Shigeru Miyamoto Discusses What Went Wrong With the Wii U and His Hopes For the future

Shigeru Miyamoto Discusses What Went Wrong With the Wii U and His Hopes For the future

Allisa James July 12, 2013 4:46 PM EST

Shigeru Miyamoto has been working very hard on Pikmin 3 in order to help boost the relatively slow sales on the Wii U, and he has a very clear idea on some of the things that went wrong so far and on how the situation might improve, as he explained in part of an interview on the Japanese website 4Gamer.

Yeah, so things aren’t easy for Nintendo and the Wii U hasn’t been selling too well (laughs). The Wii U also has features like a web browser and two screens, and it’s very useful even for simply watching Youtube, but no one really uses it that way. That’s not helping speed up the system as well.

Mostly he chalked the problems to the fact that games weren’t completed in time:

Originally Pikmin 3 and Wii Fit U were meant to be part of the lineup that was coming out between January and March. Last year I did not mean for them to be completed around this time, but we had a lot of trouble with the shaders in HD. Now that we’re used to them, we should do better in the future. At the same time, hardware development was delayed. Because of that delay, the whole development environment was delayed, which also impacted the production of the games. When you produce a game, the process should not be influenced this much by the hardware, but this concurrency of problems affected the games’ progress a lot.

When asked if Pikmin 3 was given the role of spearheading the summer lineup, he expressed a positive outlook for the future of the console:

Yeah. After this there is Lego City Undercover and The Wonderful 101. We also have Super Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Mario Kart 8 further in the future. So definitely buy a Wii U soon! I’ve been waiting to see (sales) numbers catch up this summer.

Miyamoto-san seems confident that the upcoming line-up is going to give a sizable boost to the sales of the Wii U, but will it be enough? Are you considering a purchase yourself due to the titles he mentioned?

(Editor’s Note: A couple passages of the interview have been edited to provide a more literal translation)