Nintendo President: "I'm competing for time" and not against Xbox, PlayStation

SEATTLE – Nintendo of America President and Chief Operating Officer, Reggie Fils-Aime, appeared Wednesday at the Geekwire Summit in Seattle to talk about the future of the company and, although the interview does not include the following: did not reveal new products, it turned out very enlightening on what to expect from the big N in the future.

The short version: Nintendo would be rather defined as a society of "entertainment" and not as a society of games.

Son-Aime says that the company currently has three "activities": a dedicated video game company ("the way most of our consumers interact with us"), a mobile gaming company and "leveraging our intellectual property ( PI) in a social environment ". in various ways. "The latter includes previously announced projects for a Universal Studios attraction in Osaka, Japan (which is scheduled to open for the next edition of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020) and a film. of Super Mario produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me).

At the request of moderator Todd Bishop of Geekwire on Nintendo's future interest in the company, Fils-Aime talked about the conversations he had recently with participants in a GameStop corporate conference , during which GameStop staff members described their favorite classic games (and related tattoos). "It's Mario, Zelda, Pokemon – all these wonderful intellectual properties," said Fils-Aime. "The way we operate them on various entertainment platforms allows us to grow the business."

During Wednesday's question-and-answer session, Fils-Aime used the term "intellectual property" no less than 15 times, and he highlighted Nintendo's work outside the Switch and 3DS ecosystems as a major driver of Nintendo. As an example, he mentioned Super Mario Run being downloaded by hundreds of millions of smartphones users. "It's our vision for the mobile: to offer our intellectual property convincingly to consumers who may not have experienced these properties before." A conviction that they will come back, perhaps buying a Mario t-shirt, eating this Mario cereal or buy a switch, because of the affiliation and the affection that they have with this IP address ".

Asked about the time taken by Nintendo to adopt platforms for smartphones, Fils-Aime admitted that the slow deployment of the company on its mobile – and the lack of direct ports of classic games – was intentional. "We had to create unique experiences," said Fils-Aime to the Seattle crowd. "The games from the home system, if they were transplanted to a mobile device, would not be so well transferred, we had to work with monetization … to make money. effective on platforms and markets that we do not own, which took time. "

Bishop directly questioned Fils-Aime about the issues that Nintendo Switch Online users are facing with its peer-to-peer approach to online gambling, as opposed to connecting to central servers. Son-Loves has not answered this question and explained why the service relies on a smart phone app for voice communication: "The Nintendo approach is to do things differently. We have a lot of different experiences from our competitors and it creates a kind of yin and yang for our consumers, they are excited about the cloud backups and the legacy content, but wish we could offer a voice chat in a different way, for example.

"What we see is that we know that Nintendo Switch is played in the open air, in a park, in a subway bus," he continued. "We think the easiest way for you to connect and live a peer-to-peer voice chat experience is to use your mobile phone – it's always there, it's always with you."

"Minute per minute"

Yet, despite this comparison with the services of other producers of video game materials, Fils-Aime answered the question of knowing he was considering Xbox and PlayStation as competitors with a style "I do not do it".

He counted the exact number of minutes a day and said that outside of the past, a consumer goes on eating, sleeping, working and going to school: "the rest of that time is the time you spend browsing the web, watching a movie or watching a conference broadcast: it's all the time we're competing for entertainment. important to my direct competitors at Sony and Microsoft.To do this, I have to be creative and innovative to win this battle. "

Bishop asked Fils-Aime to come back on the Wii U and Fils-Aime was frank about his problems: "Without the Wii U, we would not have the Nintendo switch, in terms of what we've learned and especially from what we've heard from our consumers, they told us, "I want to play with that gamepad on the Wii U, but as soon as I'm over 10 meters away, it's disconnected." The basic concept of take it at any time, it was convincing. "

Son-Aime took a look at his experience of first contact with the Switch, which actually came from a basic plastic shell. "It was a moment when the hair on my neck was raised," said Fils-Aime. "What I felt when I used the Wii Remote for the first time, in the same way as when I saw the inner workings of a Nintendo DS. With that moment we realized that our proposal was convincing. " He said that this shell version of the Switch was designed to "simulate what I felt in the hand, the basic concept.Our engineers had to run it.Our developers had to create compelling content to make it happen.We are lucky Do it."

"Without Wii U, we would not have the Nintendo switch."

Asked about the technologies we could see in the future at Nintendo, Fils-Aime answered a specific question about the possibilities of augmented and virtual reality. After reminding the crowd of Nintendo's story with the Virtual Boy and an integrated "AR Cards" feature in the 3DS, he introduced the company's most intriguing official line: "That's something we think about We've been saying this is the technology we're looking at, but in the end, it has to be fun, it's our mission, and that's what we do. probably better than anyone, we have nothing to announce here on this step, we will continue to experiment with these technologies and we want to bring new experiences to life. "

(He went on to point out that Nintendo was focusing on new technologies and on existing technologies, including the standard analog control knobs and the DS touchscreen, before adding: " We would like to see more of this tactile experience, between interactive experiences and the touch and feeling of something in real space. "This statement was not related by Son-Aimé or Bishop to what had already been said about possible Nintendo AR and VR products.)

Fils-Aime confirms that his famous speech E3 ("I speak of names, and games") has been carefully designed by the Nintendo international team, including "constant communication with our global partners". President at the time, Mr. Iwata "that he personally meets" each group of new employees "to present the philosophies and strategies of the company, and that the first revelation by the company of a Zelda game on Wii, at E3 2006, was indeed a sequence of what would become Twilight Princess (and that, according to Fils-Aime, the sequence "literally made people cry").