Continuing its campaign to make video gamers sweat, Nintendo today unveiled a new interactive fitness title for its Wii video games console. Designed to widen the appeal of the company’s products by toning-up former sofa slobs, the group says that the game will further break down the “psychological barriers” it claims have held back the $30 billion games market.
Wii Fit will be released together with a new “Balance Board” controller, which players stand on and manipulate by shifting their weight, the Japanese group said at the E3 gaming conference in Santa Monica.
Designed to boost the perception of gaming as a “social good” — and, it seems, to tap into concerns over rising obesity levels in developed nations — the game will include aerobic and yoga-style workouts as well as activities such as virtual hoola-hoop.
It also charts each player’s body-mass index, a measure of whether a person is overweight, and can warn players whose posture it considers poor.
Nintendo hopes that Wii Fit will build on the success of Wii Sports, the first title to use the company’s motion-sensitive “magic wand” controller to make video games a more physical experience.
Advertisement
Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo games developer, said that Wii Fit had been designed to “be relevant to everyone in the household”, adding that the Balance Board would also be used in other games to allow “full body input”.
In a presentation given by the games group this morning Nintendo rolled out a string of statistics to vindicate its decision to go for consumers who would not usually play video games — especially women.
Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo chief executive, claimed that psycholgical factors have put some people off video games and are now his greatest challenge.
“New players are the most valuable prize in video games,” he said. “If their first experience is positive, they will become veterans one day — players for life. We are seeing that it is not impossible to expand the gaming population.”
Amid a surging market for gaming hardware and software, Nintendo claims to be responsible for more than two thirds of the growth seen this year, a feat it says has been driven by its market-leading Wii and DS handheld machines.
Advertisement
It added that the ratio of men to women buying its products has fallen to two to one, from an industry average of four-to-one.
According to Nintendo, the US games market is up 50 per cent since January. The UK market has gained more than 40 per cent in the same period, while Japan has surged 114 per cent.
The Wii, which is less than half the price of its two main rivals at £185, has outsold Sony’s rival PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 by a margin of at least two-to-one. Today, Nintendo said that the console had consistently been “effectively sold out” over the 33 weeks since its launch.
By contrast, Sony this week opted to cut the price of the PS3 in the US by $100 this week, to $500. A similar move is expected in the UK, where the PS3 costs about 400 pounds.
However, according to Saturo Iwata, the Nintendo chief executive, he does not his company as competing with Sony and Microsoft. Rather, Nintendo, leading a “paradigm shift” in the industry, is hoping to tear consumers away from other pastimes, such as the cinema and TV, he said.
Advertisement
But the group has not yet abandoned shooter-loving “hard-core” gamers.
Today it also unveiled the Wii Zapper, a plastic shell that holds the Wii Remote and Nunchuck controller and turns them into a gun.