Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and the Nintendo board of directors have answered a list of questions at the company's Corporate Management Policy Briefing. The main topics of conversation included Nintendo's next-generation home console Wii as well as its Nintendo DS portable handheld.
The Q&A session begins with Iwata revealing Nintendo's intention to announce the pricing and launch structure for Wii before September. In the meantime, Nintendo hopes to provide third-parties with development kits for as low as $1,732. This reasonable price combined with software manufacturing prices similar to GameCube may result in more third-party developers taking the plunge to develop for Wii.
However, third-party developers won't be alone. Internally Nintendo has big plans for Wii support. In fact, Iwata expects the company's research and development budget to rise with the impending launch of the console. This is because Nintendo intends on having a steady supply of software for Wii in order to avoid the drought faced by GameCube in its first year of release. "When we combine the total number of people working for Nintendo's first-party and second-party titles, however, there are far more than 1,500 people working on the titles today," explained Nintendo EAD producer Shigeru Miyamoto.
Iwata also touched on some of the intimidation third-party developers might feel about developing for a new Nintendo platform. "Some developers are wondering how to materialize their unique ideas," he acknowledged. "For such developers with unique ideas who cannot tell how to make a good game from them, rather than waiting for them to develop games, Nintendo should proactively approach them and make some concrete proposals on DS or Wii." Nintendo said it has already begun approaching third-party developers to help turn their ideas into games. The results of this will be seen beginning next year.
With all this software support, it's understandable that Iwata feels Wii will be a failure if it is unable to sell more units than GameCube. "In fact, we shouldn't continue this business if our only target is to outsell GameCube," he noted. Nintendo has set a shipment goal of 6 million Wii hardware and 17 million Wii software during the fiscal year ending March 2007.
Finally, Iwata has no regrets about the "Wii" name. "I am one of the people who have decided this final product name," he explained. "Of course, I am not the only person to make this decision, but I have never thought that it was a mistake to name it, "Wii." I understand that a great many people have already accepted this product name. When someone has some hesitation today, we'd like to make efforts so that they will come to like this name in the end."
Moving onto Nintendo's other star product, Nintendo DS, Iwata said that his top priority is to remedy the severe shortage problem in Japan. The problem stems from issues with production of the "bicolor molding." Once the kinks in production are solved, Nintendo has planned shipments of more than 2 million Nintendo DS units each month. For comparative sake, the peak production for the Game Boy Advance reached around 2.3 million each month.
Iwata also acknowledges competition. In particular he said he is not concerned about Microsoft entering the portable games industry. He says such competition will not change Nintendo's path.
The full interview can be found via Nintendo's corporate website.