“Only a handful of characters can last for one, two or three decades.”
☆ NintendObs Event – Nintendo’s 2015 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders.
Question:
From watching kids playing and listening to their conversations, I know that many of them want to be a certain hero or heroine. Is it possible to place their faces onto in-game heroes or heroines so that they can play as these characters? Also, I would like to make a request. Personally, I seldom play video games but I have a certain desire to purchase, wear and own Nintendo-related products at every occasion possible. Why don’t you ask external companies to use Nintendo characters on the T-shirts or sneakers they make?
Answer:
Iwata:
At the very last stages of developing the Wii hardware, we integrated Mii functionality, a software function to make consumers’ facial caricatures by choosing pre-designed facial parts such as the nose, mouth or eyes and adjusting their size, distance and angle. I think it is safe to compare it with Fuku-Warai (a traditional play in Japan to make facial caricatures with paper parts) but with more flexibility. Consumers can create Mii characters based on themselves or their families to place them in the game. Following Wii, which was launched in 2006, Nintendo 3DS and Wii U inherited the same functionality. In that sense, I think your request to put consumers’ faces in the game has been fulfilled to a certain extent. On the other hand, characters created in that way do not always look similar to heroes like Mario because they have different shapes, so it doesn’t always work to simply place Mii faces on hero characters. In order to realize the dreams of the kids you mentioned, we will have to discuss the details of how we can advance Mii in the future.
On your request, we are very grateful that you love Nintendo characters and games, and have the desire to own related products. On the other hand, we have to be wary of whether more Nintendo-licensed products will make a better situation. In the short term it may receive much attention, income such as licensing fees may increase and we might be able to grant some people’s wishes, but along with that we also have to consider correct quality control (maintaining and managing character value). Most products in the character industry are consumption-based in that they continuously repeat the process of birth and death. Only a handful of characters can last for one, two or three decades. Nintendo’s IP strategy is based on a long-term perspective where we continue to enhance our characters, worlds and settings for years. We have already announced that we would more actively utilize our IP, but not in the way that we increase the number of licensing partners as much as possible; instead we will proactively try anything that will enhance the value of our IP. We believe that it is not worth attempting initiatives that produce short-term profits at the expense of long-term detrimental effects on our IP. You might be unsatisfied with our pace of IP utilization, but we ask for your understanding.
— The 75th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders
Source: Nintendo JP.
At NintendObserver, the comments are on Discord.
Click on Community to learn more. 🙂
…
…Wanna play? Buy a Wii U.
And if you’ve already got yours, here are all the games already available on the platform. 😀
