Nintendo: Key to avoid Arrogance

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata spoke to Newsweek In a E3 interview recently published. About the challenges of what the future holds for Nintendo. While Nintendo has been blessed with success via Wii and DS, he believes that Nintendo must avoid becoming arrogant and losing its momentum.

“I believe my most important role right now is to prevent Nintendo from being in a company where people say, ‘Oh, Nintendo is arrogant, Nintendo has let its guard down’, or ‘Nintendo has lost its challenging spirit’,” said Iwata. “We want to avoid all of the pitfalls that can come from losing one’s momentum.”

Another important topic was of the share of third part titles on Nintendo platforms. Nintendo has been well known for the first party dominance on its consoles, and Iwata spoke of the third party developers’ perceptions of this, saying, “I believe that third party publishers kind of look at the software titles that are being sold on Nintendo and they don’t want Nintendo to have more than one-third, otherwise, Nintendo will be too strong. They want to have two-thirds of what’s being sold on the platform. However, I believe that the job of first party software is to drive hardware. If you don’t have a quick impact and quick dissemination amongst the audience, you lose momentum. If you don’t have momentum, the third parties don’t want to jump on your platform. So that’s not a good situation to be in.”

To gain third party developer support for the Wii, insider information had to be giving out. Iwata talked about the difficulties of making releaseing such important information.

“I convinced a lot of people at Nintendo to allow us to give out all this information,” he said. “Now, of course, there’s the possibility of being imitated, having ideas taken from us before we’re able to use them ourselves. But at the same time, if the industry doesn’t grow, then we can’t grow and we don’t feel that the industry–we have to have the industry to survive so we may survive as well.”

Nintendo probably has little to worry about in terms of arrogance. These ideologies in the decisions that Mr Iwata has made make him seem humble enough already.

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