Following last week’s Financial Results Briefing, Nintendo of Japan have released further transcribed responses to questions pitched to Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, in which he discusses the company’s continual relationship with third-party companies.
“Honestly speaking,” Iwata began, in response to an investor who discussed Nintendo’s reliance on its own talent rather than that offered by third-party developers,.”Wii’s future could have been different if Nintendo had made better partnerships with outside companies in the field of network services at the early stages of the penetration of Wii.”
He continued, “Although we have already put ourselves back on track, we would like to clearly differentiate what is our true strength from what we can basically do by ourselves but can be done better by more skillful outside specialists in order not to fall into that trap again.”
Such a move has already been made in relation to the latest Nintendo 3DS, and Iwata is keen to continue this with the anticipated successor to their ground-breaking Wii platform.
“We want the other companies to be successful,” he then aimed to emphasise during a response to another investor. “In order to accomplish this goal, we would like to decide on the dates [of Nintendo software] after we know the release plans of other companies’ games so that we are able to consider how we can maximize the sales of our titles without affecting the sales of other companies in the short term.”
This was then followed by a third investor, who queried Iwata in regards to third-party plans for the new Nintendo home console.
“Of course, we would like to cooperate with software developers for Wii’s successor, and as I am repeatedly saying, I don’t believe Nintendo can carry out everything alone,” Iwata replied. “I am saying that we are responsible for building up the market, but I don’t think that Nintendo can maintain the market alone; We are aiming for creating a situation where software publishers will be willing to cooperate.”
Then, having received an additional question as to whether Nintendo would continue to “draw in” third-party support, Iwata commented “I would not use the term ‘draw in’ third parties, but I hope we can create a market that is attractive to third parties. The end result might turn out to be the situation you call ‘drawing them in,’ but I do not use such words as ‘draw in’ or ‘enclosure,’ as I do not like such expressions.”
