Nintendo of America executive vice-president of sales and marketing Scott Moffitt spoke on the Wii U’s future during E3 2014, saying that the games Nintendo showed at the event will right the once floundering system.
The Wii U will likely mirror the success of the 3DS, Moffit suggests, which began its reign of the handheld market just a few years ago.
“We had the price cut [for 3DS] in August [2011], and then we had Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, which really drove sales that first holiday, and on 3DS we haven’t looked back,” Moffitt told GamesIndustry International. “So we’ve had momentum ever since that first holiday and we’ve got now 260 some games in the library and some of the best, highest rated, highest quality content we’ve ever had on that platform.
“Everything we launched seems to do above forecast and surprises us on the positive side.”
Moffitt expects the new features and software currently coming down the pipe will do the same to revitalize the Wii U.
“As I look at what we have coming this holiday, now with Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., plus the innovation of Amiibo, I think we are right at that tipping point where we have a lot of great content that’s going to tempt gamers into buying the system,” he said.
Amiibo, Nintendo’s answer to the runaway popularity of Skylanders and Disney Infinity figures, allows Wii U owners to incorporate Nintendo icons into their games by way of NFC (near-field tech) figures. Uniquely, Amiibo figures store data and act as veritable memory cards for some games, most notably the next Super Smash Bros.
True to the fiscal projections Nintendo gave earlier this year, Moffit expects the next Super Smash Bros. to be a pillar for the Wii U.
"From the comments I'm reading online, and following gamers' comments, I think there are a lot of people that are going to have a hard time resisting buying a Wii U once Smash Bros comes out. I think that's going to be a major hardware driver for us.”
“We think GamePad is the only innovation that’s come in this new generation of consoles,” he added, dismissing visual fidelity as a byproduct of improvement, not improvement itself.
Those are big words for any studio, and before E3 2014 Nintendo didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making good on them. However, the fresh thinking and games that they brought to the stage lend Moffitt’s claims more than a bit of merit. For now, though, we can only wait and see what the Wii U can do.
