“Nintendo is even more passionate about and highly motivated to continue its dedicated game system business.”
☆ NintendObs Event – Nintendo and DeNA Q&A.
Question:
What is Nintendo’s strategic objective in making the capital alliance with DeNA? What are the issues the company needs to deal with in order to reach to that goal? Finally, why did you announce the new platform codenamed “NX” today at this press conference?
Answer:
Iwata:
Regarding our business expansion on smart devices, DeNA and Nintendo agreed that both companies should deeply consider our plans for the mid-to-long run. In other words, this is not a business alliance just on paper. We concluded that this alliance was worthy of also establishing a capital alliance so that each company would be firmly interested in the other’s business operations, and so that both companies would prioritize various issues in our daily business and closely communicate to make decisions on a variety of strategic options. It was not that either of us made this proposal to the other. It was rather a natural progression of our negotiations, and both of us started to discuss that we would need to establish a fairly strong relationship to reach a certain point and we would need to form an alliance worthy of that kind of a relationship. As a result, we are here today announcing this alliance.
About the reason why I announced “NX,” which is the codename for Nintendo’s dedicated game system with a brand-new concept, it is true that it has no direct relationship with our alliance announcement today. I announced it because I wanted to convey my message that Nintendo is even more passionate about and highly motivated to continue its dedicated game system business. As I mentioned today, we were able to overcome the issues concerning our business expansion on smart devices and have reached a conclusion about Nintendo’s approach and the utilization of smart devices so that we can encourage a great number of people to become acquainted with Nintendo IP. For these consumers, we would like to provide the more premium gameplay experiences on our dedicated game platforms so that they understand the overwhelming appeal of the detailed game worlds so much so that they become immersed in these worlds and even core game players can play to their heart’s content. Nintendo will firmly continue its core business. The biggest reason (why I mentioned “NX” today) was that I wanted to eliminate such misunderstandings as we made the smart device announcement today because Nintendo is pessimistic about the future for the dedicated game system business.
Question:
Can I then assume that there is no change in Nintendo’s overarching goal of expanding the gaming population and that the alliance you announced today, as well as your announcement of the new platform, is a part of that overall strategy?
Answer:
Iwata:
You are absolutely correct. As I illustrated in one of my presentation slides today, we will flexibly choose the most appropriate means by taking into consideration the characteristics of the Nintendo IP to be used for each smart device application, and we will try to maximize the number of people who are exposed to Nintendo IP. As a result, we will aim to expand the gaming population. We will make use of smart devices, jointly develop the new membership service and release the new game platform, all for this objective. All of these activities are connected with one another. In other words, we aim to reach an increasing number of people with Nintendo IP. We aim to make it so that they will become not only familiar with but also fully satisfied with our IP. If we can successfully satisfy them and they become fans of our IP, we should be able to expand the number of people who want to continue playing Nintendo games forever. We will try to bring this to fruition. Nintendo has recently been announcing that it is aiming to “redefine entertainment.” We are now saying that anything which “improves people’s QOL in enjoyable ways” is a form of entertainment. As such, we try not to narrowly define “games” because we are actually trying to define games far beyond what people conventionally consider a video game. You may want to recall how we made training your brains a game in the era of Nintendo DS and how shaking a remote to play sport on Wii became a game. We are very eager to continue inventing such new entertainment.
— Nintendo Co., Ltd.
DeNA Co., Ltd.
Business and Capital Alliance Announcement
Source: Nintendo JP.
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