Iwata talks Wii success, 3D will be minor element of future consoles, third-party Wii U announcements this fall, lots more
The Indepdent recently chatted with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. The publication asked Iwata a bunch questions, and he was more than willing to provide a few juicy tidbits.
Iwata commented on the company’s first-ever operating loss, the surprising success of Wii, Wii U’s asymmetric gameplay, specs and third-parties, the future of 3D, and a whole lot more.
In the process of responding to these topics, there are a few points we’ll mention right off the bat. Iwata said that more third-party Wii U games will be announced this fall, the same time that the console’s price and release date are revealed. He also commented about the future of 3D, noting that it will likely play a minor role in Nintendo’s future systems.
Head past the break for all of Iwata’s comments. Believe me, you won’t want to miss this Q&A roundup.
Iwata on why Nintendo recorded its first-ever operating loss and what it’s doing to react…
“It’s very unfortunate that we had to record a loss and I feel personally responsible for that. My goal is that this will be the only time we record a loss. There are three factors that led this loss. First of all, we were, in terms of the console life cycle, in a console transition phase, so the fact that sales shrank during this period is actually quite normal.
“The next factor is that when we launched the Nintendo 3DS last year it lost momentum after launch, so we had to take measures and cut the price in order to avoid a failure toward the end of the year, which meant we were selling Nintendo 3DS units at a loss; these two problems we will solve this year.
“The third factor, which is outside our range of influence, is that the global economy situation is unstable and the exchange rate is very disadvantageous for us with the Yen being so strong. Obviously we have no influence over this, so we need to find a set-up at our end that will still allow us to make profit.”
Iwata on whether or not extra competition from the likes of Apple have taken away from the handheld market that Nintendo have controlled for so long…
“I don’t think this is a central factor, I think it’s much more about our lack of ability to release software in a timely matter that will motivate people to go out and buy our gaming hardware. But obviously smartphones and tablets have changed the environment that we operate in and we can no longer offer some kinds of games experiences that couldn’t also easily be offered on a smartphone, so we need to differentiate and offer something exclusive.
“We’ve seen this in the past, as personal computers became cheaper people were saying ‘we don’t need more home consoles then do we?’ Then, with the advance of mobile phones, people were questioning the need for dedicated gaming machines and now with smartphones again. Under the conditions I mentioned earlier, I think if we can offer exclusive entertainment that cannot be replicated on other devices then we’ll have the chance to survive.?”
Iwata on whether or not Nintendo will sell the 3DS XL/Wii U at a manufacturing loss…
“First of all to the 3DS XL, we will not be selling this at a loss, we don’t have a huge profit margin on it we intend to sell it a profit. As for Wii U we having even announced price so it’s too early for me to comment.??”
Iwata on whether or not there remains work for Nintendo to do on the online side of things, and the possibility of using key franchise to push online multiplayer…
“The strength of Nintendo is definitely creating game experiences for people who can play in the same room together and enjoy them together. I think this is the strength we are coming from and if you look at our games and how they’re structured; this is the starting point (for our games).
“But we also have titles like Mario Kart that are heavily reliant on online and support online multiplayer. But you shouldn’t be expecting Call of Duty-like games to be offered from Nintendo. For that type of game my belief is that, if there are companies out there who can do this very well, then instead of us try to do it this, or to compete with them, it would be better to have them do it on our platforms, so to invite them and to support them to offer this kind of entertainment on our platform.?”
Iwata on whether or not the rapid success of Wii was surprising…
“I think that the Wii offered something really new, something that hadn’t existed before. The more people knew about games, the more sceptical they were about the console; some people were thinking this would be the last console that Nintendo would launch.
“At the same time I was convinced that it wouldn’t be the last console we would launch because I felt that it had unique value. I was confident we would survive; but I have to admit that, quite honestly, I didn’t quite predict the sales that we eventually had.”
Iwata on whether or not video (seen with Move/Kinect) overcomplicates gesture control…
“I personally believe that if there is no physical feedback from the controller then that’s, for me, not good. With the Wiimote it has a certain weight, you feel like you have something in your hand, you can press and button and have this haptic feedback or can hear a sound, or it will rumble. With a camera there’s no feedback that you can feel physically. But this is just my subjective point of view and whether I’m correct or not maybe we’ll see in 10 years, I think history will tell us (laughs).”
Iwata on whether or not “asymmetric gameplay” is what Nintendo is hoping will help sell Wii U…
“Whether asymmetric gameplay will lead to a similar boom as we had for Wii is something we cannot tell at this point, we will have to release it and see how it goes. But if we look at video-game history there have been plenty of games where multiple people play together, but I think in almost all of them each player would be performing the same role.
“Asymmetric gameplay is really about “what if one person gets a special controller and gets a different role than everyone else?”. You could see some examples in the game modes that we presented in [Wii U launch title] Nintendo Land [for instance in one game, one player controls a ghost that none of the other players can see]. But I think there are many more possibilities. Our development teams have plenty of ideas for asymmetric gameplay and are proposing a lot of ideas.
