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Attracting kids/women & making new game types will continue 3DS success, says Kimishima
Coming from Tatsumi Kimishima...
First, I will address Nintendo 3DS software sales in this fiscal year. As I acknowledged in the presentation, the titles we have released this fiscal year have not had quite the same potential as titles such as Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS that we released last fiscal year. To expand this business in the next fiscal year, reaching young consumers and women and expanding our sales of our evergreen titles will be key.
As I said before, we have sold over 54 million units of Nintendo 3DS hardware, but it would have been possible to sell more software if all 54 million systems were in frequent use. I believe there are two approaches we can take to improve this. The first is to release software that makes people want to play, and the other is to create an environment where people around you are playing. These approaches will spur people who have not played games recently to jump into our games again, and help our software drive hardware sales. For the next fiscal year, it will be important to release titles that are different from the ones we have released this fiscal year, so we will make efforts to provide a strong lineup.
The question asked about issues that we have had. One of our endeavors this fiscal year has been to release multiple titles for young consumers and women. There was some variance in the response to these endeavors across different countries. For example, each of the European markets has different characteristics, but we were able to achieve a great response with our promotions and advertisements aimed at women in France and Spain. Going forward, we will also focus on promoting sales in regions where we did not meet expectations for this period so that Nintendo 3DS will be well-received there, too.