Reggie Fils-Aime: Nintendo "Closely Tied" with Sony

With E3 officially over, journalists all around the internet are taking the time to reflect on who ‘won’ or did the best with their presentation.  And I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with the idea that Nintendo pretty much knocked it out of the park.  Ubisoft created controversy and disappointment with the whole ‘we don’t have the time or money to cater to half of our audience’ thing, Microsoft and Sony had very little to offer except pre-rendered trailers, EA mostly just offered behind-the-scene videos of developers talking about how excited they are for games that will be revealed next year, but Nintendo?  Man, Nintendo rocked it—they had gameplay trailers with actual gameplay, new hardware that seemed both interesting AND a little perfunctory, revealed games people are actually excited to play, and made people (myself included) actually excited for the Wii U for the first time… possibly ever.



And frankly, Nintendo knows how well it did.  At least, if the boasts of Reggie Fils-Aime are anything to go on.  Talking with the Seattle Times, the president of Nintendo of America had some uncharacteristically boastful things to say about Nintendo’s standing in the ‘Console Race’, saying;

"The dirty little secret is if you look at life-to-date numbers, between Sony and Nintendo they’d be pretty close in terms of PS4 vs. Wii U, with Xbox coming in third place. I think it’s going to be a three-horse race for the balance of this cycle."

This is surprising, to say the least.  Nintendo has said in the past that it doesn’t consider itself a true ‘competitor’ in the console market anymore—that it’s just doing its own thing and letting Sony and Microsoft do theirs.   Maybe their outstanding showing in E3 made them throw their hat back in the ring, or maybe they were just saying that to save face. Regardless, I’m not sure how true it is; Nintendo has been having serious financial woes for the past few years, while Microsoft has been boasting it’s sales figures ever since the Xbox One came out.   But then, in the same interview, Reggie Fils-Aime said their hardware sales have quadrupled since the release of Mario Kart 8.



Reggie also spoke, briefly, about why he believed the Wii U has been struggling for so long, saying...

"The interesting point [regarding the launch of the Wii U] is that when we announced the Wii U and when we announced all of the launch details, we fully expected games like “Wii Fit U,” “Pikmin,” the “The Wonderful 101” to be in the launch window. The Nintendo quality bar is really what kept us from launching those games potentially in February or March and so that’s what created the lack of software during that initial launch phase."

Which is certainly true: the Wii U’s launch had a few okay games (ZombieU, for example) and the rest were just ports of other triple-A titles from the previous generation.  Since then, the Wii U has been struggling to find developers willing to work with it—EA saying they had ‘given up’ on the console (but they quickly retracted that comment) and Ubisoft recently saying they have a whole stash of games for the Wii U they won’t release until the console starts selling better.

Either way, it looks like this MAY be the turn-around the Wii U has been waiting for—and if it is, Reggie can say he called it.