Nintendo president Satoru Iwata fielded several investor questions today, which have been rounded up into a Q&A session that is available online. One of the most pertinent questions from an investor was for Iwata to outline how he plans on continuing to grow profits throughout the fiscal year to March 2017, especially as the Nintendo 3DS is nearing the end of its life cycle and the Wii U is “expensive to produce”, according to the investor.
The first point that Iwata addresses is that despite the New Nintendo 3DS being the third iteration of the 3DS line of consoles, the renewed interest in the platform means that the platform won’t see shrinkage despite its age and nearing the end of its life cycle in terms of hardware refreshes. That’s a comforting thought for anyone who has purchased one of the New Nintendo 3DS handhelds in the last few months.
Perhaps the biggest thing that Iwata acknowledges in his answer to this investor is that Nintendo has not been using their full marketing potential when it comes to showcasing their games. He states that if they were producing software that is critically and commercially panned by consumers they have something to worry about, but each of their software titles receives high review scores.
If our software were not receiving high evaluations from both professional reviewers and consumers, our ability to create marketable products and services itself must be questioned. However, since this is not the case, and our products are receiving high scores but are still not selling as expected, there is much to be done in the way we incorporate aspects into our products that sell themselves, and in the way we communicate with consumers to promote and sell our products. And that is the area we are going to focus on. From this perspective, I give first priority to the improvement of our core business.
So it looks like Nintendo will begin working on new marketing strategies to ensure their games are at the forefront of what most casual gamers see. This is good news, as Nintendo has always had a marketing problem that really hasn’t been acknowledged until now. What do you think?
