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Denise Kaigler - Nintendo never wants our gaming appetite to be satisfied, not worried about the iPhone
A portion of a Bitmob interview with Nintendo’s Denise Kaigler…
DK: I will give you that hardcore gamers have an insatiable appetite for everything Nintendo, and we love that! We love that. When we get to a point where core gamers say, “OK, Nintendo, enough! We don’t need any more games from you guys….” None of us wants to be put in that position, right?
We don’t want your appetite to ever be satisfied, because when we satisfy you, it’s time for us to go [dusts off hands], “OK! Let’s go on home now!” And none of us wants to go home. So there’s this sort of fun…relationship, I think, that’s happening between Nintendo and the hardcore gamer — which we enjoy and hope that the core gamer enjoys it.
Bitmob: How do you view the iPhone? It must be some sort of threat to the DS business because it has a lot of the same functionalities the DS and DSi have, but it’s a broader platform with more features. How do you guys view it? Is it DEFCON-4, DEFCON-2 for you guys?
Kaigler: [laughs] It’s different. They’re two different categories of technology, of experiences. We are a videogame company, first and foremost. We are all about making games.
It comes down to the gameplay experiences that we offer our consumer. Currently for the DS and DSi, we have over 850 games on the market, hundreds more — almost a thousand, certainly — GBA games that can be played on DS. They’re just totally different…hardware units. They’re not the same, and that’s how we’re looking at it.
You have one that is subscription-based, certainly a lot of free apps, versus ours that isn’t subscription-based and certainly not free apps and games for DS and DSi. But, unlike what you [press] guys are doing and what you guys try to get us to do, we are not comparing ourselves to anybody.