Just as we suspected, the Wii Vitality Sensor has been scrapped

One of the most maligned pieces of gaming hardware ever revealed will not now be released.

In truth, any potential release for the Wii Vitality Sensor would have come as a shock. But the reason for the peripheral’s demise has certainly come as a surprise.

After a large-scale test of a prototype inside the company, we found out that for some people the sensor did not work as expected,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told investors.

We wondered if we should commercialise a product which works as expected for 90 people out of 100, but not so for the other ten people. Though I am sorry that we did not give any specific updates after this product’s initial announcement, I would say that knowing that a product has a problem we should not launch it for the sole reason that we have already announced it.

We would like to launch it into the market if technology advancements enable 999 of 1,000 people to use it without any problems, not only 90 out of 100 people. I actually think that it must be 1,000 of 1,000 people, but (since we use the living body signal with individual differences) it is a little bit of a stretch to make it applicable to every single person.

You might be anxious that there will be other launch cancellations of products we have already announced. Indeed, it is difficult to decide the time to announce a product. If we announce a new product just before the launch date, we may hear some fans say that they cannot purchase it because the announcement was so sudden. However, if we provide too much information well before the launch date, people will become so used to hearing about it that they may even feel as if they have already played it and experience dj vu when we finally do launch it.”