Several characters models from an unannounced Disney Interactive game have appeared online, via the online profile of 3D artist Cari Mayle. The game is coming to the Wii U, but it’s unknown if other platforms will be receiving it as well. We know that the project is a fantasy game of some sort… and not much else!
Comic and Painting Workshop users will soon be able to post screenshots on Miiverse, Collavier has confirmed. An update is in the works that will make the functionality possible. A date for the patch’s arrival hasn’t been determined, but it’s “coming soon”.
Collavier’s “Jeremy” wrote in a Miiverse post:
If you plan on playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, you should be aware that the game apparently lacks the Japanese dub. The original Wii game allowed players to switch between the Japanese and English voices. Just to be safe, we’ll try following up with Nintendo of America to confirm that the situation.
Mr. Iwata, how do you think the demand for entertainment will change from now on? Earlier you mentioned consumer behavior, and the way consumers collect and receive information has changed. For the last few years, I think that for the overall entertainment industry, various key trends have transitioned. I would like to know how you think the ultimate demand is changing.
I think that the demand itself for entertainment is increasing rather than decreasing. Now that smart devices are a means of entertainment consumption for a number of consumers, I think the total time and consumption of entertainment is increasing. However, the tough issue for this platform is that the platform holders are not so interested in maintaining the high value of the content and instead feel that the cheaper the content, the better or even that the content should be free. On this point, I can empathize with Mr. Kawakami, the chairman of DWANGO Co., Ltd., as he often uses the expression to describe the situation of the content for smart devices with “the eggs are on sale at the supermarket.”
In the music and video industries, they made more profits by selling content before, but, because of the digitalization trend, it has become much more difficult to make profits by just selling the content. For example, artists whose CDs sold over one million copies in the past can sell less than one-tenth of them now. It is said that whether they can maintain the revenue or not now is up to the number of people who attend their concerts and other events. Consumers spend money on one-time events like concerts, but once they have regarded as a norm that they can digitally obtain content free of charge, we cannot easily change their minds regarding content value. As for video content, once services offering a library of tens of thousands of videos for only a few hundred yen per month become mainstream, DVDs will not sell as they did in the past. I have heard a Hollywood movie producer say that profit structures for movies have changed, and it is difficult to expect profits from selling DVDs.
My question is about the company’s internal marketing structure. It seems that New Nintendo 3DS has had a good launch in the U.S. and Europe, but focusing on the year-end sales season, I get the impression that Nintendo could have done more. For example, Nintendo may have had more of the chance if the launch of New Nintendo 3DS in the U.S. and Europe was in time for the year-end sales season, or Nintendo could have struck more of a balance between handheld devices and home consoles because home consoles tend to perform weakly when handheld devices are strong. I believe Nintendo plans to provide new services and diversify its business, but I would like to know specifically how you plan to change the marketing structure, or if there is no need to change it, do you think that your current sales and marketing structure can keep up with the changes that you explained in this presentation?
I think that each of our activities, whether it is product development, marketing or providing constantly evolving services, has unique issues it has to address. For example, if developers tended to think that even though they had created good products, incompetent marketing team members were the cause of poor sales or if, on the other hand, the marketing team members thought that the products were not selling well because the developers had made unappealing products, then we would be seen as a bad company with a culture in which everyone tends to lay the blame on someone else. Since such an organization should never exist, I have been encouraging everyone internally to first consider what more they themselves can do. A company is a group of people, so it is impossible to completely eliminate these kinds of opinions in challenging circumstances, so I repeatedly make this kind of remark internally. This is not something I would usually say externally, but I thought I should share this internal message with you today.
To your question about our marketing issues, many of the people who are now leading the marketing teams have had the experience that products sell well if awareness is built through TV advertisements, so it is inevitable that they have a tendency to continue proven methods from the past. However, this does not mean that the managers of the current marketing division are being adamant and inflexible. On the contrary, everyone is conscious that they have to change. Recently, as you know, Nintendo has been taking new approaches such as making use of social media, utilizing our own direct consumer channels like “Nintendo Direct,” and digitally taking pre-orders soon after disseminating relevant information through “Nintendo Direct.”
