Nintendo Wii Should Help Games Reach the Masses

Nintendo will be the lowest priced console on the market for the next generation videogame war. The $250 price point and $50 soft cap on games makes it an extremely appealing proposition to the mass market. For good measure, Nintendo is also the only game company that is including a free game disc, "Wii Sports," with the console. That goes a long way with consumers that are shopping for gifts this Christmas season. But more than anything else, Nintendo Wii has the potential to help the game industry reach a larger and broader demographic. That's something that could benefit the entire videogame industry going forward.

I had a chance to play a lot of the upcoming Wii launch titles in New York this week. While the jury's still out on playing a game with the motion-sensor controller for a long time, versus a short 15 to 30 minute session, Nintendo certainly has put together one of its strongest launches ever, if not one of the strongest launch game line-up of any game system. Certainly, when compared to the higher-priced PlayStation 3 and its anticipated launch games, Wii's got something for everyone from gamers (hardcore and casual) to newbies.

The Wii remote controller adds a whole new dimension to the most simple games and an extra layer of veneer to great games. It's refreshing to see the game publishers and developers who leapt aboard the Wii bandwagon find different uses for the controllers. About 40 percent of Wii's games will use a second handheld controller called the nunchuck. Using these two controllers is a seamless experience, and one that has a much faster learning curve than traditional Xbox 360 and PS3 games. A lot of games these days are designed for gamers, rather than the mass market. The Wii controllers reverse this trend, thus opening videogames to a much broader audience right from launch.

Game hardware and software prices go nowhere but down after launch. Nintendo, although a year behind Microsoft, is well ahead of the curve in the important price category. The faster a game console reaches mass market pricing, the larger an audience it reaches. That's why PS2, an old system priced at $130, outsolde the plentiful and more expensive Xbox 360 last month in the U.S. Wii starts at $250 and will drop in price, likely next year, to cater to a larger gaming audience. The difference between this launch and GameCube's is that Nintendo has great games to back the device. GameCube's price drop came out of necessity, while any Wii price break will come as the natural progression of a console's life cycle.

For a company that many experts were counting out of the game not long ago, Nintendo's certainly impressed me with Wii. It's still a long race, and Wii, even with its price difference, might not win it, but Nintendo has learned from the mistakes it made with GameCube. And that's a good thing for gamers of all ages and experience.