Topic: Reggie Fils-Aime Responds to Declining Wii Sales

[Webmalfunction]

The president of Nintendo of America explains why this year's hardware sales are a good sign of things to come.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/28958

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime sought to spin Wii sales numbers in a good light in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.

When asked about the console losing steam, Fils-Aime viewed it not as something negative, but rather a positive progression leading up to the release of Wii U. "The Wii is now approaching 40 million homes here in the United States, so from a penetration standpoint we're beginning to top out in terms of the total number of systems sold," he said. "That's why it makes so much sense to prepare for the launch of the Wii U."

Although Fils-Aime didn't offer any new information regarding the Wii U, he did comment that despite consumer hesitance, the Wii U "is going to bring gaming to a whole new experience."

[Chozo Ghost]

No surprise that he would try to spin this in a positive way. A lot of this is directly his fault because he withheld the Operation Rainfall games right when Wii needed them the most.

[Mop it up]

I don't think XenoBlade would have sold systems, and The Last Story and Pandora's Tower aren't even out in Europe yet so they wouldn't have been 2011 releases anyway.

[Webmalfunction]

I'm not so sure if that was Reggie's call necessarily. Maybe partially, but there was no way he was the only force at work.


More importantly though, remember that we're talking about sales here. Maybe if Nintendo brought them over and put a bit of advertising behind them, the games could sell fairly decent (albeit modestly), but how many consoles would be sold because Nintendo gave in to Operation Rainfall? If these are the types of games that would push you into getting a Wii, I feel like you would have purchased a Wii by now. And even if I'm incorrect about that, I can almost guarantee that an American release of any of these games wouldn't offer sales of more than 150,000 apiece (and that's fairly generous). If Pandoras Tower, The Last Story, and Xenoblade all sold even 200,000 copies, and every one of those people purchased a Wii, would 600,000 Wiis added to the 4 million units already sold erase that quote from existence?

[Chozo Ghost]

The fact of the matter is just about any game can sell systems if there is enough of an advertising campaign behind it. You are right that Xenoblade won't, but that's just because there will be no ad campaign for it whatsoever, and only one place will have it and even then you would probably have to ask for it because its probably hidden somewhere in the back.

[nhaines]

The fact of the matter?  I'd say [citation needed], please.

Mario Kart or Super Mario Bros is a system seller.  Even Wii Fit or Nintendogs can be a system seller if the price is right.  But not just any game is going to sell systems on a significant level.

[broodwars]

OK, taking the B.S. out of Reggie's response...and...translation:

"Well, we thought we'd sold all the Wiis we were ever really going to sell, so who cares about supporting the Wii in its last few years?  We've gotten our money, suckers."

[UncleBob]

facepalm.jpg

[Kairon]

Nintendo has to shift their resources to support their new platforms. I can understand them taking resources away from the Wii if they want to make sure that their Wii U launch goes better than the 3DS launch.

[rlse9]

Sometimes I wonder why PR people say so much stuff that clearly isn't true and that they're trying to completely spin.  Reading his attempt at spinning the Wii's massive dropoff to a positive thing just makes me less likely to believe anything he says in the future.

[Caterkiller]

Oh come on, you guys are just hating to be hating. I've seen Nintendo pull some really outrageous spin, but to me this is more like "this is how it is and our resources have moved on." Just mad to be mad.

[Chozo Ghost]

Just because you are moving on into a new generation doesn't mean you have to abruptly pull the plug on your current console months and months before that new generation even begins. Has Sony done that with the PS1 or PS2 when the next system came out? But Nintendo has done this with every one of their systems since the N64. With the N64 and Gamecube it could be excused I guess because those systems didn't sell so hot, but with the Wii being the market leader and still selling a huge amount of hardware, there is just no excuse to have abandoned it like Nintendo did.

Its not like the Wii U is even out yet anyway. It's still many months away, but the Wii has been a dead corpse drifting downstream for quite awhile now (except for the small breath of life it got from Skyward Sword). If the Wii U had launched already I guess this would be okay, but it hasn't.

[TJ Spyke]

Chozo, none of the Rainfall games are system sellers. They would have had little to no impact on hardware sales.

[broodwars]

Just because you are moving on into a new generation doesn't mean you have to abruptly pull the plug on your current console months and months before that new generation even begins. Has Sony done that with the PS1 or PS2 when the next system came out? But Nintendo has done this with every one of their systems since the N64. With the N64 and Gamecube it could be excused I guess because those systems didn't sell so hot, but with the Wii being the market leader and still selling a huge amount of hardware, there is just no excuse to have abandoned it like Nintendo did.

