Nintendo closed out its investor briefing today by teasing its quality of life (QOL) plans for the future. The company’s first big step, president Satoru Iwata revealed, is a focus on health.
Head past the break for Iwata’s lengthy excerpts concerning QOL.
Nintendo typically maintained a tough stance on licencing its characters. Going forward, however, “we will actively expand our character licensing business, including proactively finding appropriate partners,” president Satoru Iwata said during the company’s investor briefing today.
Head past the break to read up on Iwata’s comments in full about this topic.
Head past the break for a ton of comments from Satoru Iwata regarding connectivity between Nintendo’s consoles and handhelds, Nintendo Network IDs, and the inclusion of smart devices into Nintendo platforms.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared a few words about sales of the 3DS at the company’s investor briefing a short while ago. Continue on below for his remarks in full.
One of the highlights from Nintendo’s investor briefing today was the confirmation of DS support for the Wii U Virtual Console. You can find out what president Satoru Iwata said about the functionality below.
Nintendo is currently working on an update for Wii U which will add a quick start menu. Essentially, gamers will be able to access games immediately instead of fumbling around on the Wii U’s menu.
Read Satoru Iwata’s comments on the quick start menu below, which reduces the time to start up a Wii U title by more than 50 percent.
During Nintendo’s investor briefing, president Satoru Iwata discussed what’s in store for the Wii U’s NFC feature. Check out Iwata’s remarks below.
In addition, the GamePad is the only video game platform with an NFC (near-field communication) reader/writer function. “Pokémon Rumble U” has already taken advantage of this function, but aside from this title, Wii U has failed to make use of the full potential of this function so far, despite it being a built-in feature.
This year, we will make full use of this function by preparing multiple proposals, including the implementation of NFC payments with JR East’s “Suica,” which we announced on a previous occasion. We will showcase our detailed propositions for utilizing the NFC functionality at E3 in Los Angeles in June.
Satoru Iwata’s comments on the state of Wii U coming from Nintendo’s investor briefing are now available. You can find them below.
As a platform in its second year, Wii U is currently in a very difficult position. I would like to begin with what we are going to do with Wii U.
Obviously, under the current situation where the company has to report an operating loss, simply executing a price reduction as a way to defuse the situation is not an option. In the short-term, Nintendo will focus on thoroughly enriching the value of the most significant feature of Wii U, the Wii U GamePad.
Unfortunately, as the current situation of Wii U shows, we have not been able to fully communicate the value of the GamePad. We also realize that we have not been successful in answering consumers’ questions such as, “What is the difference between Wii U and the previous platform, Wii, and what is the benefit of upgrading it?” By looking at the current sales situation, I am aware that this is due to our lack of effort. What’s even worse is that there even appear to be not a small number of consumers who think the GamePad is one of the accessories for the previous platform, Wii.
It is more challenging to convey the appeal of the GamePad to consumers who do not engage with video games that often since they do not actively gather information about video games. Therefore, we intend to take on this challenge, and I would like to have this solved before the year-end sales season.In order to do this, it is obvious that
Our top priority task this year is to offer software titles that are made possible because of the GamePad.
We have managed to offer several of such software titles for occasions when many people gather in one place to play, but we have not been able to offer a decisive software title that enriches the user’s gameplay experience when playing alone with the GamePad. This will be one of the top priorities of Mr. Miyamoto’s software development department this year.
This is something that we’ve posted in our Nintendo investor briefing megapost, but this certainly deserves attention of its own.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal:
Nomura analyst now asking why Nintendo revamped its organizational structure to merge consoles and portable devices. Mr. Iwata says there was a huge technological gap in developing consoles and portable games in the past since portable devices run on batteries, but technological advances have narrowed the architectural difference between the two. He adds he doesn’t know yet whether the two hardware will be merged in the future, but the two will become more like “brothers.”
