Iwata discusses Nintendo Web Framework
One investor asked Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to explain the Nintendo Web Framework during the company’s investor meeting last week.
He did just that, responding:
I have just described “Nintendo Web Framework,” but I guess my explanation might have been a little too simple. We have publicly set forth the goal of “gaming population expansion” or “user population expansion,” but when it comes to the Nintendo Web Framework project, we are calling it internally at Nintendo “developer population expansion.” Development of games for dedicated game systems has gradually become possible only for large-scale development teams. The best situation for a game platform is one where even a game developed over a short period by a small team could become very popular around the world. Many developers dream about competing to make a game for such a platform. However, recent video game machines are, in a sense, becoming rather unique systems because they require the software creators to use development methods specific to each game system, employ a large development staff and spend a considerable amount of time in order to develop a packaged software title for which consumers are willing to spend several thousand yen.
This is a conceptual diagram of developer communities. The vertical axis shows the scale of a community. On the horizontal axis, “Embedded System” on the left is a system required for a dedicated development approach and “Open System” on the right is a system widely used in the world. When you access an active website, a special program to control actions has been automatically downloaded from a server and executed. This is an example of the technologies called “Web Platform.” This diagram also has information on the population of developers for each system. Currently, the top-left “Dedicated Game System” has a relatively small number of large-scale development teams left. As dedicated game systems require a unique software development method, developers have to learn a lot to understand such a method and then make considerable efforts to create game programs for such systems. The entry levels are going up because developers need to know a lot of things before starting developing games for Nintendo 3DS or Wii U for the first time. The bottom-left “Unity” is a video game engine with a vast number of developers around the world, which can easily be used to develop games for various platforms. We have started working to expand the developing population by organizing a partnership with Unity and making this engine available to Wii U developers. “Nintendo Web Framework” that you asked about is a system we have prepared so that the more than ten million developers of the right-sided “Web Platform” can relatively easily develop games for Wii U. However, since we are currently not capable of dealing with a vast number of individual developers, we cannot go so far as to widely open development opportunities to them tomorrow. However, we are accepting ideas from any corporations which are interested in it regardless of their scale or development experience and are considering the possibility of accepting individual developers in the future. This is the first step to increase the number of developers for dedicated game systems, which we started more than two years ago and announced this March. We hope that this will expand the potential of video games. Thank you for your understanding of our strategy.
