Nintendo NX Launch Plans Will Not Repeat Wii U Mistakes

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With Wii U soon to be cast aside when Nintendo NX releases, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé has reflected on the lessons that will be learned from what will sadly forever be remembered as the company’s worst-selling console.

While sharing his belief that the second screen concept remains innovative and that the console’s game catalogue boasts several “hugely compelling” releases, Fils-Aimé admitted that there was poor communication around the product’s positioning in the wider market.

He added that they needed “to do a better job from a software planning standpoint,” in order to motivate more consumers to purchase hardware and software over time. These are seen as “critical lessons,” and apply to the wider industry rather than solely Nintendo themselves.

“Every time we launch a new platform, every time we launch a critical new game, we always learn,” Fils-Aimé admitted to [a]listdaily at E3 2016. “We always do our breakdown of what worked, what didn’t, and certainly we’ve done that with Wii U, and we continue to believe that the innovation of the second screen was a worthwhile concept.

“The games that we’ve launched on the Wii U are hugely compelling: Splatoon, Super Mario Maker, Smash Bros., Bayonetta 2, the Super Mario game, The Legend of Zelda. Arguably, if you line up all of the single platform games for Wii U and the other two platforms, we have by far the most unique games that are highly rated by consumers and highly rated by the media. So those things worked.”

He continued, “One of the things that we have to do better when we launch the NX—we have to do a better job communicating the positioning for the product. We have to do a better job helping people to understand its uniqueness and what that means for the game playing experience. And we have to do a better job from a software planning standpoint to have that continuous beat of great new games that are motivating more and more people to pick up the hardware and more and more people to pick up the software.

“Those are the critical lessons. And as I verbalise them, they’re really traditional lessons within the industry. You have to make sure people understand the concept, you have to make sure you’ve got a great library of games, and when you do that, you tend to do well.”

Nintendo has repeatedly confirmed that Nintendo NX will release worldwide in March 2017.

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  1. That would be on the “depends” list. We don’t know if the NX systems will have region locked or not.

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