Nintendo on the timing of NX’s announcement, decision to pursue mobile, reaction
Scott Moffitt, executive VP of sales at Nintendo of America, has once again spoke about the reasoning and timing of NX’s announcement.
Moffitt told Examiner:
“Going back to the reveal, it was important for us to reinforce to our loyal game fans out there that we remain committed to the world of dedicated game platforms. We believe there is magic that occurs when you have a marriage between the hardware, operating system and game content itself. It was important for us to recommit, on behalf of our game fans, to that business. We didn’t want people to think we were migrating away from that core principle, which is we believe in the power of dedicate game platforms and we are going to remain in that business.”
Moffitt went on to talk about Nintendo’s decision to pursue the smart devices as well. He said that this space will be used as an “additive” for the company’s console business.
“We can’t deny the massive install base of smartphones out there, and some fans that aren’t old enough yet to afford their own gaming console, perhaps for those consumers they can start to appreciate some of our content and build a relationship with some of our characters and our franchises. We feel it’s going to be an additive to our console business.”
“We don’t want it to be a substitute for the kind of game experience you can get and that’s why we announced it at that time. Normally, we wouldn’t have taken that step of telling people we are working on the next system, but we wanted people to know we remain committed to the dedicated game device business.”
“Judging by our stock price, the [reaction] was very enthusiastic, but our game fans were also very enthusiastic. People also respected the fact that we remain committed to making rich, deep experiences that they can enjoy in their living room.”
Finally, Moffitt touched on how Nintendo intends to approach games for mobile devices. As the company has said before, they’re looking to make unique experiences rather than porting existing software.
“[Mobile and console] are two different types of gaming experiences and I don’t think the approach we’ll take is to just port existing content over to the mobile. That really wouldn’t be doing justice to those devices and to that experience, it’s a different kind of gameplay.”
Thanks to paidenthusiast for the tip.
