Is Wii Fit just another accessory title?
Nintendo has officially announced pricing for the much anticipated Wii Fit, well, at least for their Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Plaza. Coming in at $89.99 for the package that gives you the game, the Wii Fit board, and a free t-shirt may be a little too up there for a niche title that tries to make fitness fun. I do hope this title is a huge success, and I look foward to checking it out on it’s release. But the topic of yet another title-specific peripheral being released got me thinking about Nintendo’s long-term strategy.
While I’m sure Wii Fit will be a quality game, I worry that people will simply balk at what seems like a steep price tag for a title that forces you to acquire yet another peripheral for the already accessory heavy Wii. For a system that changed the console landscape with a groundbreaking default controller, Nintendo seems hellbent on compromising themselves with game specific add-ons that don’t do much else but clutter gamers’ living rooms.
That isn’t to say that the Wii Fit board isn’t a unique product unto itself. If anything, it once again proves that Nintendo is truly dedicated to changing the way we think about games and our interaction with them. But if you look at the current cluster of accessories that have accompanied many titles in the relatively short life of the Wii, the number of peripherals consumers are expected to purchase out there is astounding.
Let’s take a quick inventory of the items that Nintendo wants you to acquire to fully experience Wii games:
- The Wii Nunchuck
- The Wii Classic Controller
- The Wii Zapper
- The Wii Racing Wheel
- The Wii Fit Balance Board
And that’s just what’s out there currently! For a console that is striving to bring more casual gamers in via Nintendo’s “Blue Ocean” strategy, it may be a bit much to ask them to repeatedly spend more and more money on accessories. Not that I’m against having specific use controllers per say, I’ve bought more than my share of light guns over the years, but the entire concept of the Wii was to have a unique and more physically interactive controller in the box with every system. It’s becoming apparent to me that Nintendo seems to be taking a step backwards by trying to adapt this groundbreaking idea to the past concepts of game controllers, rather than focus on developing new methods of controlling our games with the Wii remote. If we look at the above list, it proves my theory at least a little bit. We’ve always had racing wheels, light guns, and the classic style gamepads for just about every system; what we have never had in the history of game consoles is something as unique as the Wii remote as the PRIMARY control method. Please Nintendo, I’m begging you, start putting it to better use.
A few of you are probably saying that the first-party titles from the house of N are generally the ones that do the most to showcase the revolutionary idea of the Wii remote. When the Wii first hit the console scene, I would have agreed with you completely and pointed the angry finger at third-party developers for not fully utilizing the input methods available to them. But as time has moved on, Nintendo has become as guilty as any of their third-parties, and have begun to move in the opposite direction of what their original mission was. Granted, titles like Mario Kart Wii or any of the first-person shooters on the Wii don’t necessarily require purchasing the steering wheel or the Wii Zapper; but many of the games that use them have them in the package when they are first available. In the case of a title like Wii Fit, the balance board is required, and good luck finding a game that doesn’t need the extra degree of control afforded by the nunchuck attachment.
My point to Nintendo is simply this: stop pushing out so many accessories for the Wii. You had a great thing going with the Wii remote, and have single-handedly changed the audience that gaming caters to. Don’t ruin it by falling back on the old ways of previous console manufacturers (*cough* Sega) by asking consumers to constantly purchase additional items to play their games. In the short-term, it may seem like a great way to make players comfortable with the non-traditional input of the Wii, but if we look a few years down the road, it could lead to players simply getting frustrated with having so much clutter for one system. Casual gaming to me is “pick-up and play,” not “dig out the right peripheral for a given title in the mess of other accessories and then play.”
Please Nintendo, it’s not too late. Help me avoid having to add a “Wii Accessories Box” to my living room furniture.
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Comments
Tim Wilsie The Wii really is on it’s way to being the console with the most peripherals, and it’s kind of scary. Having the virtual console with the Classic Controller is all fine and dandy, but all of the little snap on bits that Nintendo is flooding us with can get out of hand pretty quickly.
Sleeper It will sell okay but as a product and an idea it is an epic fail. Fan boys and people that don’t have a fucking clue will eat this shit up, so I guess Nintendo may have not failed if they are just about the money.
[...] Nintendo’s vision of gaming beyond the gamepad, it would have been easy for them to throw yet “another peripheral for the masses to lap up and fill their living room with. Nintendo has done this with Wii Fit, but [...]
To be fair, the console does come with a Nunchuck bundled, but extra controllers are quite expensive.
Its cool that some of the Virtual Console Games support a Gamecube Controller, its better than nothing.
The accessory I want most is a Wiimote Holster.