Nintendo might have made a right balls-up with the 3DS launch, but they’re not going to make the same mistakes with the Wii U. Well, some of them, anyway.
“Every platform we launch, every title we launch, we do a deep dive of understanding what worked, what didn’t work,” the company’s Reggie Fils-Aime tells MTV Multiplayer. “How do we take the learning and apply it to future initiatives?
“Certainly we will take learning from 3DS, both positive and opportunities, and apply all of those to the launch next year of Wii U.
“Things like the importance of digital. Certainly the importance of strong first-party support right at the launch. Those are things that we will look to strongly reapply as we prepare for Wii U.”
So digital and first-party support, but what about price? Bizarrely enough, Fils-Aime is defensive about the 3DS’s big launch price tag, saying pre-orders and “strong” first-day sales meant “the value equation was appropriate”. Which doesn’t really make sense when one considers they’ve now cut the handheld’s price by a third, because it wasn’t selling.
“This is a momentum business; we know we have to have strong momentum going into the holiday timeframe,” he explains.
“In order to address that, we’ve taken this dramatic step of reducing the price, doing it fairly early in the platform’s life, to address the value equation and to reset that value equation beginning this Friday.”
What does that even mean?
No official RRP has been confirmed for the Wii U yet, although the Wii’s quick success is credited – among other things – to its low launch price, so perhaps that’s another lesson learned.
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