Admitting I was WRONG to Wii and Wired
About 18 months ago, I made one final prediction as a games journalist. I was at a Nintendo event, and I told a reporter from USA Today that I thought "the Wii bubble was about to burst."
The next day, Wired's Chris Kohler took me to task in an online editorial. He talked about the rise of casual gaming and the differences between the Wii audience and the audiences for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Well, clearly Kohler was right. The Nintendo Wii not only survived the rest of 2007, it was the clear winner in 2008.
What can I say? Even after nearly two decades as a games journalist and 30+ years as a video game addict, I misunderstood the market. I did not envision so much of the market choosing a console that had nothing better than Wii Music and a really solid port of the GameCube/DS game Animal Crossing for Christmas. Chris, you nailed it.
To those of you who had a merry Christmas pretending to play the tuba on your Wii, I wish you a wonderful 2009.
Back to apologizing for my mis-prediction... Since that comment may well have been the swansong of my journalistic career, I wanted to take a moment to explain why I made such a glaring mistake. As I said before, I met the reporter at an event in Seattle. Nintendo had just revealed its summer and fall lineup for Wii which included three highlights: Carnival Games; Big Brain Academy; and Pokemon Battle Revolution. As I recall, they did not let us play Metroid, but we knew it was coming. I took that as a bad sign.
This was mid-June, 2007, and Wii had been out for 18 months. Now in my experience, the 18 month mark was when you started seeing a generation of competent games for new systems, but Nintendo showed us nothing even remotely competent at this event. Well, there was Boogie, from Electronic Arts. That must have tickled some gamers' fancies.
Anyway, after 18 months on the market, Wii inventory was still nowhere near meeting demand; but the only things people were playing on their Wiis were tennis, bowling, and boxing. In other words, they were still playing Wii Sports.
At that time, I began calling the Wii the "Wii Sports Delivery System." The name was not entirely original. I was paraphrasing something an Electronic Arts executive once told me about the original Xbox. When Xbox first came out, the only thing people seemed to play on it was Halo. He took to calling the Microsoft console, "the Halo Delivery System."
But I stand corrected. I no longer think of the Wii as the WSDS, I now call it the WiiP--which rhymes with Bleep--which is what the censors would have done to my language had I woken up to a WiiP and a copy of Wii Music on Christmas morning. WiiP also sounds like weep which is what I think most real gamers are doing when they realize that Nintendo has abandoned them.
On October 6, 2006, I made some other predictions that raised the ire of Nintendo-ites everywhere. I said, and I quote:
In my mind, Nintendo is like a wonderful old friend who has a drinking problem. You like the friend, you like to spend time with the friend, but every so often bad behaviors come up and remind you that this friend has problems.
Like the old friend with the drinking problem, Nintendo is quick to fess up to old faults. "Yes, we really screwed up using cartridge format on N64. Yes, we did not support GameCube the way we said we would. Yes, we have been hard on third-party publishers in the past. Virtual Boy... oh, what were we thinking?"
And, like the old friend with the drinking problem, Nintendo bows its head after making these confessions and says, "We've learned our lesson."
Chris Kohler, you were right. Call them casual games, or as I like to say, "tragic," apparently Carnival Games and Pokemon Battle Revolution were what the masses really wanted to play. Judging by the sales of Wii Fit, people really wanted to exercise with there game console, not play games with it.
If the latest batch of WiiP games are any indication, Nintendo still acts like that old friend with a drinking problem. Nintendo has now sold nearly 50 million WiiP consoles worldwide. Compared to Microsoft's paltry 30 million Xbox 360s and Sony's 20 million PlayStation 3s, Nintendo now rules the world.
As far as I can tell, Nintendo still has the same drinking problems that worried me back in 2006, but apparently the latest generation of gamers likes dealing with a company that dances on tables and wears a lampshade over its head.
