Monday, July 8, 2013

Nintendo Explains Wii Vitality Sensor Delay

Nintendo has commented on the long delay since it last spoke about the Wii Vitality Sensor. Originally announced at E3 2009, the peripheral has become something of a running joke among Nintendo fans and hasn’t been referenced officially since Nintendo said it wasn’t good enough yet back in 2011.

Its launch has been pending because we decided that the Wii Vitality Sensor’s current result is insufficient as a commercial product.

Now, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has expanded upon those comments, acknowledging the lack of news about the Vitality Sensor in a recent investor Q&A.

“After a large-scale test of a prototype inside the company, we found out that for some people the sensor did not work as expected,” Iwata explained. “We wondered if we should commercialize a product which works as expected for 90 people out of 100, but not so for the other 10 people. Though I am sorry that we did not give any specific updates after this product’s initial announcement, I would say that knowing that a product has a problem we should not launch it for the sole reason that we have already announced it.”

“The Wii Vitality Sensor is an interesting device, and we did various experiments to see what is possible when it was combined with a video game,” Iwata continued. “But, as a result, we have not been able to launch it as a commercial product because we could not get it to work as we expected and it was of narrower application than we had originally thought. We would like to launch it into the market if technology advancements enable 999 of 1,000 people to use it without any problems, not only 90 out of 100 people. I actually think that it must be 1,000 of 1,000 people, but (since we use the living body signal with individual differences) it is a little bit of a stretch to make it applicable to every single person.”

Iwata concluded his statements about the Vitality sensor by adding that “its launch has been pending because we decided that the Wii Vitality Sensor’s current result is insufficient as a commercial product.” He also explained that “it is difficult to decide the time to announce a product” since it might face delays later, and added that “we consider that we should announce a new product when we come to a stage where there will be minimal change to the contents of the announcement in the future. The reason for this is that it would ruin the trust of our consumers if we ignore the quality finish or launch an incomplete product only to adhere to the announced launch date.”

For more from Iwata, see our interview with him from E3.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.


Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com

No comments:

Post a Comment