Iwata on software delays, says highest-quality products needed to keep maintain consumer trust
It has been made clear that Nintendo was unable to deliver all of its intended software for Wii U on time. Nintendo has cited a number of reasons for development days, such as the difficulties in making the jump to the HD era. It’s also true that more time than usual was needed to bring some 3DS content to market.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata also pointed out during the Q&A portion of Nintendo’s E3 2013 analyst briefing that the company must polish its games to the highest level. With the popularity of games on smart devices and other recent trends, Iwata feels that “it is becoming increasingly more difficult to have consumers understand and appreciate the value that a particular game offers than ever before.”
Putting out the highest-quality products is therefore essential. Nintendo feels the need to “improve and re-polish any game that we feel is still lacking in quality.” If Nintendo were to release poor software, consumers’ trust could be lost and the brands of popular franchises could be damaged.
First, I think it is becoming increasingly more difficult to have consumers understand and appreciate the value that a particular game offers than ever before. For example, it is now common to find on smart devices a large volume of products categorized as games selling for one dollar. With countless games offered for free, consumers are far more careful than ever to decide whether it is worthwhile to spend dozens of dollars to buy one game. Under these circumstances, we feel that it is important to offer games that are even more polished than before in terms of quality to have consumers buy our products, understand the value that they offer and recommend them to others by word-of-mouth. It now requires incredibly high-quality products to satisfy consumers to the level where they feel compelled to recommend them to others; the barriers are indeed higher than before. Moreover, it is not an easy task to regain the trust of the fans of a franchise once you lose it. Therefore, it is critical for us to improve and re-polish any game that we feel is still lacking in quality. Failing to do so, we feel, would be detrimental to what makes our strong franchises the valuable assets that they are.
We had to push back the releases of some games because it has become more difficult to satisfy the quality standards that we feel are necessary for games to satisfy before they are released. It was not because it took us more time to take advantage of what is unique about the hardware. On the other hand, we have become more experienced as we continue to develop software on our platforms, and we have gradually been able to predict more accurately how long it will take a particular game to meet our quality standards. There has been a software shortage in the past two years (for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U) in the early stages of their product lifecycles because it took us time to meet our quality standards.