Its not like the Wii U is even out yet anyway. It's still many months away, but the Wii has been a dead corpse drifting downstream for quite awhile now (except for the small breath of life it got from Skyward Sword). If the Wii U had launched already I guess this would be okay, but it hasn't.

Precisely.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wouldn't mind NoA not bringing over the Rainfall games last year if it meant they put something worth buying out in their place.  But instead they decided to abandon the platform until the year was nearly over.  This year doesn't look much better, with only Xenoblade and Rhythm Heaven out this year IIRC.  And there's no reason to think the Wii will see any other 1st party software this year, not with how Nintendo's been focusing on Wii U.  The Wii U isn't out yet.  We should still be seeing Wii games.  This is a problem none of the other platform holders seems to be having.  Once the Wii U is out, then the Wii can bow out with grace.

[NWR_insanolord]

I'm not saying this excuses what's going on, because they really need to give the Wii at least some support, but Nintendo has finite development resources. They're trying to cover the Wii, 3DS and Wii U all at the same time, and I don't blame them for putting most of their money into the platforms that still have life left in them.

If anything, this just makes their refusal to bring over games that are already finished even more puzzling. Maybe they just feel (rightfully so, in my opinion) that whether they release them or not doesn't have any real bearing on whether people will buy the Wii U, meaning there isn't much upside and a very real downside to porting over what will be low-selling games.

[Mop it up]

This year doesn't look much better, with only Xenoblade and Rhythm Heaven out this year IIRC.

There's also Mario Party 9 and PokéPark 2, though I'm not surprised those were forgotten (I'm probably the only person anticipating Mario Party 9). However, we don't always know about Nintendo releases far in advance, so there could always be surprise announcements.

[broodwars]

I'm not saying this excuses what's going on, because they really need to give the Wii at least some support, but Nintendo has finite development resources. They're trying to cover the Wii, 3DS and Wii U all at the same time, and I don't blame them for putting most of their money into the platforms that still have life left in them.

Yeah, I'm not accepting that excuse anymore.  Sony and Microsoft don't seem to have any problems ensuring that their consoles have support until the next one arrives (with the exception of the PSP, but considering that device has had better 3rd party support than the Wii has had and continues to do so, I can forgive that).  Nintendo has spent this entire console generation making games on the cheap that have sold tremendously well.  They've built up a tremendous war chest of cash from the Wii and DS.  While they've dumped a lot of that back into R&D, I can't help but wonder how they still can't manage to "have the resources" to support their platforms.  Nintendo of all companies has no excuse on that.

[TJ Spyke]

Microsoft openly abandoned the Xbox a good 5 or 6 months before Xbox 360 released (I think they even said they were ceasing support), and third parties followed suit. Sony was different with the PS2 because it dominated and was close enough to GCN and XBX to get easy ports.

[NWR_insanolord]

I'm not saying this excuses what's going on, because they really need to give the Wii at least some support, but Nintendo has finite development resources. They're trying to cover the Wii, 3DS and Wii U all at the same time, and I don't blame them for putting most of their money into the platforms that still have life left in them.

Yeah, I'm not accepting that excuse anymore.  Sony and Microsoft don't seem to have any problems ensuring that their consoles have support until the next one arrives (with the exception of the PSP, but considering that device has had better 3rd party support than the Wii has had and continues to do so, I can forgive that).  Nintendo has spent this entire console generation making games on the cheap that have sold tremendously well.  They've built up a tremendous war chest of cash from the Wii and DS.  While they've dumped a lot of that back into R&D, I can't help but wonder how they still can't manage to "have the resources" to support their platforms.  Nintendo of all companies has no excuse on that.

Sony and Microsoft don't have the problem because they're not as dependent on first party releases as Nintendo's consoles are (or at least have been the last three generations). Also, Microsoft doesn't have a handheld, and Sony doesn't seem to do as much with theirs as Nintendo does. And money doesn't seem to be the issue; Nintendo clearly has tons of it, but they don't have the internal studios to do more than they currently are.

They unfortunately seem to be reluctant to use any of the money they've built up to create/buy new development studios, and I can't imagine it's easy to find third party studios with enough experience with the Wii and who would actually want to make games for the platform to farm them out to.

