It is a rare thing to go behind the doors of the game industry,s corporate offices, but Nintendo has done just that by releasing the transcript of its Corporate Management Policy Briefing. During the meeting, Nintendo president and luminary Satoru Iwata voiced his views on various topics.
Iwata made statements on what his expectations were for the launch of the Wii as compared to what Nintendo accomplished with their previous game console launch–the GameCube. “”When we launched GameCube, the initial sales were good, and all the hardware we manufactured at that time were sold through. However, after this period, we could not provide the market with strong software titles in a timely fashion. As a result we could not leverage the initial launch time momentum, and sales of GameCube slowed down.
“To avoid repeating this with Wii, we have been intensifying the software development, both internally at Nintendo and at developers outside the company, in order to prepare aggressive software lineup for Wii at and after the launch.”
During the time of the initial GameCube launch, many developers were frustrated with Nintendo,s apparent lack of third party support by making routine functions, such as meeting Nintendo software standards and guidelines, a slow and laborious process. Nintendo,s conflict of interest-developing its own game franchises while trying to make sure its own interests were not overshadowed by third party titles proved to be a juggling act that was too difficult to achieve. The resulting lack of support for developers proved to be one of the stumbling blocks to the GameCube,s lack of game titles.
Iwata then commented on the “unhealthy product cycle” of game software in which titles are released at a high price only to fall to lower prices in the resulting months. “We believe that each software should have its own price point depending on its volume, theme, contents or energies and time spent for the development, namely, the development costs…once the suggested retail price is announced, we should stick to it.”
His rationale for sticking to advertised prices is to ward off consumer,s expectations that software prices will eventually go down with time. This lag in buying effects sales. Iwata said, “…if the suggested retail price of any and all software is marked down in six months or nine months, the customers will learn the cycle and wait for the discounting, which will simply aggravate the decreasing sales of new software.”
Game enthusiasts have been quick to point out the Wii,s shortfall of computing power when compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. Iwata said that this was not a concern of his.
"What we are trying to do is to create brand new freestyle entertainment that can be enjoyed by all the family members as well as by a single player. In making such entertainment, I have never felt stress about the power of Wii. Honestly, I have not been able to use 100% of GameCube’s power yet, so I am very happy with Wii’s far superior functionality.”
