Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata recently talked about the future of Nintendo and the path the company is going to take in the near future, and in his speech, Iwata talked about how Nintendo wants to move past being just a video game company and enter a new business model, so as to “extend the definition of entertainment” as part of its 10-year Quality of Life platform.
“A lot of people around the world think Nintendo is solely a company that makes video games, and I believe more and more of our own employees have started thinking in this way,” Iwata said. “Some employees in charge of development find themselves in positions where all they are thinking about is how they can make the game in front of them more fun, so I don’t think it can be helped if others outside of our company see us the same way.
“So even though we won’t chance the fact that our focus is on video games, I felt the need to take that occasion to state that Nintendo is a company that can do whatever it wants.”
Iwata then went on to talk about what Yamauchi’s- the previous Nintendo boss- vision was for the company, and how Nintendo was going to take that forward. “Yamauchi always said ‘Nintendo is an entertainment company and should never be anything else’, but he didn’t necessarily think ‘entertainment equals video games’.
“I was wondering how to express Yamauchi’s feelings, and I thought about it non-stop, even during the New Year’s holiday break.
“Recently the words ‘quality of life’ have been coming up regularly. Entertainment is there to improve people’s quality of life. After your basic needs, there’s entertainment. However, when it came to improving people’s quality of life, I didn’t know the difference between us and household appliance makers.
“At the start of this year, I finally figured that the concept of ‘improving people’s quality of life with fun,’ with emphasis on the ‘fun’, would be perfect for Nintendo. And that’s why I decided to focus on this during the financial results meeting in January.”
Just what could this industry be that Nintendo is talking about? Movies, possibly? Table top games? Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.