Nearly Wii Day then

As you all know the Wii's release in the European territories Friday. Unlike sony I reckon you'll be able to walk into Comet or maybe a Curry's and pick one up off the shelf until Friday night as usually Nintendo are pretty good with their hardware and getting more on the shelf the following week.


One thing that makes me smile is the notion that Nintendo are doing anything majorly new or are taking a chance with the Wii. Nintendo, whatever you think of their games are an exceptionally well run company and they'll have done the homework on this one. They have a machine that sells at a profit resulting in games that don't need to subsidise that hardware and therefore offer a higher margin and larger return. The usual faces are here - Zelda at launch to clean up and probably on download to allow you to purchase again that which you already own. Much of the emulation on the Wii has been kicking around for a while, theres that N64 machine they produced in korea AFAIRC and it's downloaded games, the emulators that popped up in animal crossing and the GBA player for the Gamecube so most of it was there already, waiting to be used an exploited.

The controller is really nothing new - it's very much like the sort of thing that first came out on the Megadrive/Genesis to play golf games back in the early 90's, it's very much like the Golf and Baseball controllers for the Ps2 and the likes of Eyetoy have established the idea of using hands to play games on the screen. And as for fishing controllers , the Dreamcast one was the daddy there. What is new is that it's packed in with the machine thus allowing anyone to make games for it and to keep the price down. Samba de Amigo's great but was £80 new even if it was stupidly dot bombed down to 54 quid just to get some orders in for the likes of simply games. a £40 Samba would be great if it can be done on the Wii.


The one thing I massively disagree with is that somehow Nintendo are going out there and appealing to women as if thats never been done. Nintendo have always appealed to Women, Mario and Zelda appealed to women, it was these games going 3d that saw the old late 80's and early 90's crowd lose interest, as well as probably finding something important to do, like get on with life. Women like Pokemon, they liked Animal Crossing but they also like Singstar, they like Samba, they like the eyetoy games, they like the Sims and Sims 2. Singstar, Eyetoy, Pokemon and Sims have probably been responsible for more women gamers than anything else but I kind of get the impression they are ignored, seen as somehow lacking gameing credibility especially the Sims, the constant rereleases and upgrade packs are distainfully looked down upon. I get the impression that some think Nintendo's Wii pitch is somehow previously unseen genius when it's clearly not, it's just being spun that way. EA and Sony (as much as dislike much of their previous output) have done loads to encourage a different crowd to play games and deserve masses of credit for this.

That they'll make a profit on each one is the strongest part of the pitch though, they can afford to sell a machine with one game and then move on, they've made as much cash as Sony selling a machine and maybe 4-5 games. They can have a business plan that involves selling 5-6 million to their fanbase, redesign the machine to look better in 2 years time and do it all over again. Why bother trying to sell 100million consoles and all the advertising, marketing, R&D costs this runs up, the subsidies etc when you can just flog 20-30 million consoles to the same people, make £10-£20 on each one and lord alone knows how much margin on your software. Keeping stock in the shops and princing it lower than your competitors is such basic good business practise that you wonder how others simply failed to see it, certainly Sony didn't with the PSP (that and a lack of games, low stock and the smaller ipod coming down to such a price it made the psps size do anything approach look unattractive). Every machine that sells to a non or even returning Nintendo fan is a major and profitable bonus.

Nope the true genius of the Wii is in the business end, Nintendo will make millions this time round , as they always do and thats whats to be admired.