Nintendo’s biggest Wii related problem currently seems to be the console’s storage. Although company officials appeared rather careless with regard to this subject, things have recently took a turn for the better, at least from the gamers' point of view.
Last month, within a dialogue with UK-based Edge magazine, senior marketing director of Nintendo Europe Laurent Fischer said something extremely inappropriate, namely that only "geeks and otaku" (otaku is a word used by the Japanese for describing those with obsessive interests) showed concern about Wii storage. Obviously enough, the statement was quite upsetting to many gamers.
Later on, Laurent Fischer retracted his ill-chosen comment and Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America president, said the hype generated by the interview will lead to certain changes. He admitted that Wii storage is indeed becoming a mainstream issue and added that it will be taken care of.
No official statement has been released yet on upcoming solutions; all we know is that "a range of solutions" is being worked on. There have been some rumors about external USB-connected storage units or about an update that would allow gamers to read content directly from SD cards; however, it is pretty much anyone’s guess what will happen next.
Back when the gaming console was only able to play media on external discs, storage did not represent a discussion topic for the gaming community. Now however, when users have been given the ability to download, store and play new games, storage has become a problem.
For now, the only solutions consist in storing data on SD cards and copying and deleting data from the 512MB internal Wii storage. However, this is starting to seriously displease users as, always having to replace old games with new ones is not a very comfortable method of handling one’s media library.
The problem gets worse when taking into account the following fact: the Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 support hard drive storage for both new downloads and saved games. The Xbox for instance, comes with three internal drive options: 20GB, 60GB or 120GB.
For the time being, the Wii seems to be doing very well though; a few days back, The NPD Group's June sales figures were released and, as it turned out, Nintendo’s Wii is now leading the sales chart. With the 666,000 units it sold last month, the company has reached a total of no less than 10.9 million, since the console’s release. Although it was launched about one year before the Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has sold only 10.5 million units.
At the recently ended press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo Business Summit, Nintendo presented its upcoming console peripherals and several game titles. Perhaps some gamers would have been more interested in an announcement about the storage situation. However, the presentations of the new Wiimote pluggable peripheral MotionPlus, as well as that of Wii Speak were quite well received. The games, Shaun White's Snowboarding, Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades and the DS-exclusive Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown also matched the public’s expectations.
Some say the company has become aware of the storage problem’s importance a bit too late and that many might drop their Wii consoles and turn to its competitors before something is done. Whether or not this will turn out to be true remains to be seen.
