“There will be big hits somewhere in our business, and they support the games that fail and allow us to take on other challenges.”
☆ NintendObs Event – Nintendo’s 2016 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders.
Question:
Nintendo’s core business is in the game industry, and the biggest problem there is the rising cost in terms of time and money needed to develop one game. How are you addressing this problem?
Answer:
Kimishima:
The cost of developing game software has certainly grown over the last ten years. This is a big challenge, as there is no simple formula to calculate the size of how popular a game is going to be with consumers. That said, I think that developing with this in mind will be increasingly important.
Genyo Takeda (Senior Managing Director, Technology Fellow):
The thinking for a long time was that computer performance for a game should be dedicated entirely to the consumer’s enjoyment, but now times have changed and the common sense is that computer performance should also be used to improve productivity in making the game software itself. But what is most important is how we achieve balance. I am going to let Mr. Miyamoto speak, as he has spent a lot of time and energy on raising the productivity of software development while doing this balancing act.
Miyamoto:
In striking that balance, while it’s important that we do not overextend by putting an excessive amount of content in our games, the only solution is how to make software that sells well. There will be big hits somewhere in our business, and they support the games that fail and allow us to take on other challenges. So our basic premise is to create software that will sell in the range of at least two million units. We simply couldn’t recoup our costs if we only released games in Japan that had sales of around 300,000 units, so the global market is our standard.
Takahashi:
I also think the key word here is balance. This has a lot of aspects, such as knowing when we need to dedicate a lot of time and people to something and when we do not. Or ways to leverage game engines that are used for general purposes, and how to create our own game engines that lots of others can also make easy use of. For NX, we are thinking about many different development techniques based on these considerations.
— The 76th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders
Source: Nintendo JP.
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