Last night, Nintendo held its 75th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Ten proposed candidates were re-elected to the board, including the following key figures:
Director and President – Satoru Iwata
Senior Managing Director – Shigeru Miyamoto
Senior Managing Director – Genyo Takeda
We’re also hearing that Nintendo is remaining in a position of strength in the stock market. You may recall that after Nintendo made its announcement about bringing games to mobile devices in partnership with mobile, it spiked to over 20,000 yen per share. Shares took a slight dip during E3, but they’ve now returned to their new norm of 21,780 yen.
GamesIndustry published its own interview with Nintendo of America executive VP of sales and marketing Scott Moffitt. Metroid Prime: Federation Force, amiibo, shortages in general, and the Humble Nindie Bundle (not ruling out its own bundle) were among the topics discussed.
You can read up on what Moffitt had to say in this latest interview below. Be sure to check out GamesIndustry’s original article here as well.
On Sunday, Arc System Works will release six new Kunio-kun themes for the 3DS. Each one will be priced at 200 yen. Photos of the different themes can be found over at the source link.
Damon Baker, who heads up Nintendo of America’s third-party relations and indie development, has told Polygon that the company is “certainly exploring options and capabilities” regarding an early access program.
He said:
“We don’t have anything to announce, but I can say that we’re certainly exploring options and capabilities. So anything is possible. I guess the important part of it is we’re very conscious of it and definitely looking at it.”
In terms of the benefits of what an early access program would program, Baker noted that it could act as a beta program of sorts.
“Working out some of the kinks, the server loads or what matching those expectations so that it’s a prime experience when it does, when the full version actually launches. So there could be some benefits there, but I think it’s a very sensitive topic, because you wouldn’t ever want to ask for money for something that doesn’t become fully-realized.”
Lastly, Baker also commented on the Nindies@Home initiative that was held during E3 week.
“We had to change policies over this, guidelines. I mean we basically created almost an early access-type of situation because some of this content isn’t even coming out until towards the end of the year. So to be able to give such early visibility to some of the developers and these builds, there was a lot of work that went into it.”
Nintendo UK has prepared a new promo/commercial of sorts for Yoshi’s Woolly World, which launches in Europe today. View it below.
Nintendo has scheduled more maintenance for Wii U and 3DS. Online play, rankings, and other Internet-related elements will be affected.
Here’s when the maintenance period will be taking place:
6 PM PT (Sunday) – 4 AM PT (Monday)
9 PM ET (Sunday) – 7 AM ET (Monday)
2 AM in the UK (Monday) – 12 PM in the UK (Monday)
3 AM in Europe (Monday) – 1 PM in Europe (Monday)
I’ll also mention that Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate maintenance will be undergoing maintenance on Monday. That will be taking place at the following times:
5:30 PM PT (Monday) – 6:30 PM PT (Monday)
8:30 PM ET (Monday) – 9:30 PM ET (Monday)
1:30 AM in the UK (Tuesday) – 2:30 AM in the UK (Tuesday)
2:30 AM in Europe (Tuesday) – 3:30 AM in Europe (Tuesday)
Now that Yoshi’s Woolly World has arrived in Europe, Nintendo Life was able to quiz a couple of the game’s developers on a few different subjects. Nintendo producer Takashi Tezuka and Good-Feel executive producer Etsunobu Ebisu discussed topics such as the Yarn Yoshi amiibo and amiibo functionality in the game itself, why the team decided to revisit the yarn style (they even have additional ideas!), and more.
Read up on some excerpts from the interview below. Those that are interested can find the full talk here.
V-Jump has shared new footage from the 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII. Check it out in the video below.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has once again weighed in on topics such as virtual reality, eSports, and the Nintendo World Championships. Below you’ll be able to get a look at his latest comments from an interview with Fortune.
“We have a long and deep history with VR with Virtual Boy, and we also have a history with augmented reality because there’s AR in Nintendo 3DS. We know the tech and we know how the tech has evolved. For Nintendo, we always go beyond the tech to make sure that the experiences we do are fun and they’re social, and I think those are the two key opportunities today on the VR/AR space. Are they both fun and social? I don’t think that’s there yet. So we’re going to continue to stay close to the technology. We’re going to continue to do our own internal experiments, but we don’t believe it’s ready for prime time yet.”
“We saw success last year with the Smash Bros. Invitational, and Smash Bros. has always been a game in the eSports community. What we’re really gratified to see is that the community has now embraced Super Smash Bros. for Wii U because it has the speed and customization they like. We’re also seeing them embrace Mario Kart 8, as well as Splatoon, in a competitive environment. We’ve always been close to the eSports space and will continue to be.”
“We’re fortunate that we’ve got the range of content to pull it off in the here and now, and we’re really gratified to see the reactions. All of that is going to go into the mix as we think about proper opportunities, future E3s as well as potentially taking the idea outside of E3. So it’s something we’re going to be looking at really hard.”
