Iwata on the Virtual Console – looking into making games with limited resources, lack of titles with new platforms
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata opened up on the company’s handling of the Virtual Console during the latest shareholders meeting.
Iwata explained that creating Virtual Console titles “require detailed manual work, such as testing if the software runs smoothly on each platform, or making sure the content is appropriate under the various standards currently in place.” Although some fans say that Nintendo tends to release classic games slowly, it’s difficult to speed up the process since doing so would take up resources for brand new titles.
Nintendo is “currently researching how we can efficiently develop Virtual Console titles with limited human resources.” Iwata also pointed to one big issue, which is “how to resolve the situation in which we can only release a few Virtual Console titles at a time when we release new platforms.”
Read on below to check out everything Iwata stated about the Virtual Console.
Regarding your question on the scale of Virtual Console title sales, the download sales as a whole for this (75th) fiscal year are 31.3 billion yen, and I have shared publicly that this is a 30 percent increase from the last fiscal year, but we have not disclosed the individual sales of Virtual Console titles only.
Virtual Console itself is a service that began when we developed Wii so that consumers can play past titles on new platforms, and we continue to distribute various titles now. However, back when we started this service, there were some points that we could not sufficiently foresee about how big this business would grow to be and how the business would expand. For example, Virtual Console titles are generally developed based on the original game software, but this does not mean that we can develop numerous Virtual Console titles simply if we have the original game software. Development of Virtual Console titles require detailed manual work, such as testing if the software runs smoothly on each platform, or making sure the content is appropriate under the various standards currently in place. Thus, we occasionally receive opinions that our pace of releasing new Virtual Console titles is slow, but if we use much of our human resources on such detailed manual work, we would not be able to develop new titles, so we are currently researching how we can efficiently develop Virtual Console titles with limited human resources. One of the big issues for our system development is how to resolve the situation in which we can only release a few Virtual Console titles at a time when we release new platforms.
In addition, regarding the possibility of making all titles available on Virtual Console, I can say that it is possible for Nintendo titles with a few exceptions, since we generally have the intellectual property rights for such titles. However, as to third-party software publishers’ titles, if they are producing the software based on a license from another copyright holder, for example, we may not be able to easily use the same title for the system that exists now because we do not have a license from the copyright holder at the time. This often becomes a problem with reruns of TV shows or Internet broadcasting. Therefore, since we can only release Virtual Console titles of third-party software publishers if they come to an agreement with the copyrights holders upon negotiating terms and conditions that were not included in their original contract, please understand that there are some titles that we cannot easily release despite many requests. We will make our best efforts to satisfy our consumers with our Virtual Console title lineup.
