Price point is always important for mass market commodities. Look at the iPhone. It's expensive. But I think it is going to sell. It does something that people really want to do. People want to share it. It's an emotional thing that goes beyond the price point. It has emotional power. You are connected to it.
— Satoru Iwata
Sometimes you are physically tired at night, but your brain is functioning too much to go to sleep. If you can have software that helps you understand how you can shift from such a tense situation to being more relaxed, then that would help.
Nintendo is an entertainment company, but I think we need to broaden the definition of entertainment.
I personally am a user of iPhones and iPods.
We always try to be a unique company.
When similar products are on store shelves, price competition is inevitable. Nintendo has been trying to steer clear of that direction and create a market of our own.
There are many different regions around the world, and each region has its own cultural acceptance and legal restrictions as well as different age ratings. There are always things that we're required to do in each different region, which may go counter to the idea that players around the world want the freedom to play whatever they want.
I'm not interested in offering software for free of charge. That's because I myself am one of the game developers who, in the future, wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.
Our thinking has always been in trying to grab the limited amount of spare time people have and always try to offer some unprecedented attraction to the consumer.
What I wanted to have happen was that people who didn't know that Game Boy Advance and GBA are the same thing would remember Wii right away because it doesn't need to be abbreviated.
It is challenging to communicate attractions which are hard to understand unless you actually touch and experience them yourself. This is especially so with Wii U because it has unprecedented entertainment potential.
People will buy hardware just to buy a single game if the game is really compelling.
Here's a hypothesis I seriously believe: If there hadn't been a 'Pokemon' game, maybe the market for handheld game devices would have gone extinct.
What I believe is that Nintendo is a very unique company because it does its business by designing and introducing people to hardware and software - by integrating them, we can be unique.
Making games look more photorealistic is not the only means of improving the game experience. I know, on this point, I risk being misunderstood, so remember, I am a man who once programmed a baseball game with no baseball players. If anyone appreciates graphics, it's me!
Typical tech-driven companies or hardware-driven companies always lay out the so-called roadmaps when it comes to making the new hardware. So, in other words, availability of certain technologies dictates when the company is intending to make the new hardware.
Like any other entertainment medium, we must create an emotional response in order to succeed. Laughter, fear, joy, affection, surprise, and - most of all - accomplishment. In the end, triggering these feelings from our players is the true judgment of our work. This is the bottom line measurement of success.
Entertainment is there to improve people's quality of life. After your basic needs, there's entertainment.
The advantage for Nintendo is that we always try to do things that other companies don't try to do. That is something that the general public appreciates.
We have to think of what kinds of experiences we can create that only Nintendo can create and what no other companies can create. So the result is the Nintendo 3DS.
Some people will say Nintendo's games are for children. But our goal is to boost the population of gamers by making games for all ages.
We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.
We are producing something people can live without. But we need to keep thinking what would make our products a priority purchase even if they are not a necessity. If we stop doing that, no matter how successful Nintendo is at the moment, things will start going wrong in no time.
In general, no engineer hates higher performance.
If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it's Nintendo's mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.
I read blogs quite a bit.
Nintendo's approach to our work is to greatly increase the population of gamers.
The brand new user interfaces that Nintendo invented often faced skeptical views before a hardware launch but wound up becoming de facto industry standards.
If you want to make short-term profits from the stock price, then I am a very bad president. But I don't think I'm so bad for maximizing the long-term value of Nintendo.
When people saw how other people were playing Wii Sports, they could immediately understand how different the system was.
The DS was launched back in 2004, and sales of that machine hit a record in 2009 in the United States. That is totally different from the conventional sales pattern, in which game gear sales peak in the third year and take a downturn thereafter.
Personally, I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box.
In the case of the Nintendo 3DS, it's supposed to be the successor to Nintendo DS. As soon as the development of the original Nintendo DS was over, we started working on the successor to it.
People sometimes ask me what I did when I was hired at HAL. The answer is that I was a programmer. And an engineer. And a designer. And I marketed our games. I also ordered food. And I helped clean up. And, it was all great fun.
I don't think that free games are something new. On the PC, there have always been free games. But finding them was not always easy. With the popular products like the iPhone, now it is easier.
What Nintendo has to do is make software that takes advantage of the Wii MotionPlus and make efforts to make the public understand the benefits of the Wii MotionPlus controls.
We never try to think in terms of any competitive product or company. If you do that, you just focus on a certain narrow area. Rather, we should think much more broadly.
The heart of the matter is that everybody starts video games as a beginner. Then, after going through a lot of experiences and becoming more and more fond of video games, they become the experts.
Needless to say, nobody is born an avid gamer.
Regardless of age, gender, or game experience, anyone can understand Wii.
When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wish list. But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list.
Nintendo has been a very unique company because it's not just hardware but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it's given us a unique advantage.
A motion-sensing controller that you hold with both hands is completely different from one that you can use with either your right or left hand.
Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room.
I always and strictly tell Nintendo employees never to use the term 'success' to describe our own performance.
Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength.
Many things we can't do are simply because we think we can't do them.
Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun! Fun for everyone.
The term 'innovative' or 'innovation' is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.
We've been thinking very carefully about how can we possibly communicate the real value and the attraction of Nintendo 3DS. The conclusion was that there is no other way than to let as many people as possible to actually see it.
