Damon Baker, Nintendo of America’s senior manager in marketing and licensing, has offered further comments regarding the company’s decision to only release the New 3DS XL in North America. Unlike other territories, the standard model that supports cover plates is not being sold in the states.
Baker told Nintendo Life:
Yeah (laughs). Look, the face plates are super cool, but we’re a different market. And now we have clear differentiation between those three systems. Before, there was a very limited difference between the 3DS and 3DS XL: other than size. It was the same resolution, same functionality… now, there’s the 2DS, 3DS, and New 3DS XL, all of which have their own functionality and features. The different price points give it a clear message for consumers. The core audience… we weren’t going to win with them on that decision. But we had to think about expanding the user base, we had to be able to market it and make it easy to pick up for consumers.
Baker also commented on the topic of community feedback online. Regarding this, and how Nintendo’s social media accounts tend to avoid direct engagement with consumers, he said:
I’m there daily, multiple times a day. You have to go there with an open mind. I’d love to get to a point where we have marketing channels where we can promote direct communication with the community, where people comment on stuff and Nintendo can communicate back. That’s my dream. Right now, PR is driving our social media, we’re not actively engaging the community, or very rarely. People have a fascination with Nintendo and want to be close to it and we feed off that excitement. We need to be more active there.
The original team behind The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was rather small. Series producer Eiji Aonuma, speaking with Kotaku, revealed that just 40 people worked on the game. He didn’t say how that number compares to Ocarina of Time, but Aonuma did mention that it’s much smaller than the teams Nintendo has on Zelda games these days.
Atlus have just uploaded a video featuring audio from the upcoming Etrain Mystery Dungeon. Check it out below
According to a leak of the April issue of V Jump magazine in Japan, it seems that Bandai Namco Games will be revealing a brand new 2D-fighter Dragon Ball Z game heading to 3DS this summer. It will feature over 100 fighters that can be used in both one-on-one and team battles.
According to a post by AnimeNewsNetwork:
Players can employ “Ultimate Arts” finishing moves, and the game will feature unique layouts and stages. With “Z Assist,” Bulma and Chichi (among other characters) will provide support to players via Bulma’s inventions from Capsule and Chichi’s fury (which fills the screen with a giant speech balloon of her venting).
Extreme Butouden is a follow up to Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate But?den, which was released on the Nintendo DS back in 2011, and unfortunately never saw a release outside of Japan.
Now, I would like to explain the progress in our digital business, which will play a very important role in our efforts to expand our business.
These graphs show the download sales transitions in the recent three financial years.
Our download sales as of the end of the second quarter of this fiscal year were a bit lower than those in the previous fiscal year. Yet, the most recent nine-month download sales showed a year-on-year increase of 17 percent to reach 21.1 billion yen.These are the regional download sales breakdowns for the nine months of this fiscal year and the previous one.
You can see the decrease of the ratio of the Japanese market, where there were some hit titles including “StreetPass Mii Plaza” and “Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball” in the last fiscal year. In contrast, the Americas dramatically increased its proportion, followed by Europe.In the U.S., purchases of digital products in general have been widely accepted by consumers. As a result, the ratio of people who purchase and download digital game software is high. As you can see, when we focus on the Americas and create a chart of the download sales percentage of the total software sales, the ratio of the download sales has been increasing largely in the most recent three fiscal years.
Of course, there are some gift-giving opportunities such as holidays and birthdays when packaged software is preferred over the digital version. Yet, as we have been continuing our various efforts in this field, I hope you can see that Nintendo’s digital business is making steady progress. Specifically, not to mention the increased purchasing at Nintendo eShop on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, our efforts to increase digital purchasing opportunities, such as via online e-commerce sites that we mentioned during the previous Corporate Management Policy Briefing, have been showing results.
