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Nintendo chief’s game recipe is no diet fad
July 13, 2007
Santa Monica: When Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, took to the stage at the E3 video games summit this week he talked about cookery, vision training exercises, brain teasers, word games and lifestyle coaching.
The latest Super Mario and Legend of Zelda adventures were left to others to demonstrate. The 47-year-old Nintendo chief is focusing on the non-gamers as his company leads the way in expanding the market with titles for its DS portable and Wii console aimed at nine year olds to 95-year-olds.
He talked to us about his strategy here. Other highlights from the interview:
On Nintendo winning the next generation war: “While we have some momentum at this point I don’t think that we have completed our goals, we haven’t succeeded with everything we set out to do. We are still looking at expanding the gaming population and we really feel we are at the entrance to this new market. The reality is you look at the sales of the DS and the Wii on a weekly basis and we are selling more than other consoles. So Reggie [Fils-Aime, US president]’s statement that we would be the leading seller is something that you can reasonably predict in the foreseeable future.”
On comparisons with Apple: “Nintendo is not a game company per se, it’s an entertainment company. As one, it looked at and saw the potential interactivity of video games as a successful product and we were the first company to hit on that product [Nintendo is the oldest surviving console company with products dating back to 1975] I want to expand the definition of a video game. In particular, why we remind people of Apple is we are not afraid to try something different and we really believe the experience our users get from interacting with a product is very important, we really value that experience. But Apple is a high tech company and Nintendo is an entertainment company and while high-tech might be a part of entertainment sometimes, it’s merely a component of entertainment rather than the focus of entertainment. We also both went through some hard times and are now seeing a resurgence."
On competitor’s high-definition products: “I have nothing against high definition, I have an HDTV myself. The reason we didn’t put it in the Wii is it would have raised the prices higher than we wanted and for the mass market audience we wanted to reach, it was too early for that component. When we do release our next console, we will look at whether it is viable and whether it makes sense in the marketplace. It’s all about timing and balance and it didn’t make sense when we were bringing the Wii out. You could say, with some of the difficulties that Microsoft is having with breakdowns in its system, that they tried to do too much too fast.
Could the Wii be a fad?: “Fads don’t have 33 continuous weeks of sell-out success, I feel if it was a fad it’s time would have passed. But people are still talking about it and looking for it and we didn’t create the Wii console to just do sports, I think we are thinking of lots of new ideas to use this functionality and keep that momentum moving forward.”
How are you making games easier?: "Nintendo has been successful at drawing in new casual users, that’s the first step. Step two would be to take a few of these casual gamers and transform them into core gamers. The latest Legend of Zelda game was launched in Japan on the DS and you would assume it is only being played by core gamers. However, we’ve made it controllable only through the stylus and the reason we did that was to try to get new Zelda fans out of those who came to the DS because of Brain Age or Nintendogs. One thing we’ve found is that we are seeing an increase in Zelda users among young women and even mothers. Zelda like a lot of franchises increased in the complexity of the game design and became more difficult to play. We are now seeing people who played Zelda at one point coming back to the franchise. So you get stories of people playing Zelda again for the first time in 10 years. So when we talk about extending the gaming population, it simply means attracting casual gamers and taking from within that group the new generation of core gamers."
