS, that right now is targeted toward that young adult gamer. So we think they’re differentiated enough. Certainly over time there’s going to be improvement to the product line. The way we do that is we let the consumer decide, and as we see some trends we’ll be preemptive and will look to improve product lines and move forward.
Nintendo's Wii U console and controller
We’ve made it clear: This is not a tablet, it’s not meant to be a tablet. But having said that, yes, it has a screen, yes, it has a range of input buttons, and yes, you’re going to be able to have a great console experience right in the palm of your hand.
But as we at Nintendo often do, we’re essentially creating a whole new type of game. It’s not handheld, it’s not a tablet, it’s a different type of experience. It’s an experience that most consumers have said, wow, I’d love to do that. I’d love to be able to have my home console gaming experience while my spouse is watching something else, whether that’s live sports, whether that’s some other entertainment option. Once it’s described, people are tremendously excited about it.
Can a user consume content other than games on the controller? Could I watch a TV show on it?
The messaging comes right from the console. So the programming would need to originate off the console.
So if I’m connected to Netflix on my Wii, I could watch Netflix on the controller?
Theoretically, that’s possible.
If the console is not turned on does the controller do anything?
No. It’s got to be powered through the console.
Microsoft’s message at E3 was all about Kinect, how there will be no controller, you are the controller. It seems like Nintendo’s at the polar opposite; you’re putting even more in the controller. Is this indicative of a basic philosophical difference between the two companies?
Well, all I can say is that this is not the first time that Nintendo and our competitors have had dramatically different views on the future of gaming. When we launched the original DS everyone was saying the handheld competitor coming from Sony has more powerful graphics, that’s really the way to go. And we showed that no, two screens, a touch screen, a microphone, that actually led to better gaming experiences. With the Wii, again, at the time our competitors were all about high resolution graphics. We said we think that a motion controlled experience could be more fun. Eighty six million units later around the world, I think people would say we got that one right as well.
In this case we’re saying that this two screen experience –either two screens playing the same game or two screens doing fundamentally different things– is the future.
How will the Wii U inter-operate with Nintendo’s handheld game devices?
All we’ve said to date is that we see the opportunity for cross-platform playing. We have one key developer with a very strong relationship to Nintendo, the same developer who created Smash Brothers, that is envisioning a Smash Brothers experience that will be cross platform between Wii U and 3DS. So we’re certainly thinking about it. What I would say is our experience will likely be very different than what our competitors are doing.
Your online services are very different than what your competitors offer. Isn’t something missing, that you can’t offer the sort of experience I can get on Xbox Live?
I don’t think it is an issue for us, and here’s why. We’ve seen what our competitors have done, and we’ve acknowledged that we need to do more online, starting with the launch of our eShop on Nintendo 3DS, and we’re going to continue to build our online capability.For Wii U, we’re going to take that one step further, and what we’re doing is creating a much more flexible system that will allow the best approaches by independent publishers to come to bear. So instead of a situation where a publisher has their own network and wants that to be the predominant platform, and having arguments with platform holders, we’re going to welcome that. We’re going to welcome that from the best and the brightest of the third party publishers.
Would it be reasonable to expect there might be a new or significantly upgraded online presence when the new console comes out?
We’ve said that the Wii U will have an extremely robust online experience. There will be other publishers talking about that as well, and from our perspective, we think it’s much more compelling for that information to come from the publishers than to come from us.
You were first on the 3D bandwagon with the 3DS, now Sony’s selling a 3D monitor, and 3D gaming is becoming more mainstream. Does 3D come to the console at some point?
In our view, what’s key to the 3D experience is that there be nothing between you and the machine. So for us, 3D gaming without glasses is a key part of the proposition. Right now the TV’s that offer that… I would argue they’re overpriced.. and a fairly small screen. There may come a time when 3D without glasses becomes appropriate for console, but we don’t see that in the near future.
Source:
Forbes
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