Nintendo thinks Wii "could get over 50%" of the North American console market.
As part of the Nintendo Media Summit festivities, Wired's Chris Kohler talked with George Harrison, NOA's veep of marketing and corporate communications. If you're inclined to see everything the two chatted about, you can do so here. If you're lazy (and we bet you are!) you can simply check out some of the highlights below.
Harrison was asked about where he sees the Wii in five years. After talking about how the PS2 still seems to be selling well despite the presence of the PlayStation 3 and how Nintendo expects the Wii's lifecycle to last more than five years, here's what he said:
"We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience."
That's a pretty lofty goal, even with the current success of the Wii. Much of that success is due to free pack-in Wii game, Wii Sports. Harrison said that the game will continued to be included with North American Wii systems through at least this holiday period, because for Nintendo "it's kind of the Trojan horse" that gets people to use other parts of the console, like the Wii Channels or other Wii games.
The situation with Wii system shortages was also addressed. Much like Nintendo has been saying all along, it is still amazed by the demand and is trying to keep up with it as much as possible. There's also the problem of "being successful not just in one territory but in every territory," so Nintendo has been trying to keep things balanced across the three major markets and other regions.
Finally, Harrison touched base on third parties seeing the light with Wii and DS development. Much how like third parties have been porting over games to Wii without much thought, Harrison said that a lot of developers "were kind of just bringing their Game Boy games and mentality" to the DS development front. It took games like Nintendogs and Brain Age for everyone to realize that there other opportunities out there. Now that the Wii is showing similar success, Harrison says, developers are "actually trying to do original things. And that's very important to us, because we needed the Wii to stand apart based on the originality of the games, not just the fact that we have a similar game available on the competitors' system."
