During the financial resutls briefing Satoru Iwata defended Nintendo’s poor performance and why game are getting delayed by going explaining the Wii U’s release schedule to invenstors.
Iwata was asked if the game delays occured because of poor manage, Iwata replied: “It is a fact that Wii U currently has lost momentum owing to longer-than-expected intervals between software releases.”
“We were faced with the alternatives of taking time to refine our products or launching them without too many intervals, and after careful consideration, we selected the first option because we believe that from a mid-and-long term perspective it is more important to improve customer satisfaction with each game. Development always bears many uncertainties and a delay in release is not necessarily a consequence of insufficient management of development teams.”
Satoru Iwata, however, did admit that the Wii U’s launch titles were taking up more resources than Nintendo expected. “The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them,” he said. “In short, the development teams of Pikmin 3 and other future games were understaffed during that period.”
He then continued talking about how important it is to expand the range of developers creating games for Wii U, especially on eShop.
“The number of developers who can use versatile web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript is probably more than 100 times larger than that of the current software developers for dedicated gaming machines. We would like them to create software for our console.”
“The other thing we announced was that developers can now use Unity, a cross-platform video game engine, for Wii U development, and we have started offering it to the developers,” he added. “There are over a million Unity developers, including many in developing countries where the business of dedicated gaming machines is not prosperous. We would like to create opportunities for these developers to have their games available for Wii U.”
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