Nintendo’s Iwata defends management record and explains game delays

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http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/04/Iwata-610x343.jpg (http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/04/Iwata.jpg)Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has defended his management of the company in a financial results briefing (http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/130430qa/index.html), explaining the Wii U’s sparse release schedule to investors.When asked whether the delays were down to poor resource management, Iwata contended: “It is a fact that Wii U currently has lost momentum owing to longer-than-expected intervals between software releases.”“We were faced with the alternatives of taking time to refine our products or launching them without too many intervals, and after careful consideration, we selected the first option because we believe that from a mid-and-long term perspective it is more important to improve customer satisfaction with each game. Development always bears many uncertainties and a delay in release is not necessarily a consequence of insufficient management of development teams.”Iwata did, however, admit that the Wii U’s launch titles took up far greater resources than expected. “The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them,” he said. “In short, the development teams of Pikmin 3 and other future games were understaffed during that period.”He went on to state the importance of expanding the range of developers creating games for Wii U, particularly on eShop. Iwata believes that opening up its platform to welcome developers working with HTML 5, JavaScript and Unity will help Nintendo achieve that goal.“The number of developers who can use versatile web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript is probably more than 100 times larger than that of the current software developers for dedicated gaming machines. We would like them to create software for our console.”“The other thing we announced was that developers can now use Unity, a cross-platform video game engine, for Wii U development, and we have started offering it to the developers,” he added. “There are over a million Unity developers, including many in developing countries where the business of dedicated gaming machines is not prosperous. We would like to create opportunities for these developers to have their games available for Wii U.”

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