First, Nintendo’s basic business structure is to have a relatively small number of titles that sells all over the world for a very long time and that each sells a large volume to drive hardware and software sales and, as the result, revitalize the market.
Talking about Wii, if Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk that we launched late last year had been able to sell for a long time and to build up a steady sales volume, we might not have to say that we lacked strong software in the former half of this year. One year ago, Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii continued their strong sales. However, if they had not sold in that fashion, we might have said that Wii had lacked the software to support the hardware at that time. In other words, it is not the question of the quantity of the titles. What matters here is, whether or not we have the software that continuously sell, and whether or not we are able to construct the circumstance in which these titles can steadily make their ways into the hands of new customers.
Of course, Nintendo wants to have a perfect batting average, and I believe Nintendo’s developers have been trying to pick up interesting ideas and themes, polish them and to offer them as the final product. Unfortunately, since we are human beings, we cannot make every one of them a 100% hit title. That, and also other factors did not work well, either. The atmosphere toward the entire gaming industry had been cooled down for a while, more so than we had anticipated. As of spring this year, we were already anticipating the general atmosphere to cool down. Honestly speaking, I thought in summer that I didn’t expect the extent to which the market had be cooled down, on that, I had misjudged. However, as I shared the data with you today, Wii Sports Resort has been functioning in order to regain the momentum in the excessively cooled-down market. I understand that it takes time to heat it up again once it has been cooled down this much. The general atmosphere in the world is not that people want to snap up a Wii, so it will take time. Thinking in this way, we came to conclude that we would not be able to reach the unit hardware and software shipment that we had originally expected, and we revised our forecasts downwardly.
Next about the question of how we will prevent the situation where we are unable to prepare the strong software lineup, as a matter of course, we are preparing for our arsenals for the next year right now and, we are confident that we have a fair chance of winning. We are currently considering how we should prepare our weapons the year after rather than next year.
Right now, as a marketer, we are focusing upon how we can maximize Wii Fit Plus sales around the world and how we should sell New Super Mario Bros, Wii. As a manufacturer, we are preparing for next year so that what software we will be able to sell then are already in sight to a certain extent. In other words, if we cannot be very sure right now if we will be able to sell them next year, these titles probably won’t hit the market next year. As of now, we have been considering what we need to prepare in order to do our business in 2011. Of course, the fact that we were unable to put long tails to the software we had launched in late 2008 was what we regret and we would like to make efforts not to let it happen once again. – Satoru Iwata
Looks like Iwata is really upset with Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk sales. Keep in mind, but of those titles sold over a million units. It goes to show just how big Nintendo expects their titles to be!
