Iwata on StreetPass Mii Plaza DLC, downloads of new games surpass 200,000
A series of new games hit the StreetPass Mii Plaza – in Europe and Japan – as downloadable content last month. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently said that these new mini-games came out because the company felt 3DS users would be itching for new content inside the app.
Iwata also drew comparisons to Wii Play: Motion. Much like that title, the StreetPass Mii Plaza games were created by individual developers. Also, had the model been in place and digital distribution saw a rise in popularity, Wii Play: Motion could have been considered as a DLC-type package.
Iwata additionally confirmed a fairly impressive stat: sales of the new StreetPass Mii Plaza games have already exceeded 200,000 digital copies.
As you just mentioned, Nintendo 3DS incorporates a feature called “StreetPass Mii Plaza.” By closing your Nintendo 3DS system while the power and the wireless feature are on, it automatically searches for other Nintendo 3DS systems in its environment. Whenever you pass by another user, your virtual characters known as “Mii” will transfer to each other’s system. Previously we had a puzzle-piece collecting game and a very simple RPG game called “Find Mii” on offer, but after two years on the market, we knew that those who had experienced every aspect of these two games wanted something new. In a way, we have until now been trying to create an environment in users can experience the StreetPass feature, so our objective was to create something that was simple and easy to understand. But we feel that the next step for us to take is to create games that are deeper, and we have actually been working on them for quite some time. You also mentioned “Wii Motion: Play,” a product we released when we first developed Wii Remote Plus. This controller was bundled with the software, and we offered it at a competitive price point. At the time, we had various software developers vie with each other to design products that took advantage of Wii Remote Plus: it was a competition of games. And we put what they created into one package. At the time, Wii was not ready for the kind of model in which one sold add-on content separately (after a software title’s initial release). To add to this, digital distribution was not as active so we decided not to adopt this model at the time.
But we now have the environment where we can do such things, and as we considered what we could do with Nintendo 3DS, we felt that it might be interesting to expand StreetPass Mii Plaza by adopting a similar (competition-style) model that we took in the past, and I’m happy to say that the new StreetPass games are the product of our year-long preparations. As you pointed out, we only started distributing those new games a week ago, but already more than two hundred thousand consumers had purchased at least one out of those four games by last Sunday. We employed no mass-media advertising so we think we are off to a good start. I think that products like these ones will provide new business opportunities for Nintendo in the future. I take it that you are very satisfied with our new games, and we feel that if our consumers determine that the price of a particular game that we offer matches the content that it offers, then there will be more people who try our new propositions. We would certainly like to consider new possibilities for our future endeavors. Thank you for your question.
