Two days after launching its next console in Europe, Wii U cedes its prominence to the announcement of Wii mini, a redesign of the previous Nintendo machine at a reduced price , without backward compatibility with GameCube, without internet and exclusively for Canada.
You don’t have to scratch the surface much to see that what Nintendo is doing with Wii mini is the same thing that it has already done countless times, especially with GameBoy, to offer a machine with a new design that can keep the sales momentum, introducing benefits at a time when no one is disgusted by a good pinch of money.
The ad makes even more sense when looking at the sales figures from last Black Friday, with a Wii U that placed 400,000 units among consumers, but a Wii that, even at this point in the movie, was very close, in the 300,000 . And beware, being a 2006 console to which the companies have already turned their backs.
It is not surprising, then, that there are doubts about Nintendo’s move, which just a few days ago announced that it would not develop more for Wii, focusing its efforts on expanding the Wii U catalog. So, why launch a Wii now mini? Why with those characteristics?
Wii mini, a known strategy
Both answers are very clear from an external perspective, understanding that if we had access to the company’s accounts, the cost price of Wii mini and the profit that Nintendo extracts from each sale, we would not be talking about possibilities, but about a fact and a truth that, although we all intuit, for the moment we do not know.
Time, however, has taught us to live with these phenomena. You will all remember how well the arrival of the PS3 did for PS2, skyrocketing sales and creating a cushion that the stumble of Sony’s latest desktop console came in handy to gain time and confidence.
Something similar happens now with the arrival of Wii U and a project like the Wii mini , which seems to respond to an identical tactical scheme. Why forget a console and a catalog that has given you so much joy? There’s no reason to put it aside, there’s still milk left in that monetary holy cow that has turned out to be the Wii.
No backward compatibility with GameCube games and what is that?
The strategy of covering the console responds to a single objective, to reduce the price to the maximum to increase the benefits . In fact, what I do not understand is that they have chosen to include the Wii Remote Plus, without scratching some figures that could have come from pearls to the whole.
There is no concern about the lack of internet and even less that of backward compatibility with GameCube, which should be noted is not something new, the same has already been done with the Wii Family Edition, which has coexisted with the classic version of the console, sold in different packs since the end of last year; And it doesn’t worry for one simple reason: Wii mini is not for us .
Its target audience is not gamers who want to get the most out of a purchase, they are people who come to the store and prefer to opt for a Wii mini that only allows them to play Wii titles instead of going for the classic version that costs $ 30 more. Not 50, not 100, only 30. But anyway, why do you want to spend more on features that, most likely, you don’t even know existed before. Wii mini is an impulsive purchase , it is the equivalent of the video game world to the chewing gum placed before departure, a purchase capable of making those who carry the box in their arms believe that it has made the business of the century.
The outdated player
With all that in mind, but once again without the numbers in hand, it would be interesting to see if Nintendo has missed a field that could have been even better for its final numbers. A Wii mini with internet could have followed in the footsteps of the PS2 and its DVD player , offering an addition to the living room in which content downloads and services such as Netflix had the option to play an important role.
The problem, once again, is that they continue to be assumptions that cannot be worked on, and discarding the internet option ends up being more intelligent than waiting ” to see what happens ” in that sense. In the end, it is something that buyers who do not trust internet security and refuse to enter their credit card number to download a game will appreciate.
Nintendo itself made it very clear in its announcement. Wii mini is a console to play Wii games, and if you buy the console now, the one that costs $ 30 less by losing capabilities, everything else matters little to you. It would be different if Nintendo decided to make room for Wii U by eliminating everything related to the classic version of Wii from the stores, but we all know that this will not happen, neither now nor before the natural course of the industry puts each machine in the right place.
Wii mini is not in direct competition with Wii U
Isn’t it counterproductive to put a machine on the market that could compete with another launch? Yes, the point is that Wii mini is not in the purview of Wii U. In fact, it would seem quite surreal to me, although not impossible, that someone with more than 300 dollars in his pocket with a rational purchase in his head, end up opting for something inferior.
In that case the idea of seeing which machine is cheaper to take home is something that only Canadian children will suffer. Christmas morning at grandmother’s house, waiting to open the Wii U package to meet Wii mini , promises to be such a funny picture for whoever is there, and the subject completely slips, as irritating for the heirs of the boy of Nintendo 64 on YouTube.
The Canada!
We’re going to launch a Wii mini and we’re going to do it exclusively in Canada . You will not deny me that the phrase has crumbs. The point is that considering Nintendo’s current priority, placing as many Wii U as possible around the world, getting into a second large-scale distribution could be sheer chaos.
It is not that in the rest of the world’s stores Wii boxes are in search and capture, there is a stock that must be gradually eliminated , and so Nintendo can test the potential of Wii mini using a probe balloon in a region that does not cause major headaches.
It is difficult not to imagine a near future, once the first Wii U purchases are normalized, in which Nintendo does not make known to the rest of the territories its intention to bring Wii mini to stores. Among other things because if the redesign turns out to be that gold mine that the company executives must have seen (otherwise they would not have dared to confuse the population with a launch that nobody was expecting or fervently wanting), limit the cake to a portion like Canada would be irresponsible.
