The video didn’t seem like a typical Nintendo promotion. It was aimed at an audience that you would expect for Sony or Apple.
As the name implies, we’re switching a lot of things. But we have no interest in switching our customers. We have no intention of just going after a certain age group. Depending on the kind of software that comes out, families and kids will be able to play too. The titles we did show, those are games that for people who understand they will grasp it right away, but for families and kids, we want them to understand by actually experiencing it.
What are your expectations for Super Mario Run?
In terms of expectations, we all saw what happened when we delivered Pokemon Go. And honestly I was quite surprised by it myself. There’s no doubt that more people are using smartphones to play games. And as this time we’re using Mario, that’s a very important intellectual property for us. And that’s what Miyamoto’s team is working on now: making sure it spreads out just as quickly as Pokemon Go.
So our expectations are big. And as Tim Cook mentioned, more than 20 million people have already registered to receive notifications when the game is available. In terms of the game itself, you can download it and play a certain part of it, and then pay a fixed price and then play it over and over as many times as you want without having to pay anything extra. And that should give peace of mind that kids can play it. And we’re hoping that will help it become more popular.
Where do smartphones and Switch fit into your ecosystem?
There’s an image of our future that our previous president painted two years ago: we had what we called NX—which is now the Switch —and surrounding it are our businesses for smartphones, theme parks, movie-related businesses. We’re at the start—you will see various connections between our smartphones, theme parks, movie-related business, and merchandising that uses our intellectual property
