Sony UK boss: Nintendo decline “could be detrimental to the market”
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News | 2 Comments
Sony UK boss Fergal Gara, in an interview with Trusted Reviews, made note of how Nintendo declining “could be detrimental to the market”. Gara believes that the company caters well to the younger demographic – something Sony doesn’t focus on in a major way.
He said:
[The decline of Nintendo] could be detrimental to the market, unless people like us raise our game and help tap into the younger consumer group that they serve rather well. That is the challenge to us. We need to bring maybe more family-friendly, more casual experiences into the market. I think there’s a big market segment there that we should take the challenge to engage and I see lots of potential to do that.
Gara went on to mention that the 3DS and 2DS family of systems were collectively the best-selling piece of hardware in the UK last year:
The DS family was the bestselling format last year, despite the stellar sales of the PS4 for the last four or five weeks, it was still the best selling console or console family.
More: Fergal Gara, Sony, top
“Team Meat” got their name after Nintendo called them that in a press release
Posted on 10 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments
What happens when your company doesn’t have a name yet, but you’re trying to release a game on a proper video game platform? If the platform-holder is Nintendo, apparently they just make up a name for you! The following comes from Team Meat’s (Super Meat Boy dev) Edmund McMillen:
We didn’t name ourselves. We were just given the name by Nintendo in a random press release and we were just like, ‘Yeah, okay’. Somebody asked what the names were that we thought of before and we realised that we never talked about it! We never discussed anything, we just became Team Meat. I think it’s fine — it works. I mean, it’s kind of an honour, right?
Sort of a funny tale in retrospect, since most people know that as their official title and likely assumed that it was chosen by the developers themselves. Nintendo creates another gaming icon… sort of. You can read more from the guys over at Team Meat (who are really cool) in an interview with the print/pdf version of GamesTM magazine.
More: Team Meat
Amazon: “Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year”
Posted on 10 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 4 Comments
It’s weird to watch Amazon and Nintendo interact. The two companies have been at odds in the past with 3DS and Wii U sales, but occasionally something crops up that might hint at the two working together once again, only to have those hopes dashed by news of Amazon ceasing the selling of Wii Us or some other catastrophic bit of mishap. Today, however, Amazon seems to be on the positive side of the big N. Here’s what they had to say about the company’s future:
“Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year. They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.
“I think Nintendo have this [negative view] imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception,” he said. “Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done. If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.”
– Amazon.co.uk’s category leader of videogames and software Ketu Patel
So at least in the UK, and at least within the game’s division of the company, Amazon appears to be feeling more or less positively about Nintendo. That’s sort of nice, right?
Nintendo of Canada teasing something in the form of… a box
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Random | 9 Comments
Not quite sure what this is about, though I can’t imagine it ending up as something too important. In any case, we’ll be hearing more about what this box is within the next few days. You can check out the video in full here.
Nintendo was initially advised to make Pokemon more monster-like for better sales
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared an interesting nugget of information about the Pokemon franchise last week.
Initially, the company was given an indication that the creatures shouldn’t adopt the “cute” aesthetic fans have come to know of today. “This cute yellow thing is not a monster, everyone told us,” Iwata said.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, however, stuck to his guns. Yamauchi was shown mock-ups of a muscular Pikachu, but it didn’t sit well with the former Nintendo president.
“When you adapt too much, you lose what’s unique about you,” Iwata concluded.
More: Hiroshi Yamauchi, Pikachu, Pokemon, Satoru Iwata, top
Iwata on the benefits of integrated hardware-software business model for Nintendo
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 3 Comments
The final topic tackled by Satoru Iwata during Nintendo’s investor briefing Q&A concerned its focus on producing both hardware and software.
At the end of the day, “pursuing an integrated hardware-software model in which we offer hardware as well as software provides us with more options in the video game industry in terms of surprising consumers.” Iwata reconfirmed that Nintendo will soon house a new building at its headquarters to allow for its hardware and software developers to work more closely developer, and Iwata hopes he will be able to “demonstrate more clearly the synergy effect that comes from developing both hardware and software.”
Read Iwata’s full comments below.
More: Satoru Iwata, top
Even more comments from Iwata about character licensing, won’t license Mario to another company for a Mario game
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 1 Comment
Even more comments from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata have come in regarding plans for character licensing. Chief among them is a statement from Iwata in which he mentioned, “I do not envisage a scenario in which we would license Mario out to another company to make a Mario video game.”
You can find Iwata’s complete remarks below.
More: Mario, Satoru Iwata, top
Iwata further teases Quality of Life plans
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 4 Comments
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared a few more words about the company’s upcoming Quality of Life plans during the Q&A portion of its investor briefing last week. Look for his comments below.
More: quality of life
Iwata’s complete comments on potential M&A deals
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments
We recently heard that Nintendo would be open to the possibility of mergers and acquisitions. The company just put up its investor Q&A in English, so we now have Satoru Iwata’s complete comments on the matter. You can find them (plus more talk of character licensing) below.
More: M&A, Satoru Iwata
Nintendo on downplaying tech specs
Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 88 Comments
Nintendo has always been coy when it comes to technical specs. We rarely see spec sheets from the company, and we often don’t see comments about what Nintendo’s systems can do from a technical perspective.
Last week, Nintendo senior managing director Genyo Takeda spoke with investors about how “Nintendo tries not to emphasize the raw technical specifications”, instead opting to place the focus “on how we can use technology to amplify the value of our entertainment offerings”.
Takeda said, “Whether a machine is powerful or not only has meaning in the context of whether that can express itself in terms of gameplay to consumers.”
