Reggie on sales of the 3DS in North America compared to Japan, localizing games
You may remember a statement made by Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata earlier this year in which he said that sales of the 3DS in the United States and Europe have been “weak” compared to the performance in Japan.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, responding to this and the handheld’s sales in general, jokingly said:
“When he said that, I had a sharp pain in my neck. It was in the middle of the night, and I viscerally reacted to it.”
Fils-Aime followed up with more serious commentary, confirming that sales in Japan have indeed been better than sales in North America:
“The fact of the matter is that Japan is doing better than the North American marketplace. That is a factually true statement. It’s driven by the strong level of support that they’ve had from Japanese third-party publishers. There’s been a number of games like Monster Hunter that did big numbers. But just as important, there was a group of games in the Japanese market that did between 250,000 units and half a million units. Those sustained that gamer desire to have something new on a regular basis.”
Reggie later noted that many of the strong Japanese titles haven’t made it to the North American market. This is changing somewhat with titles such as Kingdom Hearts 3D, which has been a solid success thus far.
There’s one important point here: the 3DS has managed to outpace the DS. The new portable is beating out the 3DS by around one million units.
“At the same point of the life cycle, DS had actually had two holidays, and even with that, Nintendo 3DS is about a million units ahead in terms of installed base versus the DS base… so we’re tracking well.”
Going back to the point of the unlocalized games, Reggie said:
“In the end, this is a business. [Publishers] need to look at the opportunity as far as how much they’re going to sell versus the investment and make a business decision.”
Last but not least, Reggie was reassuring in that Nintendo encourages third-parties to localize some of their games for North America:
“We always engage with third-party publishers about their content and help them make smart decisions. Whether that’s Western publishers or Japanese publishers. There are opportunities for some of these games to come to the Americas. There have been times when we’ve published those games in that type of show of support. We’ve certainly encouraged it.”
