Nintendo’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications George Harrison has hit out at out both Microsoft and Sony for effectively copying their ideas. In an interview with Wired, Harrison said:
“So far, they [Microsoft and Sony] haven’t spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we’re having some success, they probably will.”
“We can already see some of the things that they’ve tried. For last year’s E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Piñata as their killer app for the Pokémon set. And neither of those worked really well.”
“Part of it is, I think it’s not in their DNA, They’re really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have.”
Harrison also spoke about how he sees the Wii doing. When asked where he thought the Wii would be in five years time, Harrison replied:
“We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that’s being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do.”
You can read more of the George Harrison interview, including the future of the Virtual Console, Wii Sports and the Wii supple issues, over at Wired Game|Life.
Originally Written By: Scott Webber
