Miyamoto on Wii U sales: "I’m not at the point where I’m concerned yet"

Nintendo’s design boss Shigeru Miyamoto insists that he remains confident about the Wii U’s long-term prospects.

He does concede, however, that he had hoped for a better performance than the machine has achieved to date.

I think that the Wii U still has a long future,” Miyamoto told The New York Times. We really view it as being the ideal device that families are going to want to have connected to that screen in the living room that everyone is going to gather around and watch.

Certainly in the short term I would want to see it performing with probably a little more momentum. I think in the long term I’m not at a point where I’m concerned yet.”

Miyamoto also made the bizarre claim that Nintendo has until now largely ignored the possibilities offered by an enhanced online infrastructure because the internet was simply not popular enough.

For a long time at Nintendo we didn’t focus as much on online play because for many years doing so would have limited the size of the audience that could enjoy those features,” he argued.

But certainly now we see that so many people are connected to the internet. It opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities.”