Reggie on the Skylanders partnership, amiibo shortages, Wii U sales, more
The quotes below comes from Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime…
On how the partnership with Activision for Skylanders SuperChargers came about…
Reggie Fils-Aime: Activision came to Nintendo at the outset of Skylanders development four years ago. So there was always this thought of, wouldn’t it be great if Nintendo [intellectual property] could somehow be integrated into the game?
Jump forward to last year’s E3, when we introduced amiibo, (Nintendo figurines that work with its games) and we articulated our strategy of having figures that could work across games. At the same time, Activision shared with us their vision for their next installment of Skylanders that would include vehicles. And that’s when the conversation became serious.
On why Donkey Kong and Bowser were chosen…
Fils-Aime: Skylanders is all about creatures. So as we looked at our roster, those two fit the game. They’re much more creature-like in their gameplay mechanics and their movements, so those were the two that we agreed would make sense.
On the business strategy behind the collaboration…
Fils-Aime: It was a great opportunity for Activision to create something special that would play only on the Nintendo platforms. It was an opportunity to create these figures that would work on both the Skylanders games, as well as all the compatible games that either Donkey Kong or Bowser plays in. And so it really was an opportunity to do something unique but fit what each company was trying to do.
On amiibo shortages…
Fils-Aime: We are producing amiibo as quickly as we can and getting them out into the marketplace as quickly as we can. With the most recent wave, over about a 30-day period, we sold just in the U.S. over a million amiibo. Through the end of March, we’ve sold 10.5 million amiibo globally, more than two-thirds in Canada, the U.S. and Latin America.
There’s a huge amount of demand and that demand is even more concentrated in the Americas. It is a manufacturing process that takes some time and we had to scale up our supply chain, and it’s still scaling up to try and meet that demand. (Nintendo has said that Marth and a few other hard-to-find amiibo will be hitting shelves in limited quantities over the next few days.)
On Nintendo’s strategy in light of the PS4 and Xbox One outselling Wii U…
Fils-Aime: The time frame that these systems are sold is quite long, and right now we’re still at the very early stages of the current generation. The other piece I would highlight is this is a global business. Don’t just look at what’s happening here in the U.S. Look at what’s happening globally.
From a Nintendo perspective, we clearly have strength here in the Americas, we have strength in Europe and we have strength in Japan. That isn’t necessarily true of some of our more direct competitors. We’ve also said publicly that we are already hard at work on our next home console and that’s another element we’ll be talking about much later.
On Nintendo’s mobile games…
Fils-Aime: I can’t talk to you about our upcoming mobile games. The core construct in terms of whether a game is free to start, has in-game transactions, or costs a certain amount and you own it forever — those kinds of decisions need to be made at the time the concept is being created for the particular game.
