Nintendo won't talk specific release dates for key 3DS titles or Vitality Sensor, wants 3rd parties to succeed

First, I would like to comment on the titles for Nintendo 3DS. If any one of the titles you mentioned “Animal Crossing,” “Mario Kart” or “Super Mario,”) right now is not released within this fiscal year, I do not believe that we will sell 16 million units of Nintendo 3DS hardware this fiscal year. Therefore, I cannot tell if all of them will be released in the current fiscal year, but at least some of these anticipated titles will be launched in this fiscal year. On the other hand, the reason why we have not yet set the launch dates is not only because of our development status, but to create an environment in which third-party titles will also sell well, which is the aim we set when we announced Nintendo 3DS. If we fail to create such an environment, we will not be able to maintain the momentum of the platform continuously. We don’t believe Nintendo can do everything by itself. Of course, we are strongly aware of the fact that Nintendo’s titles are obliged to drive the sales of the hardware, but we are not as arrogant as to think that Nintendo can maintain the market on its own. We want the other companies to be successful. In order to accomplish this goal, we would like to decide on the dates after we know the release plans of other companies’ games so that we are able to consider how we can maximize the sales of our titles without affecting the sales of other companies in the short term. However, especially for the two titles I introduced today, which are the new iterations of “Mario Kart” and “Super Mario,” I did not talk about them with the image of launching them in the next fiscal year or thereafter, so please understand it in that way.

Also, concerning Wii Vitality Sensor, I imagine that you are worried about that because it hasn’t been put on the market even though a long time has passed since it was initially announced. This is a totally new type of entertainment, and there are large individual differences in the biological information of humans. For example, if it was acceptable that only 80% of the users thought the result was natural, then we could propose this to consumers right now. However, we are aiming for a level of quality in which 99% of consumers feel comfortable, and that is why this project is taking time to complete. I feel that this project has a lot of interesting potential, and we would like to continue this project without giving up, but it is difficult to overcome this hurdle, so please understand that now I cannot clearly say when we will be ready to put this on the market. - Satoru Iwata

It’s good to know that Nintendo is still focusing on quality first, but to hear that they’re trying to maximize sales situations for third parties is even better. Nintendo is realizign more and more that their systems just aren’t going to bring in all types of gamers if they can’t provide all types of content, and there are certain games that Nintendo just doesn’t make.

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