Nintendo restructure will help avoid software lineup shortages, other benefits
Nintendo’s upcoming restructure is a massive undertaking. A single development department will be created from a nearly 300 combined employees. But the payoff will be worth it.
As noted by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to investors, in 2012, “we also started a project to integrate the architecture for our future platforms.” Nintendo won’t be integrating its handhelds and consoles, but it hopes to “integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform.”
The benefits of restructuring also extend directly to gamers. Once the new division is in place, Nintendo will be able to “avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays which tend to happen just after the launch of new hardware.”
As you might already know from some newspaper reports, we will reorganize our development divisions next month for the first time in nine years. Two divisions which have independently developed handheld devices and home consoles will be united to form the Integrated Research & Development Division, which will be headed by Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director.
Last year we also started a project to integrate the architecture for our future platforms. What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine. What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform. They will also work to avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays which tend to happen just after the launch of new hardware.
Some time ago it was technologically impossible to have the same architecture for handheld devices and home consoles and what we did was therefore reasonable. Although it has not been long since we began to integrate the architecture and this will have no short-term result, we believe that it will provide a great benefit to our platform business in the long run. I am covering this topic as today is our Corporate Management Policy Briefing.
