With Nintendo sales cooling off (but still slaughtering the competition), could the company be prepping a modestly upgraded version of the Wii to boost sales? At least one analyst believes that’s the case. According to Industry Gamers, Screen Digest analyst Piers Harding-Rolls said:
Our forecast actually incorporates the idea that there will be an upgraded version of the Wii available. There is potentially significant movement to come from Wii pricing in the future. If you look at the handheld strategy they’ve got the DSi and the 3DS, so I think they’ve got room to have to this iterative version before a 2012 or 2013 release.
On one hand, his argument makes a lot of sense and it seems like sound strategy to give the Wii a boost with PlayStation Move and Xbox Kinect coming. On the other hand, dude’s an analyst. They’re right about 33 percent of the time. That’s great for baseball, but for industry analysis…not so much.
Seriously though, I’ve never heard of this particular analyst and I’m probably thinking less of his comments due to the inaccuracies of other analysts. He could be spot on. What do you think? Is Wii 1.5 on the way? What would you like to see in such a console?
What constitutes the .5 moniker? Without that I can't even entertain this guy's chance of being correct. I mean if they change the color again and add an extra wii mote does that make it a 1.5?
Lol, his prediction is completely plausible, I have nothing else. If there is a retooled Wii I would like to see some better graphics in real HD and real online multiplayer. I would buy it.
Maybe the extra .5 is the ability to play games at 720p and let the wii play dvds. Oh and adding more internnal memory. I can't see this being true. Nintendo will come out with a next gen console first. All that money coming in some of it has to be going to r&d.
When has there ever been a 1.5 console? (N64's memory upgrade?) Plus, Motion Plus would count as a 1.5 anyway.
@sandrock
If you count handhelds as consoles then you can see how this is plausible. Nintendos been running that game with the ds since 2005 or whenever it came out.
@Sandrock323 You didn't have a Genesis stack?
@Tokz
Not really. Yeah there are a lot of redesigns and added features, but can we call those 1.5s? They don't change the way we play the games or do anything to the graphics of the games. I'm questioning the feasibility of it even being possible to have a 1.5 console. If you boost the specs, then devs have to write new code for the games and it is no longer the same console. Adding motion controls doesn't sound like a 1.5 either. For it to be a 1.5 it would have to be an improved version without it becoming something else and I just don't see that as possible. (Big gray area with me)
@Ray
This is the first gen I haven't gotten the Nintendo console.
lol@32x
i had a sega cd
The 32x is perhaps the poorest purchase I have ever made. Future coffee talk, flame the worst console ever.
@smartguy Brilliant idea! I'll do that up over the weekend since I didn't post one today.