Iwata elaborates on plans and goals for smart devices
Last week, Nintendo confirmed plans to take advantage of smart devices in a number of ways. This will demonstrate “the value of our entertainment offerings, thus encouraging more people to participate in Nintendo platforms.”
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata elaborated on the company’s plans and goals for smart devices during the Q&A portion of its investor briefing. You can find his comments in full below.
The goal of our application on smart devices is not to generate profit, at least in the short-term. The biggest point is to create consumer awareness and use that opportunity to have consumers know more about our information. As I mentioned in the presentation that people’s lifestyles have changed, we are beginning to see big generational differences in terms of how they watch TV and how often they interact with TV commercials. Consumers who acquired information only through TV or other mass media in the past now get their information through smart devices or the Internet. With the growth of the Internet, PCs and smart devices, as well as social media that enables you to see easily what others are saying, have become such important methods with which people gather information and make judgments. The key aspect is that Nintendo would like to establish a firm channel on smart devices through which we can connect with consumers. This channel will enable not only us but also third-party publishers to communicate all the fun content on Nintendo platforms to consumers. However, we cannot expect consumers to activate our application every day if we only establish a channel that is solely dedicated to advertising. We would have to make efforts to provide a channel for consumers that makes them entertained, pleased and happy in order to have them use our application frequently. The application market for smart devices is already extremely competitive, so it is generally very difficult to have consumers activate a single application on a continual basis. Perhaps it would not be too difficult to simply have people download our application and have them try it just once, but ensuring continued engagement is going to be challenging. We are determined to take on this challenge, fully understanding the situation in which we are going to place ourselves. Once we have established such an environment, however, we will be able to dramatically change the relationship between Nintendo and consumers. In addition, while we had no other choice but to use TV commercials in the past, we feel that adding such a new communication tool will be a cost-effective measure as a whole, so we are thinking about this issue in a holistic manner.
