It seems like only yesterday that I was telling you about Ubisoft’s upcoming Wii FPS Red Steel 2 requiring Nintendo’s MotionPlus controller add-on. Where does the time go?

Well, today Edge reports that the guru of videogame market analysts David Pachter predicts the WMP install base could be around 10 million users in the U.S. and Europe by the time Red Steel 2 is released later this year.  Pachter and EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich also agree that Ubisoft will most likely bundle RS2 with WMP if they can in order to ensure every user can play the game right out of the box (what a novel idea).

As for overall yearly sales, Pachter predicts around eight million users will buy either Wii Sports Resort, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 or EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis, all of which come bundled with WMP. Another two million will most likely get WMP when purchasing a new console. Divnich estimates somewhere over three million WMPs sold by the end of the year, but expects that number to climb to around 11 million over the next two years.

And yet, as Pachter points out, even if eight million users buy WMPs, that’s still just 20 percent of Wii users (U.S. and Europe). What would prevent those other 80 percent from investing in WMP, especially given how much better it is supposedly going to make the overall Wii gaming experience? Sure WMP won’t work with current non-WMP Wii games (which is kind of drag in its own right), but won’t all future Wii games support the add-on, and perhaps even be WMP-required like Red Steel 2?

In other words, it doesn't look like Nintendo is really going to give Wii users a choice in this matter. That is of course unless WMP because a niche within the Wii brand, like Wii Fit. But that just seems like a complete waste of a technology that Wii users have been expecting since they first unpacked the box a few years ago.

Of course, that just leads to the bigger issue here of Nintendo’s continued insistence on poking as many holes in consumers’ pockets as it can, all in the name of “innovation”. But I guess as long as there are enough people willing to fork over the green stuff for it all, Nintendo will continue to be the dominant force in the gaming industry.

Am I right people?

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