Iwata reiterates no Wii U price cut; Says "it is never too late" for console to succe

February 5th, 2014, 00:15 Posted By: wraggster

Nintendo’s financial plans for the year ahead have not been designed to accommodate a Wii U price drop.
President Saturo Iwata said last week that a price drop for the console was “not an option”. Now he has told investors that the company’s business strategy for the year ahead was designed around the idea of maintaining the machine’s current RRP.
Furthermore, Iwata now admits that Wii U will never replicate the success of the Wii, and seems for want of a better term to be telling investors that Nintendo will try and make the best of a bad situation.
“Regarding Wii U, it is not easy to make a significant profit with the current units sold,” he said in a Q&A. “The price reduction of the hardware in the overseas markets represents a large amount of our total expenditure for this fiscal year, but based on the premise that we will not make such a reduction in the next fiscal year, I think our business can operate without such a negative effect on our profitability.
“It is not realistic to hope that [Wii U] will sell 100m units in the same product cycle as Wii. On the other hand, I believe it is never too late and it is possible to achieve a certain level of sales volume and a certain level of results with Wii U depending on how we write its scenario.
“Therefore, we would like to come up with a realistic scenario and turn Wii U into a platform that generates as much profit as possible.”
He also thinks that forthcoming releases will succeed where the likes of Super Mario 3D World have failed in becoming ‘system sellers’.
“In this calendar year, we will release Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros which are kinds of games that Nintendo has been particularly strong with in encouraging players to invite each other to play,” he added.
“Therefore, with these two titles as our main drivers, we would like to make sure that the markets will thoroughly acknowledge the value of Wii U, including the titles that we have released to date.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/iwata...ucceed/0127623

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