When is it bad to be so good? When you’re Nintendo, some would say. One of the most longstanding criticism of the company and its consoles is the relatively lacking third-party support when compared to its competitors. And a part of that blame often sees the finger pointed squarely at Nintendo, who often finds itself faulted for its own software selling better than efforts made by the third parties which they wish to entice.
Nintendo’s President, Satoru Iwata, has said that the machine is about making people smile, but it seems that developers outside of his company aren’t doing as much of that as he would like. But what can be done?
The first step would seem to be reassurance; Nintendo has responded to concerns from third parties by expressing their belief that the situation is only temporary. According to the third-quarter report meeting transcription, translated by Develop, the problem is simple, in that the system is still quite young, and Nintendo’s own developers have a signifcant natural advantage.
The firm was quoted as saying, “when we develop new hardware at Nintendo, we do so as a collaboration between the hardware development teams and the software development teams. Our software sales percentage is currently high because our internal teams teams know the Wii’s special characteristics best, and they started development quite a bit before the Wii’s release. However, we believe that eventually that will change.”
The next step would seem to be using history as a guide: “If you look at the data for our third quarter you’ll see that, out of the 14 Wii titles that shipped over a million units, 11 of those were our titles. However, if you look at the 50 titles that shipped over a million units on DS, only 28 of those are ours.”
“We identified the same thing in the DS’ first period, and the situation continues to change little by little. For the Wii too, we believe that as time passes, the proportion of high-selling titles that come from our licensees will increase.”
