Nintendo will put more emphasis on games created in Western countries at its E3 show, said its president Satoru Iwata last week.
"I feel that it will become necessary to reinforce the development resources in the foreign countries. Therefore, I hope we will be able to show you something like that at E3," said Iwata at a Tokyo press and investors briefing last week, the transcript of which is now available in English.
Nintendo will show a playable version of its next home game machine at the E3 Expo, which begins June 7 in Los Angeles. Nintendo says that, as with its Nintendo 3DS handheld, it wants to make the next Wii more alluring to other software makers.
"I don't believe Nintendo can carry out everything alone," Iwata said. "We would like to cooperate with software developers for Wii's successor."
Specifically, he called out Western game publishers, name-checking Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty and saying that the "photo-realistic" nature of Western games has caused them to become more appealing than Japanese games in countries like the U.S.
More pertinent bits of information from the Q&A transcript are below. Iwata touched on tablets, smartphone gaming, social gaming and Nintendo's plans to partner with (or flat-out purchase) outside companies that can help it beef up its lagging online business.
On the emergence of tablets: "We have never abandoned the + Control Pad and buttons for our game systems because we think these functions are advantageous when creating highly reactive games. In this meaning, I do not think Nintendo hardware will take on any of the current tablet forms as they are without buttons, to make our game devices. However, this is only when we consider tablets as game devices and, for other purposes, I think tablets are very interesting, and they are a form of hardware that will continue to grow."
On social games: "I can not say that no one said, 'I recently stopped playing Nintendo DS because I am now playing games on my smartphone,' but statistically, there was no significant difference."
"On the other hand, we found out that people who play paid social games have a higher Nintendo DS use rate. This was a significant difference. Isn't this the opposite of your impression? Therefore, I think that the people who play paid social games are people who like games. And as a result, they have a higher overall use rate."
On Wii's weaknesses: "In particular with Wii, for example, the challenge with start-up time when changing channels, or the current situation where we cannot automatically turn on Wii, turn on the television and change the input mode in the event that Wii receives a message, have led to challenges where we had difficulty having the users use Wii in the way we had intended. I don't think that the concept was a mistake, but I think that Wii has yet to fulfill these concepts."
On Nintendo's online troubles: "In the field of networks in particular, however, I admit that we cannot do business in pace with the changes in the world and the requests from consumers only within our company and with development companies we have long been in touch with. I am not sure which term suits us as collaborations for this purpose, [mergers and acquisitions] or partnership."
"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 ... (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. You may be aware of some features which I am implying now in relation to the future developments of Nintendo 3DS and Wii's successor system that we announced yesterday."
On 3DS heavy hitters Animal Crossing, Mario Kart and Super Mario: "(If) any one of the titles you mentioned right now is not released within this fiscal year, I do not believe that we will sell 16 million units of Nintendo 3DS hardware this fiscal year. Therefore, I cannot tell if all of them will be released in the current fiscal year, but at least some of these anticipated titles will be launched in this fiscal year."
On the missing Wii Vitality Sensor: "This is a totally new type of entertainment, and there are large individual differences in the biological information of humans. For example, if it was acceptable that only 80% of the users thought the result was natural, then we could propose this to consumers right now. However, we are aiming for a level of quality in which 99% of consumers feel comfortable, and that is why this project is taking time to complete. I feel that this project has a lot of interesting potential, and we would like to continue this project without giving up, but it is difficult to overcome this hurdle, so please understand that now I cannot clearly say when we will be ready to put this on the market."