[broodwars]

Microsoft openly abandoned the Xbox a good 5 or 6 months before Xbox 360 released (I think they even said they were ceasing support), and third parties followed suit. Sony was different with the PS2 because it dominated and was close enough to GCN and XBX to get easy ports.

Alright, let's compare and contrast then, shall we?  You say Microsoft checked out on the original Xbox 5-6 months before the 360 launched.  Nintendo, by comparison, checked out on the Wii early last year, and by the time the Wii U likely launches it'll be nearly 2 years.

The whole thing with NoA just strikes me as analogous to something you sometimes see in sports: the team that tanks the rest of the season, deliberately not putting their best talent on the floor.  Sometimes it's to rest that talent for the playoffs (i.e. preparing for the next console).  Sometimes it's to secure a better draft pick because their season has gone so poorly that there's no real point to winning anymore (i.e. "not having the resources" to keep games coming out on a platform you think it's pointless to support").

At least in sports, though, teams don't have the luxury of always putting the team they want on the floor.  Rain or shine, you put the team you have on the floor.  Nintendo of America, though, at game time prefers to walk over to the other team and forfeit because they don't believe they have the talent to win (i.e. the resources to make new Wii games), and they don't want to put out the team they have (i.e. release games that may not be the most profitable, but are all they have to release just to keep the system alive).

Sure, there may be benefit in the end to the team that tanks, but that puts an awful lot of pressure on your fans to have faith that the benefit will be worth the sacrifice.  You sometimes lose fans that way, and sometimes the management is too incompetent to make the most of that benefit.

And if you're wondering why I introduced that rather tortured sports analogy, the NBA season's going on right now and my team doesn't exactly have the greatest talent on paper in the league right now.  Despite that, they're still fighting, which is all I ask from them.   

[xcwarrior]

For as bad as 2011 was for NIntendo of America, Reggie needs to go. If he had any kind of spine, he should have been making phone calls to get some more titles of relevance to the Wii platform. Someone's gotta pay, and frankly it should be him.

Off with his head!

[Chozo Ghost]

Sales of the Operation Rainfall games would have been magnified by the fact there was nothing substantial to compete with them. The argument I've heard for why Nintendo has held back on its own games was so they won't compete with the 3rd party games and trounce the hell out of them. Well, in the last 2-3 years of the Wiis life Nintendo has held back on its own offerings, but the 3rd party support never materialized anyway. So even if holding back 1st party games does somehow help 3rd party game sales along, there is no 3rd party games (except Just Dance and stuff like that) so what is the point?

With that being the case, Nintendo should have went full throttle with 1st party game support. Every game they had in Japan that didn't come out here should have been brought over here and Nintendo should have pushed the hell out of it with advertising campaigns the likes of which would rival that of the presidential candidates in the November election. That's what needed to have been done. With the combination of such a massive ad campaign and the fact there was not much else to compete with, why wouldn't those games have sold? The Wii has a massive install base and 500k was sold on black friday, and that was only two months ago. So the audience is there. The potential customers are there. They just weren't given anything.

I agree with Broodwars; whether the games would have sold or not the important thing would have been if Reggie and NOA tried and did everything they could with what they had, but instead of trying and making use of what there was Reggie abandoned the system and gave it nothing at all. You can say these games might not have sold, but you know what is guaranteed not to sell? Nothing. If all you supply is nothing then you won't get any sales because no one will buy nothing from you. That is exactly what Reggie gave the Wii, though. He could have been like the heroes at the Alamo and made sure every last bullet was used in a fight to the death, but instead he surrendered to the enemy with no fight whatsoever. If Reggie was leading the defense of the Alamo it would not be remembered today as a heroic part of American history, but rather it would be an embarrassment. But this is exactly how he is running NOA.

[SuperTrainStationH]

Quote from: xcwarrior

For as bad as 2011 was for NIntendo of America, Reggie needs to go. If he had any kind of spine, he should have been making phone calls to get some more titles of relevance to the Wii platform. Someone's gotta pay, and frankly it should be him.

Off with his head!

As bad as things were in 2011? Nintendo sold more than 12 million systems last year. Even with it's "failed" launch the 3DS outsold the Wii in it's first 9 months on the market back in 2006, and speaking of the Wii, that sold more than 4.5 million units in 2011.

