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Iwata - Wii struggles with changing the relationship between the TV and the Internet, but we tried
This is a chart, which I occasionally show in the Briefings, which shows the average “number of users per household for each game system,” which is a very important barometer for us each time we conduct our gaming population research. I have mentioned this repeatedly, but a value above 3.0 is extremely unique. This is because the average includes people living alone and, unless there is a situation where everyone in the family in most of the families is playing a certain system, it is unlikely that the value will exceed 3.0. In that meaning, from the viewpoint that we were able to make a situation where family members think “Wii is not something that is not for me,” Wii has produced results following its original concept.
For your information, when Nintendo DS was at its healthiest in Japan, even the value for Nintendo DS reached 3.0, and for a handheld device, I think this is extraordinary, but now even the numbers for Wii are a bit on the downside from its best, and this is one of our challenges. More specifically, consumers were playing Wii once, but have not played it continuously. Although we had an increase in the number of users in the U.S., there was a small decline in the numbers in Japan. We had continuous growth in the number of Wii users, but we are now seeing a downward turn. In other words, we are not making a situation where users are continuing to play after their first experience. This is a big challenge we are facing.
Also for “Changing the relationship with television” or “Changing the relationship with the Internet,” we have made several attempts, but as of today, I do not think we have come to a point where we feel we have gained a definite response. Surely, there are many consumers who say, “I have never done anything like this before” or “This is my first time to experience anything like this,” and therefore, I do not intend to say that every attempt we executed was a mistake. In fact, we have made several attempts that no one has ever done before and I think we were able to make movement; however, in our scenario, we wanted more and more growth with an increasing number of people using it, and we wanted to have people keep on using it, but we fell short of this goal. In particular with Wii, for example, the challenge with start-up time when changing channels, or the current situation where we cannot automatically turn on Wii, turn on the television and change the input mode in the event that Wii receives a message, have led to challenges where we had difficulty having the users use Wii in the way we had intended. I don’t think that the concept was a mistake, but I think that Wii has yet to fulfill these concepts. - Satoru Iwata
Iwata says that Nintendo has tried to change that TV and internet relationship when it comes to Wii, but their efforts didn’t really take them where they wanted to go. Do you feel Nintendo tried to reach these goals?