“Among all of the other things, it was DeNA’s passion. They had that strong desire to collaborate with Nintendo.”
☆ NintendObs Event – Nintendo and DeNA Q&A.
Question:
Once again, I would like to know why Nintendo has chosen DeNA as its alliance partner. Among all the companies which have approached Nintendo, what does DeNA have that others do not? Honestly speaking, when I look around the overall smart device game app market, it appears to me that some other companies have a better track record than that of DeNA. Given that this kind of opinion exists, I would like to know why Nintendo has chosen DeNA.
Answer:
Iwata:
Among all of the other things, it was DeNA’s passion. They had that strong desire to collaborate with Nintendo. Many companies have kindly knocked on our door, but I sense that they did so even though they doubted that Nintendo would ever consider their proposal at all. However, DeNA repeatedly approached us with determination.
One more thing I might add here is that whether a certain prospective partner is good at a field where Nintendo too has certain expertise is not very important. What is more important to us is that they have solid expertise and know-how in an area where Nintendo is not so strong. And in regard to the particular fields, Mr. Moriyasu even went as far as saying that they did not mind if DeNA remained completely in the background. Companies in general want their names to be exposed when they have a track record in a certain field, but doing so in collaborative works with other companies may end up creating a situation where consumers wonder whose service they are supposed to consider using. In the case of DeNA, because Mr. Moriyasu made such a statement early on, we were able to increase the number of the strategic options we might consider to jointly take.
If Nintendo were only planning to develop and operate smart device applications with another company, there might have been some other candidates to partner with. But as for another objective of this alliance, namely, the joint development of Nintendo’s new membership service, DeNA was more than willing to collaborate with us even though dedicated video game platforms, one of the platforms to be included in the membership service, was not a platform on which DeNA has been doing business. Furthermore, DeNA was that serious about and highly appreciative of the prospect of collaborating with us that they committed themselves to assigning their top employees to this project. This is what I can say as to our reasons.
Mr. Moriyasu, why do you think Nintendo’s door opened?
Moriyasu:
That question almost sounded like we have no track record! I don’t know about other companies but we were confident that we can be a good contributor in our area of strength and we can build a win-win relationship. I think this partnership is natural and makes a lot of sense.
— Nintendo Co., Ltd.
DeNA Co., Ltd.
Business and Capital Alliance Announcement
Source: Nintendo JP.
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