Reggie was instrumental in the Nintendo DS effectively crushing the PSP, which was once upon a time simply accepted amongst the "experts" to be the system that would destroy Nintendo's portable legacy, and positioning the Wii, all on its own, to sell more than 10 million units more than what was previously considered TOTAL MARKET SATURATION for the entire home game console category without even considering the many millions of consoles sold by Sony and Microsoft.

And Reggie "needs to pay" for this? You think that Reggie "abandoned the Wii"?

I think a lot of Nintendo gamers simply don't have a realistic conception of Reggie's role at Nintendo of America. He's not some dictator who can simply localize fan-coveted Japanese and European games by pressing a button and is simply "withholding" them because he "hates the fans".

Nor can he simply "make a couple of calls" to 3rd parties and magically get a lineup of high profile Wii games heading to their system.

The fact is the only calls anyone at Nintendo has been making have been to developers is to get them on board for Wii U and 3DS software. Face it, at this point the overwhelming majority of gamers save for small children and casual newcomers with any interest in what the Wii has to offer have already brought one, years ago in fact, if not in the last year for Skyward Sword.

Wii is coasting on its dozen or so "evergreen" titles while resources are dedicated to 3DS and Wii U development. Even if all the Rainfall games, which are the only "blockbuster" Wii games yet to came to North America, I'd be amazed if they managed to sell more than a few thousand new Wii consoles.

Heck, even NOA themselves are positioning Xenogears to be a niche release for the hardcore fans, rather than a chart sweeping, system selling powerhouse. I'm surprised this notion that Nintendo somehow hates gamers outside of Japan for not localizing EVERY SINGLE Japanese Nintendo published Wii game has persisted considering the Xenogears release is almost nothing but a courtesy release.

Given the way Nintendo published games have dominated the Wii (with the exception of successful 3rd party casual offerings like Just Dance), does it even make sense at this point in the game for a 3rd party to pour their resources and put a whole hearted effort into a "hardcore" Wii game having known for perhaps a full calendar year by now that the Wii is a lame duck system in the waning phase of its lifespan as Nintendo's flagship home console?

This may be hard to believe, but Nintendo doesn't base their business strategy on gambling on what might appease the fanbase and hoping they make some profit in the process.

[Chozo Ghost]

The fact is the only calls anyone at Nintendo has been making have been to developers is to get them on board for Wii U and 3DS software.

I fully understand that. I also understand it takes 2 years or so for a game to be developed. That's why at this point now anything coming out for the Wii has to be games that started out in development 1-2 years ago, and its unlikely anything new is going to be created except third party shovelware designed to exploit the enormous casual installed base.

That's not the point, though. The Rainfall games are already completed and done. We aren't arguing for Nintendo to start development on new Wii games from scratch at this point. But these games are already done and ready, so there's no excuse.

And while it is far too late to get 3rd parties on board with the Wii now because its dead, this is something that should have been done in the years 2006-2009 or so. Games which started development in 2009 would have been ready and completed right around now, so there wouldn't be this drought that there is. No one is saying that can be changed now, but its something that should have been worked on years ago and the fact it wasn't done back then when there was still time is a legitimate cause for criticism. If its the 3rd parties fault then they should be criticized for it, and if its Nintendo's fault for not doing more to get them on board then they should be criticized for it also. Most likely both are to blame to some extent.

Nothing can be done to help the Wii now, but the negligence that led to the abysmal software droughts is a lesson that needs to be learned so this won't be repeated again on the Wii U. I hope that while Reggie tries to spin this software drought in a positive way he deep down acknowledges that it really is not a good thing, because if he truly sincerely thinks the way the Wii is being neglected is a great thing then that means he doesn't see anything wrong with it and will probably repeat that again on the Wii U. In order to avoid a drought in the future the seeds have to be planted right now. Games that are to be released a few years from now needs to start entering development right now.

[UncleBob]

Have you considered that the "Operation Rainfall" titles may have had a NEGATIVE impact on Wii sales?

If Nintendo had released it in the states and pumped the airwaves full of advertisements for it... "hardcore" gamers would have still ignored the kiddie/casual Wii.  It's what they do.

Meanwhile, the casual/family gamers would have been confused by this new direction of the Wii.  What is this complicated, confusing RPG?  Is this what we can expect to see from Nintendo here out?  Oh, look at this pretty, easy to use Kinect with the fluffy animals...

When was the last time any J/RPG or RPG was given a huge advertising budget here in the states?

Never mind the fact that, as it has been pointed out to you already, only ONE of the "Operation Rainfall" titles had a chance at being released this past year (Xenoblade)...