GamesIndustry.biz interviewed Marko Hein, Nintendo's head of European Developer Business. Hein talks about the Revolution, the Nintendo DS as well as the future of Nintendo. Check out an excerpt below or the full interview here.
GamesIndustry.biz: You and others at Nintendo have spoken often about Nintendo's view of the industry - and it's clearly quite a different take on things than the other two platform holders have. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Marko Hein: Sure. We are at an interesting time right now in the industry. Over the last twenty years graphics have improved dramatically, but this has negative effects. Development teams are increasing, development times are increasing and development budgets especially are increasing quite significantly.
I've seen a speech recently from Julian Eggebrecht of Factor 5 at the German Games developer Conference, where he showed how the development costs have increased in his company. They started with EURO 10,000-15,000 back in the old Super Nintendo times, hitting the Euro 1 million mark for GameCube. Now when they are pitched for next generation they reach EURO 10 million, and the actual project for PS3 is over EURO 20 million - around EURO 25 million in truth, I guess.
So the problem is, we are facing increasing development budgets, but the price for the end product is not increasing. It's actually declining when you look at it carefully. There are some factors with retail etc, but I think the consumer is unwilling to pay more for a more sophisticated product, which I can understand; what consumer would pay EURO 100 for a video game?
The question is, how do we overcome this problem? The money has to come from somewhere. So the only chance we have is to grow the market; to find more consumers and get them into videogames. What we see in Japan is that the market is stagnant; it doesn't grow very easily. Japan's market is even declining now. Europe is the only market which is quite healthy right now. So what we as Nintendo believe is that we need to look for different user groups to get into videogames.
First of all, the older lapsed users who played videogames in the early '80s and have sneaked away from them. We need to revive them. But even more importantly, the female market because female gamers are a very interesting group. The only game I know which has really broken through the wall is The Sims. They claim to have a 50/50 split [between male and female] and we think they have sold more than 10 million units in Europe.
That means that there are 5 million females who want to play videogames and have no content to play. We are still very much male driven and it's probably a fault from the business side, but also the developer side. Most of the developers are still male. There are a lot of boys there.