SEATTLE—Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime appeared at Seattle's Geekwire Summit on Wednesday to speak broadly about the company's future, and, while the talk didn't include new product reveals, it proved illuminating about what to expect from the big N in the future.
The short version: Nintendo would rather be defined as an "entertainment" company, not a gaming one.
Fils-Aime says the company currently has three "pieces of business": a dedicated video game business ("the way most of our consumers interact with us"), a mobile gaming business, and "leveraging our intellectual property (IP) in a variety of ways." The latter includes previously announced plans for a Universal Studios attraction in Osaka, Japan (still slated to open ahead of Tokyo's next Olympics hosting run in 2020) and a Super Mario film produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me).
When asked about how long Nintendo took to embrace smartphone platforms, Fils-Aime admitted that the company's slow mobile rollout—and lack of direct ports of classic games—was intentional. "We needed to create unique experiences," Fils-Aime told the Seattle crowd. "Home system games, if transplanted to a mobile device, wouldn't transfer as well. We needed to work through monetization... as we're driven to make money. And we needed to work through how to be effective on platforms and marketplaces that we ourselves don't own. That took time."
Bishop directly asked Fils-Aime about issues that Nintendo Switch Online users are facing with its peer-to-peer approach to online gaming as opposed to connecting to central servers. Fils-Aime did not answer this question and instead offered his take on why the service relies on a smartphone app for voice communication: "Nintendo's approach is to do things differently. We have a much different suite of experiences than our competitors offer, and we do that in a different way. This creates a sort of yin and yang for our consumers. They're excited about cloud saves and legacy content but wish we might deliver voice chat a different way, for example.
"What we see is a situation where we know that Nintendo Switch is being played in the open, at a park, on a metro bus," he continued. "We believe the easiest way for you to connect and have a peer-to-peer experience with voice chat is with your mobile phone. It's always there, it's always with you."
Other tidbits included Fils-Aime confirming several things: that his famous E3 speech ("I'm about taking names, and we're about making games") was carefully crafted by the worldwide Nintendo team, particularly through "constant communication with our global president at the time, Mr. Iwata"; that he personally meets with "every group of new employees" to deliver an introduction of the company's philosophies and strategies; and that the company's first reveal of a Zelda game on the Wii, at E3 2006, was indeed footage of what eventually became Twilight Princess (and that, according to Fils-Aime, the sequence "literally made people cry").
Source:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/nintendo-president-our-future-is-as-an-entertainment-company/
Close if I'm too late.
