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Iwata on digital growth, expanding Virtual Console support, not bringing games to smart phones
As I remarked in the presentation, digital sales in the first six months of the fiscal year have reached 11.4 billion yen, and about half of them come from digital distribution of packaged software. The other half of this figure is derived from, for example, digital-only software and downloadable content. To put it a different way, I think that our digital sales grew because both of these components grew. On the other hand, I feel that digital content that is offered through brand-new sales methods has greater potential to turn into massive hits than digitally offered packaged software. Whenever we offer a new proposition, we do so wishing that it will turn into a hit, but since we can never know when our endeavors will come to fruition, it is difficult to give a concrete figure on the breakdown of our future digital sales today.
In terms of taking greater advantage of our previous assets, I feel that there are two points to consider. As we first began to do on Wii, one method would be to release games for our previous consoles, such as Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo Entertainment System, on other Nintendo consoles as Virtual Console games. While Wii U and Nintendo 3DS already offer Virtual Console software, I feel that we have not been able to take full advantage of our assets yet, so we would like to enrich our Virtual Console lineup. As the ability to digitally offer our products has given us greater flexibility in offering new propositions to our consumers, we should naturally consider these possibilities in the future. The other point is, as you mentioned, whether we should release our games on smart devices. At the moment, however, we believe a more balanced approach would be to use our content to increase the value of our hardware as opposed to distributing it on smart devices, and therefore, we have no plans to release Nintendo content on smart devices. - Satoru Iwata
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In terms of taking greater advantage of our previous assets, I feel that there are two points to consider. As we first began to do on Wii, one method would be to release games for our previous consoles, such as Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo Entertainment System, on other Nintendo consoles as Virtual Console games. While Wii U and Nintendo 3DS already offer Virtual Console software, I feel that we have not been able to take full advantage of our assets yet, so we would like to enrich our Virtual Console lineup. As the ability to digitally offer our products has given us greater flexibility in offering new propositions to our consumers, we should naturally consider these possibilities in the future. The other point is, as you mentioned, whether we should release our games on smart devices. At the moment, however, we believe a more balanced approach would be to use our content to increase the value of our hardware as opposed to distributing it on smart devices, and therefore, we have no plans to release Nintendo content on smart devices. - Satoru Iwata
Link