Nintendo Admits They May 'Lose Some Purists'

njkid1 writes "GameDaily has up their full E3 interview with Nintendo of America's George Harrison, SVP of Marketing and Corporate Communications. Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience, and he doesn't rule out a Wii revision: 'It's interesting, console hardware has always historically been on a sort of fixed, sequential pattern almost every five to six years and it takes you about five years to develop a new piece of console hardware. The handhelds and portables, like Game Boy and now DS, we've always been continuously innovating, and whenever we feel like it's time or have an upgrade, we'll do it, whether it's an improved screen for the handheld or slimmed down like the DS Lite - those types of things. So it's not out of the question on Wii, but we're not even to our second holiday yet, so it's kind of premature to talk about any revisions to the hardware itself.'"

Comments

A Good Deal

[AKAImBatman]

Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience

If you lose 100,000 purists but gain 50,000,000 new customers, then I'd say the tradeoff is a pretty good deal!

That being said, I haven't seen any sign of the Nintendo faithful ditching Nintendo. Everyone who was going to leave already left during the Gamecube generation. Now some of those players are coming back, and some of them are ranting about how they're "too grown up" for Nintendo now. I imagine that Nintendo will just shrug its shoulders and move on. They're creating a large enough NEW market that they don't need to worry about a vocal minority.

Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.

When people use the term "too old" for something, they usually mean that the item in question can no longer support the person (e.g. a playground) or that it does not challenge the person at a level commiserate with their age. (e.g. Leapfrog Leapster) Thus the only argument I could see is that the storylines are too simplistic to hold an adult's attention. Which would be a good argument if we were talking about My Little Ponies. But half the games don't actually have storylines (e.g. Excite Truck, Metal Slug, Smash Bros., Strikers) and the majority of the remainder are anything but insulting. (e.g. Zelda, Super Paper Mario, Metroid, Red Steel, etc.)

The truth is that the Wii simply does not appeal to some people, regardless of the excuses they make up. Whether they used to be or not, these people are NOT Nintendo's customers any longer. Nintendo would be foolish to try and chase them around when the truth is that these customers are better satisfied elsewhere.