Rather than being ruffled by the technological advances recently revealed by Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata recently welcomed both companies to the “motion-control world.”
After years of dismissing the Nintendo Wii as a lightweight toy, both Sony and Microsoft announced motion-sensing controls for their own consoles at E3 this year. The new control systems are considerably more advanced than the Wii Remote but Nintendo President Satoru Iwata nonetheless appeared very magnanimous about the whole thing. “I’d like to say to them, ‘Welcome to the motion-control world!'” he told the Times Online.
A big part of his upbeat attitude no doubt stems from the fact that Nintendo has a huge lead over its competitors, neither of which will have their new controllers out before 2010, and a massive user base that already takes motion-sensing controls for granted. “To tell the truth, I expected them to come up with stuff like this last year,” he said. “So in my mind they’re later than expected.”
“We are happy that it is now becoming an industry standard,” he continued. “However, we still have no idea about when their products will be available, or how much they will cost, or what sort of software they will be used with. So I am not in a position to judge whether they are a threat or not.”
And while the technology on display at the Sony and Microsoft E3 press conferences easily outstripped that of the Wii Remote, Iwata warned that Nintendo is very capable of coming up with a few innovations of its own. “They should bear in mind that over the next year Nintendo will not be standing still. We’re always at work on something new,” he said. “I am actually looking forward to engaging in that sort of competition, because it gives our whole industry the chance to expand the gaming population.”
