Thursday, November 07, 2013

"Don't Forget About Nintendo This Holiday Season"

You know what Nintendo, the hell with you. The big boys have real new hardware coming out in the next couple months; PS4 and XBox One. Interested or not, it takes a lot of work from industry and retail professionals to ensure that the respective hardware launches are seamless as possible. So what does Nintendo do? Muddy the launch windows with obsolete hardware!

WiiU basic set, you know the discontinued one, bundled with Skylanders Swap Force to make a new bundle that no one will want. Of course it has a huge box. It'll look great collecting dust along side the Deluxe model, WindWaker HD bundle, and the new standard bundle with the two Mario games. That's not enough for the big N however, as here comes the stupid Wii Mini (I shall call him mini Wii). Cheap, yeah, that's great - but no internet connectivity and no SD card slot means no cheap Netflix gaming box and no cheap cracked emulation console. And of course we're buried under the damn things. Then of course we have the rehash of Super Mario 3D Land ported over to the WiiU on XBox One launch day. Seriously Nintendo, way to make it even more confusing for your potential customers and as difficult as possible for your retail partners.  What do you think is going to take priority that morning in retail stores?  That weekend?  The top of next week?

Nintendo, you only have so much retail shelf space for your huge console boxes. There will actually be more Wii / WiiU system options than there are colors of DS / 3DS systems on the shelf currently. It makes it real easy to divert people away to look at new and old offerings from Sony and Microsoft.

Yeah, there's an awful lot of hardware in that WiiU case, too bad there's not really all that much interesting to play on it.