Summary
Nintendois already facing backlash from some bizarre decisions around theSwitch 2. From astrange variable pricing model, which has seenfans unhappy at games costing upwards of $80, to amuch-increased price of the console itself. It’s been a bit of a PR nightmare.
While current employees of the company are scrambling to clarify things, a former president has done the opposite, stirring the pot and seemingly suggesting that Nintendo should have included theSwitch 2 Welcome Touras a pack-in title.
Reggie Fils-Aimé Seemingly Questions Nintendo’s Decision To Charge For The Switch 2’s Welcome Tour
Reggie Fils-Aimé was the face of Nintendo in the West for a long, long time. From 2006 to 2019, Fils-Aimé served as the president of Nintendo of America and fronted no end of E3 showcases and Nintendo Directs. He’s a man who knows what works for the company.
Last night, out of the blue, Fils-Aimépostedthree clips from an interview onIGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat podcast, in which he seems to suggest that Nintendo is making a mistake by not including Welcome Tour for free when bought with consoles.
In the first clip, captioned “The story of Wii Sports pack in”, Fils-Aimé discusses the work he put in with Shigeru Miyamoto to get Wii Sports packed in with the Wii. “It’s an understatement to say that Mr Miyamoto pushed back,” he said. “During the development of Wii and Wii Sports, the goal was, we wanted the system to be attractive to not only the most active players, but to new players to bring them into the video game experience, and we saw Wii Sports as the way to be able to do that.”
He continues, “Mr Miyamoto said, ‘Reggie, Nintendo does not give away software for free. You don’t understand how hard our developers work to create compelling content like this.’ Fortunately, because my SNES came packed in with software, I knew the company had given it away in the past.”
It was obvious in the markets that Wii Sports was packed in, the Wii became much more of a phenomenon, Wii Sports itself became much more of a phenomenon.
Fils-Aimé then shared a second clip about how he “proceeded to piss Mr Miyamoto off again by suggesting we should bundle Wii Play with the Wii Remote,” which he was “not happy about.”
In the final clip, which Fils-Aimé titled “The Result”, he says, “It was obvious in the markets that Wii Sports was packed in, the Wii became much more of a phenomenon, Wii Sports itself became much more of a phenomenon. And we did pack the Wii Remote with the Wii Play, and it became the fifth-best-selling piece of software in the history of the Wii.”
While Fils-Aimé never outright states that he feels Nintendo is making a bad decision by not including the Switch 2’s Welcome Tour with the console, this string of tweets is so thinly veiled that even the most fair-weather Nintendo fans know what he’s getting at.
