Nintendo’s investor Q&A was posted online earlier this morning and it provides a good look at the direction the leadership of Nintendo will be taking the company over the course of the next few years. Both Miyamoto and Kimishima side-stepped questions about the Nintendo NX gracefully, but when asked what the company is doing to leverage both new and existing IPs in new ways to generate revenue, Miyamoto was quick to point out the success of amiibo.
As the “Fellow” who oversees the Nintendo’s entire software production, while working on unique game software developments, I am also in a position to conceive and execute unique plans that uses Nintendo IP, and I have always been hoping to maximize the company’s profits by proactively using this IP. As the first tangible example of our proactive use of IP, we released amiibo last year, and as Mr. Kimishima explained during his presentation today, amiibo has already been contributing to the company’s financial performance.
Just as this amiibo example shows, Nintendo’s proactive use of its IP is to improve its business performance by taking advantage of Nintendo IP in a variety of ways, not by limiting use to merchandise licensing activities. For example, this is one of the objectives of deploying our IP on smart devices but it includes our attempt to increase the awareness of Nintendo by delivering our messages to people whom we have not been able to communicate with when deploying our IP on dedicated game systems.
His statement about reaching audiences not available to them before is directly tied to the expansion of the mobile market and why Nintendo is now seeking to dip its toes into the water. Mobile gaming is huge in Japan, where game spending is higher than any other market. By delving into the world of mobile, Nintendo hopes to funnel potential customers toward their dedicated video game hardware, too.
Perhaps the most prevalent reason for Nintendo’s huge push into the mobile market was answered by Shinya Takahashi, who stated Nintendo is seeking to capture a younger audience with their bevy of IPs by bringing them to new devices.
Other than creating new IP, we believe that one of the challenges of developing and expanding character IP is how we can popularize existing IP such as Mario and Link even more among young consumers. Thus, as Mr. Miyamoto mentioned previously, we would like to actively consider measures such as using smart devices and utilizing Nintendo 3DS even more.
