Nintendo boss apologises over Wii U’s mandatory day-one firmware update

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   December 3rd, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

The day-one patch for Nintendo’s first-ever HD console Wii U has not gone down very well with the users.

The Japan-based company’s president Satoru Iwata acknowledged the inconvenience that the console owners had to face and apologised for it.

Nintendo had been boasting a host of new features for its Wii U since the past few months, which included the novel TVii service, online streaming applications and various other network-based features.

However, as the new system was launched in North America on November 18, these services were not available out of the box.

Wii U owners were required to download a 5GB day-one firmware update, which took somewhere around one-to-two hours to download. There were some users who had to wait for as long as four hours before they could finally access their console.

Iwata admitted that he was not too happy about the requirement of a huge firmware update, wishing that users could have had an access to all the features of the system once they got it out of the box.

“Personally, I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box,” Iwata said. “So I feel very sorry for the fact that purchasers of Wii U have to experience a network update which takes such a long time, and that there are the services which were not available at the hardware’s launch.”

There were reports of bricked consoles if the Wii U firmware update was interrupted.

While users around America experienced a great deal of inconvenience and frustration due to the mandatory update that their newly bought console needed to perform, it was later learn that the users have an option of using their console to play games while the update would run in the background.

Despite the firmware update issue, the launch of Wii U in America was nothing short of successful. The demand for the console was so high that most of the retailers found themselves running out of stock in no time.

The solid impact of Wii U in the market is in contract to the predictions of the many analysts who did not see it possible for the console to compete against the likes of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, both of which already have a large install base and have similar specifications, with the latter still unconfirmed.

However, Nintendo managed to once again wow the consumers and surprise the analysts. Its tablet controller GamePad opened up the gates for new creative gameplay, whereas the third-party publishers showed a great deal of trust in the latest offering by Nintendo and did their bit for the console by releasing games for it, thus releasing its appeal.