Nintendo has skyrocketed in popularity with the recent introduction of the Wii U. The Wii U seems to be gaining a stronger following than even the popular Nintendo 3DS. Don Reisinger has reported today, Nov. 26, 2012, for CNET, Nintendo: 400K Wii U units sold, 1.2M devices total. Nintendo has confirmed for CNET that the firm sold more than 1 million hardware units over the last week.
Reggie Fils-Aime, who is Nintendo of America president, told CNET in a phone interview today that during the past week, its internal data has shown total U.S. hardware sales have reached more than 1.2 million units. This figure includes the Wii U, Wii, 3DS, and DS. Fils-Aime says Nintendo sold over 700,000 consoles during the last week. The Wii U came out ahead of the Wii with 400,000 units sold. And, Nintendo sold more than 500,000 portable hardware units, including 250,000 3DS and 275,000 DS devices.
John Kinsley has reported for Wii U Daily, Pachter: Wii U to sell 3 million by Christmas 2012. Although game analyst Michael Pacther has been critical of the Wii U and Nintendo in the past, he now believes that the current “negativity” that surrounds the console will not have an impact on sales. The negativity surrounded the launch, some update issues with the console, and the fact that as usual some critics didn’t like the games.
Pachter points out, “negativity will never go away."However, he believes Nintendo will ship 3 million consoles to stores by Christmas, and that all 3 million will sell out. Pacther also thinks that Nintendo will sell 5.5 million Wii U consoles by March 2013, which is on par with what Nintendo has forecast. The hot sales in spite of some negativity about the Wii U is not surprising, since the most important critics of this game system, the game players, seem to love it.
Penis drawings for U
So the Miiverse is a Wii U app that has gotten the consumers of the new console addicted, this is most likely due to the added drawing functionality added to the instant messaging that the Wii U allows on a facebook/gamefaqs/twitter interface. Unfortunately, the filtering system is harder to legitimately integrate when it comes to finding trolls.
In the an "Iwata Asks" interview with the developers some questions were raised as to what their challenges were. What caught my attention were the remarks that the Japanese developers made when they were confronted with the challenge of finding a working auto-filtering system for unnecessary "vulgarities" when it came to pictures.
The interview really brought insight to the differences in the current north-western American culture and north-eastern Asian culture.
The following excerpt discusses the difficulties behind malicious drawers in the Miiverse:
Iwata: I agree. The unique feature of the Miiverse is being able to send drawings, not just text. But since the advent of the internet, there have always been those who have used it for unsavory purposes.
Kurisu: Right, auto-detection of bad words is very simple.
Iwata: Yes, text messages may be easy to moderate; however, drawings are much more difficult.
Yuzawa: (laughs) I think I know where this is going.
Kurisu: Let us get this out of the way then. (laughs) We anticipated that some users would draw…
Kato: Can we even say the word?
Iwata: Go ahead. (laughs)
Kurisu: Ahem, uh. Some users would take to drawing penises.
Everyone: (laughs)
Kurisu: Well, it’s true. It seems to be more of a phenomenon found in the west.
Motoyama: Yes, we never had such a problem with our Hatena services. But, when we brought Hatena Flipnote to the West, we were caught off-guard by the amount of penises drawn by people.
Kurisu: So the team and I had to come up with a way to create a system that auto-detects those types of pictures.
Kato: Kurisu-san suggested we study different types of penises in order to create figure out the relative shape and size people would draw. We spent a week doing that before we realized that we should have been looking at drawings of penises rather than real-life pictures. (laughs) We were very embarrassed about that.
Kurisu: My judgement on these types of situations is poor. (laughs)
Motoyama: After a week, we made very good progress on the system. Then we tested the system with Nintendo of America and told them to start drawing. It went horribly.
Kurisu: What we learned is that people enjoy drawing penises. Multiple ones. (laughs) The system was not prepared to handle that.
Iwata: I do not think your team anticipated how difficult this would get!
Kurisu: No. (laughs)
Yuzawa: I was disheartened myself. We spent a few more weeks trying to get a system working.
Motoyama: Nintendo of America really took the system to its limits.
Yuzawa: You know what surprised me. No one drew a single vagina.
Everyone: (laughs)
Iwata: So, in the end, it all worked out?
Kurisu: Yes, we can safely say that we have a very good system to detect penis drawings. Hopefully player’s Miiverse experiences will be a fun one!
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lmao, i can't, p. sure that "interview" has been debunked but it's still hilarious. any ontders have the wii u? personally loving nintendo land (particularly metroid blast and donkey kong's crash course). pressed as fuck there isn't an earthbound or pokemon game tho.