IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Opinion: Why 'Wii HD' Just Won't Happen

Posted October 19, 2010 by David Radd

It seems like I can't look around for news about the Wii without someone talking about the Wii HD. Some even think Nintendo's going to add a Blu-ray drive. Analyst Michael Pachter has been beating the Wii HD drum for a while and now he thinks Nintendo has missed the boat. Regardless of timing, I'm here to tell you it's just not going to happen and why.

 

Nintendo Says There's No Wii HD

Probably the flimsiest reason why there won't be a Wii HD: Nintendo has said that they aren't going to do it. I say this is flimsy, because game executives say a lot of stuff all the time, and they can take it all back if they want to (it's not like they're under oath). Heck, Satoru Iwata denied and brushed off claims of a Wii price cut last summer... before cutting the price early in the Fall. I think, however, there's good business sense why they aren't going to do a Wii HD.

 

Sales Aren't So Bad That A Price Cut Couldn't Fix Things

During 2009, the seemingly impossible was happening: sales of the Wii were losing momentum. The system had seen an unprecedented level of demand for nearly three years since its launch, year round. Still, when the PS3 Slim launched at $299 and outsold the Wii, the time was clearly right for a cut, and the price was reduced to $199. That, coupled with the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, helped give the system the boost it needed and the Wii had a very successful holiday season.

This year round, sales are even less than they had been in 2009 before the cut. With the launch of the Move and impending launch of Kinect, Nintendo's competitors have a direct conduit to the mainstream audience that Nintendo's been tapping into like they've never had before. All of this is certainly a reason to be concerned... but at the same time, it's not something that couldn't be fixed by cutting the price again. It's amazing how much a price cut will fix when you have demand problems, and I don't think the Wii brand is so deflated that a cheaper price wouldn't spur a rash of purchases.

Of course, Nintendo doesn't seem likely to cut the price of the Wii this year, but point is that there's probably a couple of price cuts and demand spikes still left in the Wii just yet.

 

Why it Won't be an HD Upscaler with Blu-ray

One of the suggested ways for the Wii to enter the realm of HD is to simply add a device that would upscale the images to a higher resolution, similar to what some DVD players do. This would certainly improve the way the UI looks and make everything sharper – I'm sure some people would love it.

The problem is that an upscaler doesn't address the fundamental horsepower difference between the Wii and the PS3/Xbox 360 – it'll just look less blurry on a new television. Also worth questioning is whether this would be an internal or external upgrade – an internal upgrade would be limited to new Wii units and game systems tend to see parts removed as they get older, not the other way around; an external upgrade would make it possible for all Wii units to have it, but it still doesn't seem to mesh well with Nintendo's general philosophy these days (which I'll get into below).

Also, I just want to quash the Blu-ray upgrade theory right now because I am quite certain that would never happen for the Wii. Some people think Nintendo has to do this to keep up in the entertainment media sphere, and while Nintendo has made some accommodations to streaming video on their system, physical disc playback is clearly not a priority. For one, Nintendo hasn't even enabled the Wii for DVD movie playback, so it would be a complete about-face for Nintendo to add a Blu-ray drive to new Wiis simply for movie watching.

Having established my skepticism for some more basic upgrades of the Wii, I'll douse the idea of a hardware upgrade to the Wii as we know it.

 

Expensive New Hardware

Any new hardware launch would cost Nintendo a lot of money – not only would the hardware be more expensive to build, factories would have to be changed around to make the new console, there would be the R&D spent on designing the new hardware, marketing money spent on making it a success... any way you cut it, it's prohibitively a lot of money. The Wii itself is a testament to Nintendo not wanting to spend money on this sort of expensive hardware, at least until they feel they don't have any other choice. There's also the matter of the retail price – would they charge more than the Wii and lose the price advantage that system has, or would they price it cheaper and eat the cost (something Nintendo is always loathe to do)?

This new Wii hardware would be more expensive to build and the games themselves would also be more costly. When you add more hardware complexity, it takes more people to fully take advantage of it, and development overhead can quickly go through the roof. That's the reality Nintendo would face with its own games, and once they launched it, there'd be no going back to regular Wii. Nintendo would only make such a launch when they could make the most out of it, not to satisfy some short-term sales deficit.

 

Starting From Scratch With the Established Base 

One of the biggest advantages that Nintendo can tout for the Wii right now is its established base. It hit 30 million in the U.S. in just 45 months and its worldwide total is north of 70 million. Confirmed sales for the Xbox 360 put that console at over 41 million while the PS3 has over 38 million units, so the Wii has a very healthy lead on both those consoles.

If a new Wii launches, Nintendo would have to start all the way back at square one with the base. Some may assert that they'd quickly catch up to their competition, but there's no guarantee of that, and now that there's the Move and Kinect, the Wii might be more difficult to sell if all it has is just some new horsepower under the hood. Having the Wii as it is with more power might appeal to some, but that doesn't seem like a likely strategy either...

 

(Not) Looking to Appease the Core

Some think that Nintendo might launch a Wii system with more powerful hardware to appease the core audience that has been asking for it for years. Hogwash, I say; the philosophy for Nintendo has been for a while now to reach out to a wider audience, to focus on non-gamers or lapsed gamers and bring them into the fold and it has worked out brilliantly with the Wii. 

While the Wii wasn't a leap in hardware power that some core gamers wanted, the emphasis on intuitive motion sensing games and a cheaper price have been wildly successful for the most part. I'm sure the larger audience could appreciate the difference if things on the screen looked better, but unless its radically different from what the competition is doing, they might not care. And that brings me to the final reason there will be no Wii HD: Nintendo has bigger plans in mind.

 

The “Next Wii” Will Be So Much More

As I stated above, the launch of the Move and Kinect (along with smaller price differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360) have put some pressure on Nintendo. The “easy” thing to do would be to just launch a version of the Wii with more graphical kick and a Wii RemotePlus standard... but that really goes against the “blue ocean” philosophy that Satoru Iwata has espoused since ascending to the position of CEO.

While I do believe that Nintendo's next console will retain motion sensing capabilities, its selling point will be a whole new gimmick that makes peoples eye's light up. I don't know what that technology would be, otherwise I'd be rich, but I'll bet it'll be spectacular.

I think the 3DS is a model for what the next Wii will be like – sure, it's a step up in hardware power over the DS, but it also has an accelerometer, a gyroscope and the ability to capture and display 3D images. Sure, it comes with all the basic functionality of a DSi (a likelihood for the Wii successor as well) but it's more than just a high-def DS (or “HDS,” I coined the phrase right here!). The timing is also right, given the launch of the DS way back in 2004 and the system's software sales noticeably slowing. 

At the end of the day, I think there will be a successor to the Wii console, and yes it will have HD capabilities, but it probably won't come for at least a couple more years, and it will add far more than a simple bump in processing power and resolution.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.