Nintendo: "We don't want to walk away" from 3D gaming

Nintendo's Scott Moffitt insists that the new 2DS doesn't represent backpedaling, notes that it's all about reaching huge audience at $129
Nintendo of America


In light of the announcement of the Nintendo 2DStoday, we sat down with the company's executive vice president of sales and marketing Scott Moffitt to talk all about the new entry in the portable space. In this exclusive interview, conducted by USgamer's Jeremy Parish on behalf of GamesIndustry International, we find out who the 2DS is really for and how it fits into the increasingly crowded mobile and handheld market. Interestingly, we also see that Nintendo remains confident in 3D gaming despite the fact that its 2DS dispenses with it altogether. At the end, Moffitt even takes a dig at Sony, saying Vita's sales show that Nintendo's approach is the one that's actually working.
Here's the full Q&A. Enjoy!

Q: As someone who's made a pretty significant investment in digital purchases for 3DS, I feel there may be some games that work better on 2DS than on 3DS -- Virtual Console, for instance. But the 3DS games that have 3D functionality, I'd rather keep them on the 3DS. It's not really possible to do that...
Scott Moffitt: It's not tied to an account. Yeah. We haven't solved that yet.
Q: Are you working on solving it? It sounds like, to date, Nintendo has been pretty content to keep things as they are.
Scott Moffitt: If you look at the account system, the network ID system that exists now on Wii U, that's an effort for us to move beyond a device-centric approach to an account-centric approach. But we haven't done it on the handheld side of the business at this point. We hear that feedback. We hear that criticism, or whatever you want to call it, from time to time. We're not blind to it. But it's not something we've solved.
Q: I feel like this device forces the issue.
Scott Moffitt: Yeah. I would just challenge… If you have a 3DS and you enjoy playing it there on a bigger screen… I wouldn't think we would expect you to be part of the buyer base.
"A lot of it is driven by wanting to achieve a price point that is more accessible for consumers...Removing the 3D capability allowed us to get to a better price point"

Q: Well, like I said, if I'm playing NES games or New Super Mario Bros., that sort of thing, I can already tell just by holding this...
Scott Moffitt: It feels more familiar to you?
Q: Playing those games on 3DS, the D-pad and button placement isn't ideal. So I could see some people wanting to carry over part of their library to this and have dual devices, the way you can own an iPhone and an iPad and still share content between those devices.
Scott Moffitt: Yeah. I guess all I can say is that you weren't directly in our crosshairs as we were assessing the market potential for this initiative. You never can guess who's going to respond to a new piece of hardware.
But I think our expectation was that we were primarily trying to address the value barrier that might exist for some consumers to playing a 3DS. They could be DS owners that haven't yet upgraded to the 3DS because of price and because they love playing their old DS games. It could be young kids just entering the video game market, and parents not wanting to buy them a $200 gaming system. Now we're much closer to $100, which makes it much more affordable for them. I think that was probably the audience we expected or intended to design the unit for. But I think it's good feedback.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...from-3d-gaming