Today’s Nintendo Direct event showcased some cool new stuff happening in the world of Nintendo, stuff that hardcore Nintendo fans will rejoice about while everyone else is left scratching their collective heads and wondering why. The truth is, Nintendo is doing what Nintendo does best, which is, excuse the repetitiveness, being Nintendo. No one else is Nintendo right now, which has set them apart in the marketplace for the last few years and helped to propel the Nintendo Wii to become a huge, breakthrough success unlike we’d seen in gaming in a long time.

We learned about a firmware update for the Wii U, the Wii U Virtual Console launching in North America and also learned about some new titles for the 3DS and Wii U down the line. This all happens after we have Nintendo fans’ perennial enemy of the state, Michael Pachter, predicting that the Wii U’s sales will only continue to slump and that there is nothing but doom and despair in Nintendo’s future. He’s been saying this for a while now and in a business sense, he might actually be right about slumping sales and the Wii U not competing all that well against other consoles. That being said, no one likes a killjoy.

These new announcements from Nintendo aren’t groundbreaking, they aren’t going to make the Wii U sales surge to the top, but then again, they won’t drive Nintendo into bankruptcy, either. Nintendo has always been about providing a good user experience and for just being about fun. At the end of the day, releasing another patch for the Wii U that will improve the end user experience is a great step forward, as is finally launching the Virtual Console. The Virtual Console might not be for everyone, but for nostalgia fans or parents looking to introduce their children to some of the games that they loved growing up, it is an easy and compact way to do so.

Nintendo’s “more of the same” might feel stagnant and like a losing strategy to some, but in a way, it is almost like Nintendo is refusing to compete and are simply happy to create and sell the products that they want to sell to the audience that is happy to buy them. In a world full of cut throat competition and game companies making drastic cuts left and right, Nintendo is sticking to their guns and seem content to keep their customer base happy, which at the end of the day is what matters. We might see mega-companies like EA talk about profits and how hard they can push to make more money, but they also get voted on as the Worst Company in America, while Nintendo fans stick up for them all over the world.

So the Wii U isn’t going to take over the world this generation and Nintendo’s strategy moving forward isn’t to crush anyone. If you are a fan of Nintendo, though, you’ll get some cool new games and your Wii U will function a bit more smoothly, which really feels like the endgame for playing videogames.


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Dave Walsh

Dave Walsh is a well-known combat sports journalist specializing in Kickboxing and also works as a freelance journalist specializing in gaming and entertainment.
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