Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime says he believes that despite the Wii’s reputation as a casual game console, the company can “win over the Halo audience” with its upcoming slate of games.
Sony and Microsoft each unveiled new motion-sensing controls at E3 this year, focal points of their efforts to break into the casual gamer market that Nintendo currently all but owns. But rather than worrying about how the Wii will hold up to competition from more advanced consoles and controllers, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime revealed that the company is setting its sights elsewhere: On the core gamer.
“We think we [can] win over the Halo audience with something like The Conduit, a multi-player, online, shooting experience, or Dead Space Extraction,” he said. “And you know what? Once those people buy into Wii, they’ll go buy Mario Kart or Wii Fit Plus.”
“The near-term opportunity is the consumer who owns a PS3 or an Xbox 360 and has been bad-mouthing Wii to their friends. We can reach that consumer with games like The Conduit or Tiger Woods with Wii Motion Plus,” he continued. “The mid-term opportunity is the more mainstream consumer who saw Wii at a friend’s house but just needs a little extra incentive to get into our game. That’s what Wii Motion Plus and Wii Fit Plus and [the] new Super Mario Bros. Wii will hopefully achieve. And the long-term opportunity is that person who currently says, ‘I don’t play video games and I have no interest in playing video games’.”
He admitted that as Nintendo moves deeper into the gamer demographic, the challenges facing the company grow more difficult. “Two years ago, theoretically, there were ten consumers who said, ‘I would never play video games.’ We picked them off one at a time with Wii Fit or Brain Age 2,” he said. “Now maybe there’s five left, but now the bar is substantially higher for how to get them. Which is why we’re looking to push the envelope with something like the Vitality Sensor, and why we have to make current gamers say, ‘Huh? What is that?’ But that’s exactly the type of reaction we got a couple of years ago when we first talked about Wii Fit, and look where we are now.”
Source: CNET
