Laurent Fischer spent last week mending fences. Why? Well, as you may have heard, the managing director of Nintendo Europe made derogatory comments about Wii owners. Specifically, when he responded to questions about gamers clamoring for additional storage space said that only “geeks and otaku” would want additional space. Fischer, the genius that he is, obviously felt 512 MB was sufficient and created a firestorm amongst gamers around the world.

Fischer has since rescinded his “geeks and otaku” remark.

Read part of his “apology” after the jump.

Fischer, rather than issue an outright apology, chose to absolve himself by suggesting that his comments were taken out of context.

“I have huge respect for those who, like me, share a common passion for Nintendo and want to make it clear that I would never use and I didn’t use this terminology in such a context or way to cause offense.”

I have not seen the entire conversation, so perhaps the comment was taken out of context. However, he was obviously referring to a group of people as “geeks.” That seems pretty offensive to me. My guess is that Fischer did not expect his comment to garner much publicity. Now he is doing his best impersonation of someone conducting damage control.

As a Wii owner and Nintendo fan since childhood, I was extremely offended by Fischer’s comment. Actually, I was pissed. I don’t appreciate Nintendo executives kicking sand in my face. It isn’t unreasonable to expect Nintendo to provide consumers with adequate storage space for WiiWare titles and Virtual Console games.

Nintendo likes to do things their own way. I get that. However, any successful company needs to be able to adapt to the needs of its customers. Clearly, WiiWare was not conceptualized when the current Wii SKU was designed. Now that the service has launched, Nintendo needs to ensure that people have enough space to continue purchasing WiiWare titles.

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