Iwata weighs in on cloud gaming again, has latency concerns
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was asked to discuss cloud gaming during a previous financial results briefing. At the latest meeting, Iwata commented on the topic once again.
Iwata has expressed concern about cloud gaming’s latency, which wouldn’t work well with Nintendo’s titles due to the company’s “strict requirements in terms of real-time responsiveness”. While Nintendo plans to monitor how the technology progresses, Nintendo has no plans to acquire a cloud gaming company.
As for your remark about cloud gaming, I believe that there are games that have an affinity with cloud gaming and games that do not. Of course, we constantly pay attention to the advances and changes in cloud gaming technology and Internet infrastructure. On the other hand, I don’t think that our games, particularly the types that have strict requirements in terms of real-time responsiveness, can offer high-quality services using cloud gaming technology because of unavoidable network latency, which I mentioned last time. We will of course continue to see how this technology develops, but in order to decide whether cloud gaming is something that we should be interested in, we will need to closely follow the changes in technology and also the business environment. However, at this point in time, I do not think that acquiring a cloud gaming company will in any way improve our performance, so we are not moving in that direction.
