Did Nintendo Miss the Boat?
…that’s what I’m thinking, having owned a Nintendo Wii for almost a year. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve enjoyed the games I’ve purchased and played. Mario Kart is a ton of fun, as is Wario Shake It!.
As a game system, I have no qualms. As a media center, I have several. It would be nice to see Nintendo harness the Wii’s capabilities by adding more free channels. Youtube, Hulu, and a host of other channels on the Wii would make it a true media center platform. Having a built-in method to access music from other machines on my network is also something I would very much like. Currently, there are a few third party utilities that will let you do that, but how many folks go out of their way to configure their Wii to take advantage of such features? There are 6 million Wii’s in people’s homes. Sadly, many of them are not used to their full potential.
I sense a truly wasted opportunity for Nintendo, unless they can step up soon. What do you think?
–Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
speedmarker
March 14, 2009 at 7:45 pmI agree.
I would like to see more channels, free or paid. Some video streaming channels would be nice. Seems like they would have a way to buy or win via points via playing games to be able to get more accessories for your Mii. Might spark an interest in some people if there was a way to design and post accessories for others to use.
Seems like they really haven’t leveraged the internet ability of the Wii very well. It is just there. Most people only use it for updates.
Maybe they should give away a few of the older games from their store to let people see what they are like. Might spark people to buy more classics.
What if they put the first level of new games as free downloads, so you could try a game and maybe they could spur more sales in the store. It has to be an outstanding looking game before I will buy it at the released price. I usually wait on most games till the drop in half or more. If I could play a level of the game I might buy the game at a higher price.
WorMzy
March 14, 2009 at 8:08 pmI personally don’t want my games consoles to be a media centre; I have my PC for that.
Daniel
March 14, 2009 at 8:25 pmThe Nintendo Wii was never designed to be a media centre device or at least Nintendo didnt intend for it to be used as one. Thats the reason it doesnt play DVDs out of the box. But then again in japan they lots of non-gaming channels and with demos the person before me mentioned, there is the issue of space with the wiis minimal internal memory.
Bouke van der Bijl
March 15, 2009 at 3:01 amYou should hack it: http://wiibrew.org/
Then you can change it into an mediacenter