Wired Game|Life's Chris Kohler had a chance to speak with Nintendo of America's senior VP of marketing and corporate communications, George Harrison, over his company's console plans for the rest of the year. Harrison confirms his company remains interested in digital distribution of original game titles for the Wii, but Nintendo will need to continue building its online infrastructure in order to make it a more attractive business model for publishers. Meanwhile on the DS, he believes the success of Nintendogs and Brain Age is finally encouraging companies to begin taking DS game development to a new level; Harrison notes this increase in developer support also extends to the Wii. Indeed, his optimism over the Wii will likely be the centerpiece of the interview:

There's a price point and there's the quality that's holding the PlayStation 3 back. They're selling so many PlayStation 2s because people are saying, "You know what? The graphics are pretty good, the price is good, and the library is good." So we have a great expectation that this lifecycle's actually going to last more than five years.

We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience.

[Wii production has] begun to increase, starting in the month of April. So it takes about four months from the time we want to increase it to line up the parts and the production capacity and things of that nature. So it's already begun to increase slowly, but to be honest we don't know what to expect for the fall. So we're going to make our best guess as to what we believe we should produce and try to ramp up as much as we can for the fall. But it doesn't mean we won't -- even if we're back in stock in August/September, it doesn't mean there won't be shortages for the holidays. It's a good situation to be in, although we don't want to discourage consumers too much.

Wolfwood via blog.wired.com »