James Delahunty
16 Apr 2009 16:47
Two small pieces of news today for the world of Nintendo Wii. Firstly, ahead of NPD's sales figures for gaming consoles, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian has reported that sales of the Wii system in the United States remained steady in March, despite the large drop in sales in Japan. "Our checks in the US still indicate fairly steady sell-through, albeit within the context of some seasonal sluggishness overall in hardware," Sebastian said.
He attributes its continued success to it's easy availability on store shelves because of, "production increases put in place last summer as well as a more normalised mid-cycle selling pattern." Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted that the Wii is in its worst condition yet in the Japanese market last week, but ruled out price cuts as a response.
We also reported the launch date of the new MotionPlus controller for the Wii console. Since it has been publicized, there has been questions about the potential to use the new controller with older games, or "non-MotionPlus" titles. "There are currently no plans to make it compatible with existing non-Wii MotionPlus enabled titles," commented Nintendo.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise in any case, but at least it answers the question officially. The MotionPlus promises to deliver better accuracy, and so a better user experience, through closer tracking of user movements.