In the past, Nintendo has been quite clear on its feelings about the current trends and mobile and social gaming. At his GDC keynote, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said that mobile game development “creates games that don’t maintain high value.” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime later asked if a mobile or social title maintains “its value over time or is it such disposable content that the value quickly goes to zero? “ Recently, Iwata told AllThingsD that the company was “not interested” in the reigning business model of social and mobile games: free-to-play.
“Nintendo is a company, which is trying to maintain the overall value of video games. Of course, if Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it’s Nintendo’s mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay,” Iwata reiterated when asked about Nintendo supporting freemium games.
“When we look at the entire system of freemium, it’s not always that everyone is happy with the offers. Actually, there’s only a limited number of people who are willing to pay and many others are not paying for game titles at all,” he said.
“Nintendo is not interested,” Iwata definitively stated. “I’m not interested in offering software for free of charge. That’s because I myself am one of the game developers, who in the future wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.”
Nintendo realizes that a number of publishers have moved over to the business model in certain markets. Microsoft and Valve have both added free-to-play titles to their respective online services recently, but Nintendo has decided to march to the beat of its own drum.
“For Nintendo, the most important thing is to create something unique and unprecedented. Many people often try to find and compare a company to us. But we can do better. We can do more. But that’s not something Nintendo is interested in,” he said again. “For example, when you asked me if I’m interested in this kind of system or that kind of system, I have to say, ‘No I’m not. No, I’m not interested.’ And, if we do something similar, we are going to come up with something completely different ourselves.”
“If you say freemium is somewhere you can spur new revenue, once again, the answer is the same. Just because many other people are thinking that way, we aren’t thinking that way,” he emphasized.
Not so flexible there, Nintendo?
