Nintendo has no plans to abandon the Wii once the next generation Wii U launches in 2012. Â Reggie Fils-Aime clarified Nintendo’s stance on the two consoles co-existing, and thinks that the two will reach different and distinct audiences. Â In a recent interview with Time Magazine (via Game Informer), Reggie discusses these two consumers and why the Wii and Wii U can live happily alongside each other without cannibalizing sales for either.
“The consumer buying the Wii hardware today is going to be a different consumer than the one who will be buying the Wii U in the future,” Fils-Aime told Time. Â The Nintendo executive explained that the recent reduction in price is making the Wii a much more viable option for those that looked at the console in the past, and thought it was out of reach for their economic situations. Â “We haven’t announced pricing for Wii U, but you can definitely expect that pricing is going to be different and that the games are going to be different. Â We do believe that Wii and Wii U can coexist for some time. Â As we drive the install base of Wii, we’re really setting people up to take their gaming library and be able to transfer it over to the Wii U.
The Wii U was revealed at last year’s Nintendo E3 Press Conference where the company explained that the next generation console will be geared towards all types of gamers, and showed a company that was looking at enticing a core gaming audience back to the Nintendo family of consoles by offering third party titles that were on par with the current generation offerings from Microsoft and Sony. Â More recently, Vigil Games spoke about the ease of development on the Wii U and likened it to the Xbox 360 in a recent interview.