He said it again!
If we’re lucky, we get a couple of Virtual Console releases a week. Nintendo sure likes to take its sweet time. What’s the holdup? One investor asked exactly that during the company’s 75th annual shareholders meeting, now translated in English. In short: it’s time consuming. Also, licensing.
“[B]ack when we started this service, there were some points that we could not sufficiently foresee about how big this business would grow to be and how the business would expand,” said CEO Satoru Iwata. “For example, Virtual Console titles are generally developed based on the original game software, but this does not mean that we can develop numerous Virtual Console titles simply if we have the original game software. Development of Virtual Console titles require detailed manual work, such as testing if the software runs smoothly on each platform, or making sure the content is appropriate under the various standards currently in place.
“Thus, we occasionally receive opinions that our pace of releasing new Virtual Console titles is slow, but if we use much of our human resources on such detailed manual work, we would not be able to develop new titles, so we are currently researching how we can efficiently develop Virtual Console titles with limited human resources. One of the big issues for our system development is how to resolve the situation in which we can only release a few Virtual Console titles at a time when we release new platforms.”
Iwata also spoke about third-party games on the platform. “[S]ince we can only release Virtual Console titles of third-party software publishers if they come to an agreement with the copyrights holders upon negotiating terms and conditions that were not included in their original contract, please understand that there are some titles that we cannot easily release despite many requests.”
The 75th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders [Nintendo]
