Iwata can’t promise “overwhelmingly rich” Wii U launch titles, proposals for evergreen titles

Nintendo has a lot on its plate right now. The company is gearing up for the launch of the Wii U. Nintendo is making software for the new console. And let’s not forget the 3DS, which also needs its own fair of support.

Because Nintendo’s resources are limited, president Satoru Iwata isn’t able to promise “overwhelmingly rich” launch titles for the Wii U. But during the company’s latest financial results briefing Q&A, he told investors that Nintendo is “making efforts so that we will be able to make several proposals even from the launch period that can eventually become evergreen titles for the Wii U.”

Iwata said:

I would like to share with you our philosophy in the game business. This is one of the remarks made by our former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and is widely known in the video game industry: “Our consumers do not want to purchase the game systems themselves but want to play with the game software.” To take this idea to the extreme, consumers reluctantly purchase a hardware system simply to play with the game software. Of course, the video game hardware systems of today embody a variety of functionalities within them and offer a lot of experiences to the consumers. As the company has already included a variety of built-in software that our consumers can enjoy as soon as they purchase the hardware even before purchasing any software, the environment is a bit different from when Mr. Yamauchi made such a remark. Having said that, however, even today, I do not think the consumers are purchasing our hardware just in order to enjoy the built-in applications. The actual situation is that our consumers happen to find out how fun the built-in applications are as a result of purchasing the game hardware system. So, the primary purpose of consumers purchasing our hardware is to play with the very well-made purchased game software that they really want to play with for themselves. As we look back, when we launched the Nintendo 3DS, we failed to prepare a software lineup which could satisfy our consumers in addition to other factors, and the Nintendo 3DS could not initially increase the sales as we had originally expected. This is why the company needed to carry out such a drastic markdown measure by sacrificing the profitability. As a result, and supported by a strong software lineup, the Nintendo 3DS was able to regain momentum during the year-end sales season of 2011. We laid out such a drastic measure by understanding that regaining the momentum which had been once lost, is much harder than trying to create momentum from scratch. Without it, the Nintendo 3DS could not have realized positive results at the end of last year or the current sales pace in Japan. It did hurt our financial results, but it was a necessary measure. So, how will we be able to use this lesson for the Wii U? There is always a limit to our internal resources. The company now has to develop software for the Nintendo 3DS, has to prepare for the Wii U launch and has to finalize the hardware functionalities. With these circumstances in mind, if I said that an overwhelmingly rich software lineup would be prepared from day one, it would be too much of a promise to make. On the other hand, we are making efforts so that we will be able to make several proposals even from the launch period that can eventually become evergreen titles for the Wii U. We have learned the lesson that we have to make that kind of preparation for the Wii U, or the Wii U will not gain enough momentum to expand its sales. We would like to share additional information at the E3 show in June this year.