Reggie: amiibo won’t distract Nintendo from making games
Polygon has put up another round of quotes from Reggie Fils-Aime, this time focusing entirely on amiibo. The main takeaway is how Reggie conveyed that they won’t distract Nintendo from its bread and butter: making games. Other than that, he commented more on the supply for figures and a few other areas.
All of Reggie’s comments can be read below.
On how amiibo doesn’t distract Nintendo from its main business of making games and consoles…
“You are talking about very different parts of our organization. Amiibo is really a supply chain challenge and process right now: Getting the core design, building the mold, managing the production. Our amiibo are hand-painted. So it’s a very intricate supply chain. The people involved in doing that are not the same people involved in creating the games and creating the implementation.”
On how Nintendo is launching more games over the next 6-9 months than all of last year…
“There’s no issue with our first- and second-party development. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve been to Kyoto recently, but we’ve got a whole new R&D building that is full of developers; whether they are software developers or hardware developers. So, we’re increasing our capacity to create more content. We’re focused on creating great content.”
On how Nintendo was always bullish on the toys…
“The toys-to-life category is most developed here in the United States. Early on, we challenged our internal supply chain that this was going to be big and we needed to scale it up. The fact that we had supply challenges probably says we didn’t think big enough. But certainly the demand has been exceedingly strong.”
On waves of amiibo…
“We think this category and Nintendo’s execution in the category can be significant. We are going to come out with a regular pacing of waves.”
– Waves of amiibo (the clustering of those toys around specific release dates) only happen in the Americas
– The sheer number of stores forces Nintendo to group the figures in batches when they ship them out.
“We are going to continue to launch these, there are many more figures to support,” he said. “We are going to continue to innovate with different form factors and our developers are going to continue to find unique ways to leverage the amiibo. Our developers are having fun in finding ways to leverage the amiibo functionality across all of our different games.”
– Reggie said that the company’s toys can innovate very quickly with software as a way to leverage the functionality.
“You’re going to continue to see a range of executions and range of different functionality.”
