Iwata on Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s success and City Folk’s disappointment, smart phones, free-to-play, more
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata opened up about Animal Crossing: New Leaf’s success – from sales to the popularity of the game’s screenshot tool – in an interview with Japanese publication Nikkei. There are other Animal Crossing topics addressed as well, such as the disappointment of Wii’s City Folk and how the team approached the 3DS game from there.
Aside from Animal Crossing, Iwata talked quite a bit about smart phones, shared thoughts on free-to-play, and more.
Read up on Iwata’s comments below.
Iwata on New Leaf’s consumer demographic…
“Using our Club Nintendo system we can learn the gender and age of our customers. If we look at the first 3 weeks of Animal Crossing sales to the end of November, the highest group is 19 to 24 year-old women. This is an age-range that is typically found in fewer numbers for Nintendo. I’ve never seen anything like it; a game that sells like this on a Nintendo hardware. However, something interesting is the gender of 3DS purchasers. If we look at the male-female ratio as a whole, it divides into 69% males, 31% female, but if we limit it to just those customers that purchased the hardware at the same time as Animal Crossing the percentages become 44% male and 56% female. These are the sort of numbers that leave me dumbfounded.”
Iwata noting that dedicated gaming machines can be worthwhile even with smart phones…
“The common argument going on right now is that since smart phones exist, there’s no need for specialised game machines anymore, right? But, these 19 to 24 year old women are the ‘smart phone people’. We often say that casual female users do not need specialised gaming machines, but here we see them reconfirming the value of those systems.”
Iwata on Animal Crossing: Wild World’s success compared to the disappointing sales of City Folk…
“On the (previous generation) Nintendo DS, Animal Crossing received high praise and shocked the world by selling more than 5 million copies [domestically], it become one of the representative games that people would buy for the system. However, the Wii version, it was highly anticipated and we released it into the world but it didn’t go very well, right? That game is, for us, one with many points of reflection.”
Iwata on the team’s approach following City Folk’s disappointment…
“At that point, the core members of the Animal Crossing team used this reflection as a spring board, saying ‘Let’s make the next game one that our customers can really enjoy’. I would go so far to say that I honestly felt a tenacity from the nuclear members of the development team. This time, there are many features inserted that make you say ‘You can do this thing?’ and ‘It goes that far?’. In addition, to add an example, the ability we added to create furniture with interesting designs and share it through various means, coupled with our customers’ creativity created an amplification of sorts. It was really interesting. What really helped to spread this around was social media, and smart phones. What really sold Animal Crossing to women this time was, without question, smart phones.”
Iwata on the popularity of New Leaf’s screenshot function…
“Because you can take screenshots anywhere during the game, people are uploading the shots to social media and say ‘Hey, look what I did’ and everyone gets excited. For example, there are plenty of people who have tried and enjoyed the game after seeing people they follow on Twitter talk about it fondly, then developing their own interest and trying it out for themselves.”
Iwata on the popularity of the Animal Crossing: New Leaf Nintendo Direct mini…
“We deliver videos called Nintendo Directs to explain about our strengths via video sites, and the Introduction to Animal Crossing video has received 1.6 million hits on Youtube. What’s more is that over half of those views have taken place from smart devices. The game became a topic on social networks, then people would say ‘Watch this and you’ll understand’ and people go ‘Well, that’s cool’ and bought it. It’s not a 3 minute music video, and so for a 47 minute video with developers talking casually about a game to have 1.6 million views is almost impossible, like really something unusual, I think.”
Iwata on how the team’s goal of creating a great game led to success…
“Not one of the developers was thinking about how many units the game would sell. They were purely focused on creating a game that the users could say ‘Yes, this game satisfied me’ and focused on improving a game series they love. And with that, hundreds of thousands of people have spent over 20,000 yen for a single game and the hardware. That’s not a method or phenomenon that many other game developers get to experience, I imagine.”
Iwata on micro-transactions and digital distribution…
“We [as an industry] can now do distribution by digital means as well as micro-transactions, and the ways to obtain money through supporting entertainment have increased. It’s a change in our landscape; competing in game-quality, and working on how money is obtained, I think both are things that require creativity. Therefore, I have no intention of denying charged [subscription?] games, or the free-to-play model. If we were to talk about if Nintendo were to do that, however, I do not much inclination to do that with Nintendo’s established well-known products, where people trust their interesting-ness. For example, for people who are used to Mario games costing 4,800 or 5,800 yen, we will not have a proverbial door to full enjoyment that can only be unlocked via payment. However, this is separate from say, having something where because there are people who want more stages to play on in Mario games, we will create new courses for those people and charge for them. We have already begun this process with some of our titles. For new titles with no established base, if, in the process of development, we found it to suit the free-to-play model, we might follow that route, or we might do something like ‘Cheap-to-play’. Our sales methods have been freed up and I have no desire to extinguish that freedom. If we were to release something like that, it is not a betrayal but the birth of an interesting idea through our new found freedom, that’s all. I am not talking about changing how we sell Mario or Pokemon.”
