More Q&A tidbits from Nintendo’s financial resuts briefing
Posted on February 2, 2013 by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Podcast Stories, Wii U
Cheesemeister has gone to the trouble of translating various bits from Nintendo’s latest financial results briefing Q&A. A few of the points are rehashed from quotes we covered earlier today, but there’s quite a bit of new stuff as well. Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto talk Pikmin 3, Wii U NFC, 3DS sales and overseas performance, and more.
- Iwata: Cloud gaming possible but introduces lag, therefore not suited to all game types, i.e. action.
- Iwata: Merger of home and portable console dev. groups not a move to 1 system, but sharing of dev. process, OS, pre-installed SW, assets.
- Iwata: If groups’ merger successful, it may instead allow undivided development to be applicable to more types of (Nintendo) devices.
- Miyamoto: Having 1 dev. environment would allow efforts to be concentrated on making more games rather than being lost on hardware support.
- Iwata: Some Animal Crossing New Leaf customers said on Club Nintendo surveys that their purchases were motivated by talk about it on Twitter.
- Iwata: “Asymmetric gameplay” wasn’t the best term to describe Nintendo Land, want to think of a better way to describe Wii U software.
- Miyamoto: Pikmin 3’s HD graphics are the most appealing part. Not forcing asymmetric gameplay, instead showing a map. Off-TV play enabled.
- Miyamoto: Pikmin 3 off-TV play can be thought of as GameCube-style gameplay in your hand. Wii Remote Plus’ gyro sensor can be used on TV.
- Miyamoto: I think that Pikmin 3 off-TV play is the freshest gameplay experience. Please look forward to it.
- Miyamoto: Pikmin, Bulbear to appear w/ Toho Cinemas logo before movie screenings. They’ll be shown in 3D for 3D movies.
- Iwata: WiiU NFC can be used w/ cards/figures for games, sharing data with arcade games, and in electronic payments. I want to recoup cost.
- Iwata: More than thinking about not achieving 100b yen operating income, it’s my job to think about how to achieve it.
- Iwata: For the 3DS, the point is to achieve the same kind of virtuous cycle in HW and SW sales overseas as in Japan by releasing good games.
- Iwata: For the Wii U, software will really start to arrive that communicates its appeal, and I aim to greatly improve its sales flow.
- Iwata: As for what I’d do in case of failure, I used the word “commitment”, so please understand what I mean.
- Iwata: If only the same number of 3DS systems sell next FY as this FY, software sales will be limited and the goal won’t be achievable.
- Iwata: Therefore I absolutely don’t think that the 3DS is meeting its sales potential overseas. It’s not due to external factors, but please understand that it’s because we haven’t sufficiently communicated the 3DS’ appeal as a platform of choice.
- Iwata: Expanding the sales of the 3DS beyond this fiscal year’s numbers is obviously our objective.
- Genyo Takeda: I don’t think that the Wii U CPU and GPU are imbalanced in favor of the GPU. It depends how you measure. GPU chip is bigger.
- Genyo Takeda: In modern CPUs, the math logic portions are rather small. In new PCs and servers, the CPUs may be big, but the logic is small.
- Genyo Takeda: It’s common for the surrounding SRAM cache memory in CPUs to be bigger. From that viewpoint, you wouldn’t see them imbalanced.
- Genyo Takeda: It’s a memory-intensified design. I can’t get into specifics, but I think it’s rather powerful.
- Genyo Takeda: As for the GPU, the tech is fairly mature and going in the same direction as competitors. Makers are used to prog. shaders.
- Genyo Takeda: The experience of other companies and Nintendo with shaders means that the difficulty with them early on has decreased.
