Nintendo's Fils-Aime says Wii U feels 'no pressure' from $399 PS4

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has rebuffed the notion that the PlayStation 4's $399 price point will have a detrimental effect on Nintendo's Wii U, which retails at $349 for the 32GB model and $299 for the 8GB.

"It puts no pressure on us at all," said Fils-Aime in an interview with Kotaku. "Sony and Microsoft are going to do what they're going to do. My bet is that there are going to be more announcements the closer we get to whatever their launch date is."

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has recently said Nintendo is to blame for the Wii U's poor 2013 sales, but Fils-Aime says that Nintendo is going to focus on its customers rather than worry about what rivals Sony and Microsoft are doing.

"From my perspective, I can't focus on that. I have to focus on: How do we satisfy the needs of all of the consumers out there with Nintendo products? How do we make sure they understand our proposition? How do we make sure they're excited about the software that we offer? And from that standpoint we're going to let our competition do what they're going to do."

Elsewhere in the interview, Fils-Aime acknowledges that the original Wii had a launch advantage over its successor thanks to the inclusion of Wii Sports.

"I would say the big difference in the Wii launch vs. the Wii U launch is that, at the [Wii] launch we had a fantastic game in Wii Sports that really helped people understand the magic of the Wii Remote, and we had Zelda. We had Zelda there at the launch to satisfy the [core] player and when you look at what we had at the launch for Wii U, yes we had a Mario game--a fantastic Mario game that has a very strong attach rate to the hardware--but there wasn't as many opportunities for the [core] player to really get behind the system."