PS4 and Wii U may be competitors, but President of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida has stressed that he wants to see Nintendo successful, as its formats will usher in new waves of younger gamers, ultimately benefiting the industry as a whole.
It comes as part of an IGN interview, during which Yoshida said, “When you look at the situation around Nintendo that way, do you characterize Nintendo as our competition? I think in the bigger scale of things happening in the industry or tech or people’s lives, how they play games on what device, and how they start to learn to play games, I think Nintendo and us are pretty much in the same group
“We need Nintendo to be very successful to help induct as many consumers who like to play games with controllers, right? I have two Wii Us. I play Wii U games with my daughters, because they make pretty fun family friendly games.”
That said, Yoshida feels that Nintendo missed a trick by trying to target core gamers with Wii U, but feels that the problem has started to subside. He continued, “I think success or making mistakes depends on how you set your goal. I don’t know what was Nintendo’s goal when they launched Wii U. To me, it was a bit confusing because what they do really well was create some very safe environment for anyone, especially children to enjoy games like induct those people who have never played games ever to become gamers. And they always do very well.
“To me, what they have made with Wii U was continuing what they were doing well. But the messaging when they were saying ‘we are for core gamers’ was a bit confusing. But this year I think they slightly changed their messaging, and it seems to me like they are coming back to where they are focused.”