Nintendo president Satoru Iwata responds to N’Gai Croal’s (of Newsweek’s Level Up) concerns that only half of the Nintendo Wii’s software sales come from third-party developers, saying that while Nintendo first-party sales dominate now, we should look for that to decrease in the future.
“I believe that third party publishers kind of look at the software titles that are being sold on Nintendo and they don’t want Nintendo to have more than one-third, otherwise, Nintendo will be too strong. They want to have two-thirds of what’s being sold on the platform.”
Iwata goes on to explain that someone had to make games for the Wii, and that the system would not be where it is at today without the success of these first-party games.
“I believe that the job of first party software is to drive hardware. If you don’t have a quick impact and quick dissemination amongst the audience, you lose momentum,” says Iwata. “If you don’t have momentum, the third parties don’t want to jump on your platform. So that’s not a good situation to be in.”
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There are some parallels to the Nintendo DS launch, and Iwata is quick to point those out. He also notes that DS first-party releases have decreased this year while third-party releases have increased.
“The same thing that happened to Wii, a lot of the same conversations took place when the DS was launched. And that’s because Nintendo was really the only one that was very focused on that user expansion goal we’ve talked about so often and because we are creating unique software that no one else is creating, the phenomenon of Nintendo software selling was insane.”
Iwata seems to be saying that Nintendo did what they had to to move consoles, and now that the road has been paved for third-parties, they can now relax a bit and let them make games for the Wii.
That’s great — we are ready for them.
[thanks, J]
