IceDoesntHelp
Banned
On Earnings
On struggling with software
On innovation
On the new Zelda
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"The entertainment industry is one that is inherently unstable and if people decide that they no longer need entertainment anymore then there's no way for you to make money off of that"
"Because of the waves in the entertainment industry and the way the cycles move, personally I feel that aiming for a specific numerical goal is almost silly, and instead our focus should be on doing our best to create something that's new and unique.
“So all of this talk of ‘Oh is Nintendo going to hit its numbers? Is Mr. Iwata responsible?’ and all these discussions I think are just silly ones to have because Mr. Iwata is managing our company and I don't think there's anyone better to manage it than him.
“I'm really focused on creating the most fun and unique experiences I can so that the entertainment can appeal to a very broad audience, and we're having fun doing that. So certainly I think there are other industries where I think their chance to appeal to a broad audience has been lost, but I still think within our industry we have a lot of opportunity to do that.”
On struggling with software
Well, obviously if you speak in terms of simple math you could say that Nintendo should just multiply its development team staff by four times and then everything would be fine, but unfortunately things aren’t quite that easy. Our focus is always on delivering the highest quality content, and simply increasing the development team size isn’t going to allow you to achieve the level of quality that we strive for. You really have to kind of bring those people up gradually and help teach them how to develop games in order to achieve that consistent quality level. So that’s one challenge that we’re always engaging with and one we’re progressing on.
The other is a little bit coincidental in that the hardware jump from DS to 3DS was quite big in terms of the difference between those two [platforms] and it just so happens that that same scale of jump happened from Wii to Wii U, consecutively with those two pieces of hardware. And any time you have a big jump in the hardware technology it certainly takes the teams time to learn that and adjust their development environment in order to adapt to those big changes. So I think gradually as we’re adding more staff and we’re increasing our capabilities… and in the future as the hardware generation change doesn’t result in significant change in the hardware environment or capabilities of the hardware, then what ends up happening is you have a smoother transition, as you saw from the Gamecube to Wii.
On innovation
So this is actually a discussion that I think is tricky to balance, and certainly internally at Nintendo we have people on the teams who say, “Wouldn’t this be better if we created a new IP around it?” But to me, the question of new IP really isn’t whether or not [you have a new character]… I look at it from [the perspective of] what is the gameplay experience in the game you’re playing? For a lot of people, they would say if you take an old game and wrap a new character around it, that’s a new IP, but that game is still old, and the experience is still old. So what we’re doing is we’re always looking at what type of new gameplay experience can we create, and that’s the same for whether we’re playing with one of our existing IPs or we’re doing something new.
Pikmin 3 is a good example; the Pikmin characters were something that were born out of a new gameplay idea when we first came up with that game. We created the gameplay idea first and we decided that the best characters suited for that gameplay idea were Pikmin characters. That’s where the Pikmin IP came from. Similarly, if you look at our booth here, we’re showing it as a showcase of all of Nintendo’s great characters, but in each and every one of those games the gameplay experience is what’s new. So from my perspective, it’s not a question of just how can we create a new character and wrap it around an old game and put that out and call it a new IP. It’s always about starting with a new gameplay idea and a new experience that’s unique from an interactive standpoint and then finding a character that’s best suited with that. In some cases, it may be an existing character, and in some cases it may lead us to a new IP at some point in the future.
On the new Zelda
So it certainly is a better question for Mr. Aonuma but we are working on a new Wii U Zelda ,as we do whenever we work on a new hardware system. Development on the new Wii U Zelda game, we’ve pretty much determined our direction on that and the teams are working hard on that. In fact, we actually did consider showing it at E3 this year but we were worried that if we showed the new Wii U Zelda game then that would attract all of the focus, and really what we want people to be aware of and pay attention to here at E3 are the playable games like Pikmin 3 that we have coming in the immediate future, because a lot of fun is with the games that are coming out this year. So that’s why we decided not to show it this year at E3, but it’s certainly something people can look forward to.
Of course, as I’m sure you’re aware E3 used to be the place where you made all of your big announcements but as we’re seeing more and more, particularly with the advantages we have with the internet, we’re able to make announcements really at any time. So the other thing we didn’t want to do was go through all the news here at E3 – we wanted to be able to have some news to continue to share with consumers over time.
Q: So does that mean Nintendo will tell us more about the new Wii U Zelda later this year?
I think so, maybe. [Laughs] Maybe after we've seen enough people enjoying The Wind Waker HD, then we'll think about sharing something with them about the new Wii U Zelda.
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