Nintendo President On Future Of Gaming

Thanks to IGN Cube for their summary of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's keynote speech at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show. Interestingly, Iwata suggested that "...gamers are getting older and tastes are becoming more sophisticated", but didn't necessarily see that as a good thing for industry growth, "because gamers might buy fewer games due to longer play value and a desire to play only software with very high production values." He also remained unconvinced that convergence of functionality for game consoles was the right path, saying: "Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, it troubled me that we had moved to a hardware where the sole function wasn't playing games" and concluded: "It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone. I don't agree that multi-function hardware is the only answer."

Comments

Re:Make up your mind

[exick]

I don't think the two are in disagreement. He's likely differentiating between "gamers" and "people who play games".

Someone who just plays games might be the guy who pops in Halo and plays with his buddies for an hour and a half before they head out to the bar, or the little kid that likes to play Kingdom Hearts because he wants to hear Donald talk.

A gamer is someone who would, say, post messages in a Slashdot Games forum to debate the finer points of speech given by a Nintendo executive. =)

How about we put it this way: "A game machine should not be unnecessarily complicated."

I think we can all get on board with that.