Iwata on whether or not he considers Wii U to be “next generation” in terms of graphics, as say the PS4 or next Xbox will be…
“A similar topic came up when we launched the Wii, some people were comparing it to other consoles and saying: ‘Well, is this an improvement on the specs offered by competitor consoles?’ But that’s not our approach or what we define as ‘next generation’. We look at the user experience, the gaming experience, how we can improve that, change it, offer new kinds of gameplay. How we can get people to play more often, how we can allow people to connect from one living room to another living room and this is what we focus on and what, for us, makes a new generation.
Iwata on whether or not Nintendo has been proactive in dealing with third-parties…
“Yes, we have to; obviously before making the Wii U public we had to proactively go out to those third-party publishers because otherwise we would never have something for the launch of our system.??”
“I think some of these projects have already been announced at E3, but there are other games in the works that haven’t been announced yet and in the autumn, when we announce price point and timing of the launch, we will also be able to announce some more third-party titles.”
Iwata on whether or not Nintendo will be looking to take this opportunity to release a game which takes advantage of this visual horse power since it’ll be one of the most powerful consoles on the market for now (if not the most powerful)…
“I’m not against beautiful graphics, but my thinking is that unless the play experience is really rich the wonderful graphics won’t really help. I’m really looking forward to beautiful games coming out on Wii U though, with graphics that we couldn’t have done on the Wii.
“There’s definitely the chance for not only graphics, but also other features that our competitor’s consoles don’t have. But I think it will become increasingly difficult from now on to compete over graphics. This is because that no matter how much we increase the number of polygons we can display and improve the shading it will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
“Obviously people who are experts in the field will see these things and will look at some details and be enthusiastic about improvements in that field, but I don’t think that will be enough from the general consumer’s point of view, so I think when we look at the design of a new games console we need a structure and concept that offers more than just good graphics.”
Iwata on Wii U specs and third-parties…
“I think that the Wii U will be powerful enough to run very high spec games but the architecture is obviously different than other consoles so there is a need to do some tuning if you really want to max out the performance.
“We’re not going to deliver a system that has so much horsepower that no matter what you put on there it will run beautifully, and also, because we’re selling the system with the GamePad – which adds extra cost to the package – we don’t want to inflate the cost of each unit by putting in excessive CPU power.”
Iwata on whether or not we could one day watch 3D movies like Avatar on the 3DS…
“I think definitely in terms of a device to view 3D video the value is higher compared to the original 3DS. I think when we launched the 3DS there was a kind of 3D boom, which is perhaps slightly on the wane again, but there are plenty of people out there that create 3D video and I think that some of those who create and distribute 3D video would be very interested in the 3DS XL.
I think there’s a lot of potential there as we look to improve the distribution of digital content, and we also have streaming services, for example North America has Netflix; I think there’s a lot of potential in that direction.?”
Iwata on whether or not 3D on a handheld is something he wanted to explore once, but might not return to…
“Seeing things in 3D is the normal state for human beings, it’s how we see our environment. But then when we watch 3D TV we’re told we have to put on 3D glasses to see it, which for people like me, who wear glasses, is sometimes too much.
“I personally think that for TV, unless someone brings out technology where you have glasses-free very high quality TV, then there’s not a big market there. But, in terms of video games, 3D has been a topic for a long time.
“So why did we introduce stereoscopic 3D into a handheld? Because there are a various circumstances on a handheld machine which make it possible. You have the screen and the console being one, normally you have almost constant distance between [the user] and the screen, so with the currently available technology it is possible to provide a high quality 3D experience without glasses.
“So, now we’ve created the 3DS and 3DS XL and also have some games out there that are really using that 3D effect that we can see, from my point of view, that it’s an important element. But give the way human beings are, this kind of surprise effect wears off quickly, and just to have this 3D stereoscopic effect isn’t going to keep people excited.
“But I think it’s an important element, it makes graphics have more impact, it proves a sense of immersion that 2D doesn’t have, so I would say generally that 3D is better than 2D. It’s nice to have good graphics but not necessarily on their own, so I don’t think we’ll present [3D graphics] as one of the key features of our consoles but will probably stick with 3D as one of the minor elements of our consoles in the future.”
Iwata on whether or not he sees another way of improving profits to have people download all of their games via the eShop going forward…
“From my point of view, we’re not looking to digital distribution as a means to skip someone [high street retailers] and therefore increase our margin. I think it’s more that with traditional packaged products we need to produce them, ship them, there’s the stock keeping loss risk, and loss associated with products being sold out or you can have certain items overstocked.
“I think in general digital distribution will allow us to be more efficient in distributing content. I think the games that we make with this improved efficiency we can use to maintain our profitability or, even if software development costs improve for some reason, we balance it out that way; that’s what I’m hoping for from digital distribution.
“We have the example of Apple out there that’s very successful which is based on skipping the intermediates and therefore increasing profitability or lowering prices. That’s one way of approaching it [digital distribution], out way is quite different, we still think retailers are important.
“Of course there will be people who proactively go to the eShop and but products there but we cannot rely on our consumers to go there every week and check if there are new products out on the Nintendo eShop.
“I think for a lot of consumers it’s still important that they can go to a store and in-store they have a presence of our products and this is where they can be informed and then purchase our products. For us it’s still quite important to have the traditional retailers as our partners and to see how we can work together with them and involve them in the distribution model – and also for digital products.?”
