Shigeru Miyamoto weighs in on the power of the Wii U and how Nintendo is approaching its hardware as it tries to attract core gamers to its new console.
Several third party developers have commented on the power of the Wii U, but now we have a couple statements from the man himself, Nintendo’s senior managing director and creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto. GameSpot sat down with Miyamoto at E3 and quizzed him on a number of subjects, including the iPad, Pikmin 3, why Luigi’s Mansion is on the 3DS, and the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series. Most interesting were his answers on how Nintendo is approaching the power of the Wii U and how it impacts price. His comments are a few paragraphs long.
“Nintendo is an entertainment company,” said Miyamoto. “We’re very sensitive to pricing because people have generally only a certain amount of their spending that they’ll devote to entertainment. And if you’re talking about parents buying something for kids, there are certain price points where parents may be willing to or not willing to purchase a certain product.”
“But at the same time, you have these technological advances, and you have the needs of being able to take advantage of that technology, and those result in increasing costs and things like that. And so I think that in terms of companies that really look very carefully at what is the best balance between price and possibility in terms of the hardware, Nintendo is the company that’s going to probably pay the most attention to striking that right balance.”
“So when you look at what we’re trying to do this time, which is I think maybe to a certain degree somewhat reckless, because we’re trying to include this somewhat kind of tablet-like device–this controller with the screen. We’re trying to do that by finding the right balance between the CPU and the GPU, the graphics processor, and bringing all of that together with the ability to take advantage of the HD capabilities of the system, and wanting to do the most that we can on that front as well.”
“We’re very sensitive, of course, to trying to do all of this at an appropriate price. So I don’t know that we would be able to sit here and say that it’s going to necessarily dramatically outperform the systems that are out now. It’s part of the balance that we strike in terms of trying to find entertainment that is new and unique.”
It’s good to see that the Wii U will definitely have some power. For more information on the system and its capabilities, check out our official Wii U guide.
Before the massive success of Wii, Nintendo spent a decade with consoles like the Nintendo 64 and GameCube that, despite some great games, did not succeed in attracting the wide audience that Nintendo’s handheld systems and Sony’s first two PlayStation systems did. While there is definitely a sect of the hardcore gaming community that loves Nintendo-published games, the company has only achieved real success by branching out and doing its own thing. It will be telling if hardcore gamers actually decide to buy a Wii U for anything other than Nintendo games. The tastes of Miyamoto and, in turn, Nintendo seem to vary from year to year. Hardcore gamer tastes do not vary so wildly. Do you think Nintendo has a shot at the hardcore market?
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