Wargame: Airland Battle trailer details dynamic campaign
Halo 'Bootcamp' confirmed by Microsoft
Weekend PC download deals: Tomb Raider for $14
Game Dev Tycoon studio outlines future plans
Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced already has 350,000 words of new content
Microsoft: Gamers 'Graduate' from Wii to Xbox 360, Claims Wii Has 'Karaoke Machine' Novelty
by Aaron Linde, Jul 07, 2008 10:47am PDTMicrosoft Xbox 360 product management director Aaron Greenberg has reaffirmed that the company does not see the Wii as a direct competitor to its console, explaining that Nintendo's customers may eventually "graduate to an Xbox 360 experience."
"I think that there's a difference in the type of customer that is buying the Wii," Greenberg told Gamasutra. "When you think about it, there's a difference between trying to be the number one console with nine year old gamers, and being the console that offers the most experiences from 13 to 33."
"I think for us, we don't really see the Wii as a direct competitor, we actually very much complement the Wii experience," Greenberg added. "It's obviously clear that we're going head-to-head with the PS3 in this generation. I think what Xbox will be able to do as well as the Wii is grow the market."
Greenberg's statements continue Microsoft's public snubbing of the Nintendo Wii. Last May, the company claimed that the Xbox 360 was the world's top-selling "high definition gaming console," a phrase that nicely excludes the Wii's substantial lead of 24.45M units against Microsoft's 19M.
"I think that a lot of the people that are buying that console today are not people that have generally bought consoles in the past, right? You see they're not buying games on it...it's almost like the same people that buy a karaoke machine, you know? They're not really buying it for games, they're just buying it as a novelty," Greenberg noted.
Comments
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 21 replies.
As for the digs at the Wii, they are a bit over the top, but hardly completely unwarranted. Microsoft has the highest software attachment rate to its system by far, meaning 360 owners are actually using the system to play games for it, (By comparison the PS3 is dead last, hmm I wonder if its blue-ray functionality has anything to do with that). There was also that study released which stated that the 360 has by far the highest playtime out of all 3 consoles. So yeah, perhaps the Wiii is selling millions and millions of consoles, but there is at least some semblance of data out there that suggests that it is more of a "novelty" / "toy" than an actual gaming console. People are buying them up, going "oooh aaahhh" and then putting them aside and barely touching them anymore. And for as many Nintendo Zealots as there are on this website, there are still plenty of people who are more than happy to tell everyone that they regret buying a Wii because the games such and it never gets used.
You must be logged in to post.