Nintendo: Kinect not cannibalising Wii

Saturo Iwata has claimed that there’s no evidence that the success of Xbox 360 Kinect has played a part in the slowing of international Wii hardware sales.

"When we talk about whether Kinect contributed to significantly expanding the number of Xbox users, the number of Wii users has grown to about 10m, but the growth in the number of Microsoft users is much smaller," the Nintendo president told investors.

"Therefore, we feel that it would be rather unusual if Nintendo’s Wii market was taken over by the launch of Kinect, or if the users who were playing with Wii quit playing with it and started to play with other consoles.

"Of course, many users in the US have multiple consoles at their homes. Many Wii users also have Xbox 360 and vice versa, so I am not saying that there is completely no effect in terms of use rate.

"However, hit titles are not being released continually every month for Kinect software, so we don’t believe Wii sales are being seriously affected."