Nintendo share reasons behind the slow pace of new Virtual Console releases

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has shared the reasons behind why their Virtual Console service is treated to such a slow pace of new releases.

While acknowledging criticism, he explained that if they shifted resources to deliver them more steadily week-on-week it would affect their efficiency in releasing new Wii U and Nintendo 3DS titles.

Iwata even admitted that there were some elements that Nintendo didn’t “sufficiently foresee,” reasoning that they “require detailed manual work” that takes more time than they had originally thought when first announcing the service on Wii.

“Virtual Console itself is a service that began when we developed Wii so that consumers can play past titles on new platforms, and we continue to distribute various titles now,” Iwata explained to shareholders.

“However, back when we started this service, there were some points that we could not sufficiently foresee about how big this business would grow to be and how the business would expand.”

He continued, “For example, Virtual Console titles are generally developed based on the original game software, but this does not mean that we can develop numerous Virtual Console titles simply if we have the original game software. Development of Virtual Console titles require detailed manual work, such as testing if the software runs smoothly on each platform, or making sure the content is appropriate under the various standards currently in place.

“Thus, we occasionally receive opinions that our pace of releasing new Virtual Console titles is slow, but if we use much of our human resources on such detailed manual work, we would not be able to develop new titles, so we are currently researching how we can efficiently develop Virtual Console titles with limited human resources. One of the big issues for our system development is how to resolve the situation in which we can only release a few Virtual Console titles at a time when we release new platforms.”