Reggie and Iwata talk about the future of Nintendo

Oh boy. This is made to order for this website. Let’s see what their plans are.

Fils-Aime:

“Fire Emblem by itself did not change the momentum of 3DS. Fire Emblem, plus Luigi’s Mansion, plus Lego City Undercover, plus Donkey Kong Country, and now Animal Crossing. All of a sudden I’m looking at my 3DS hardware business and it’s cranking.”

Is it? Looking at 3DS sales, they don’t seem to be ‘cranking’. They seem below the DS in the West. In Japan, 3DS seems to have cannibalized other consoles than ‘grow the market’.

Fils-Aime related one other interesting note related to Wii. Nintendo’s blockbuster, motion-based console certainly had a killer-app in the form of the packed-in, free Wii Sports, but to Fils-Aime, the platform surged at a different point. “The inflection point of our Wii business actually changed when we had that sequence of Smash Bros., Mario Kart, and Wii Fit,” Fils-Aime said.

Hahahahhahahahaha. This is some revisionist thinking. While Mario Kart and Wii Fit certainly did help the momentum of the Wii, the fact is that the Wii was essentially sold out in the United States for the first three years of it being in the market.

Wii Fit franchise has the potential to be killed off by the upcoming iWatch. I don’t think that game will sell like it once did.

Mario Kart and Smash Brothers certainly didn’t create momentum for the Gamecube. Why should they do differently for the Wii U?

And, if all goes according to plan, that push will also revitalize third party interest in the platform, something that Nintendo wants (and desperately needs), but can’t win over without an established consumer base.

That is not going to happen. Third parties wouldn’t even make games on the Wii despite its massive install base. Why would they want to make games for the Wii U? Nintendo betting that the Wii U install base will be ‘more hardcore gamers’ than the Wii need only to look at how poorly that is faring for the 3DS at the current moment. DS had tons of third party games. 3DS seems empty.

“This is something really interesting about this industry. I should say that it’s also something really scary about doing business here. The existence of one software can change the entire picture.

No. The killer app will not sell a turd. It didn’t matter what amazing software Nintendo could or couldn’t make with the Virtual Boy, the hardware doomed it to failure. The same will occur with the Wii U. For example, you can see there is much activity behind NSMB U. However, the Wii U hardware is like a wet blanket suffocating that energy. No one wants to pay $400 to get to Mario. The Gamepad doesn’t offer value. And software will not create that value. The Wii-mote only cost $40 which is cheaper than the ‘regular’ Wii U controller! The Gamepad cost is like half the console itself. People don’t like the console cost being mostly absorbed by the Nintendo gimmick. They’d rather get a PS4 and full a real console.

“One game can sell the system. Having said that, I’m not sure that today, in today’s environment, if one game can sell the system,” Fils-Aime said. “Why do I say that? Again, if you roll the clock back to 2005, the gaming industry, in terms of who was playing games, was much more narrowly defined. If you look at the ESA data that was put out during that time, what it would suggest is that less than 40 percent of households played video games. Where do we sit today? That same data suggests that more than 65 percent of households play games. It’s much more diverse. I would argue that, given the increased diversity, unless the game has that same type of breadth, I think it’s a little bit more challenging for one game to truly change the momentum.”

Reggie Fils-Aime is already laying the foundation as to why Nintendo can’t make a ‘killer app’ to save the Wii U.

It’s a shame Nintendo won’t question its stupid ‘hardware/software’ integration strategy. It’s killing their business.

 Like the 3DS before it, Wii U is in a hole – one that is basically of Nintendo’s making.

Everyone keeps mentioning the 3DS. But the 3DS is still in its hole outside Japan. And in Japan, 3DS sucked the oxygen out of every other gaming system instead of expand the market like the DS did.

What a pathetic interview. Nothing was said.

It seems Iwata still believes that releasing multiple games near the same time creates a ‘crazy stir’ in people where they will all go out and buy the console.

One thing that wasn’t mentioned was the huge momentum boost to the Wii in December 2009. We all know what happened in December 2009. Hehehe.