No one in Nintendo could have envisaged that nearly four years after the Wii’s launch it would still essentially be sold out across the world, with demand for the console beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. On the face of it, the Wii should not be a success – it is essentially an under-powered, non-typical games console, but thanks to the then revolutionary motion controls and a phenomenal uptake from the casual side of the gaming market, the Wii is still going strong.
However, it hasn’t been a blissfully calm ride for the Wii, with cracks in it’s seemingly impenetrable armour beginning to appear well within the first year of sales, as the initial novelty wore off, and the ‘core’ gaming market that had stuck with Nintendo for so long realised that the Wii Remote wasn’t as accurate as first thought. Throw in the misguided logic of the press that the Wii was essentially a console for everyone and not the gamer among us, and the Wii was losing it’s appeal to the ‘core’ market.
There were calls from many for the Wii to get a horsepower upgrade, the so dubbed Wii HD, to accommodate the core market more, and bring some top end titles to the system, while utilising the Wii’s existing controls. Others demanded a more in depth online system, while others demanded that the Wii be cast aside and a new system launched. Nintendo answered this by going in a completely opposite direction – the introduction of Wii MotionPlus.
Wii MotionPlus was Nintendo's answer to the critics
While this article isn’t arguing the relative success or otherwise of MotionPlus, it was the first time that Nintendo showed that the Wii was not going anywhere, and that they were planning on building on the Wii rather than scrapping it. With Wii MotionPlus, Nintendo hoped to re-spark the imagination that people had had at the Wii’s launch, and to an extent, they did, until gamers got their hands on it and once again found that while almost what everyone had imagined, it wasn’t quite as perfect as hoped. And the underlying problems of power, online, and a new problem, that of accurate control, or lack of, had not been addressed.
