Industry Vets Talking Crazy

IGN has a piece today looking at ten completely outrageous claims made by games industry veterans. My personal favorite: "Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' The Big N has long made bold claims about the marketplace based solely about what is - or, as it happens, isn't - happening in Japan, but this one definitely earns Iwata a spot on our list. Two years later, we're quite confident that two million Xbox Live subscribers, more than five million World of Warcraft subscribers and, ironically, more than a million DS Wi-Fi Connection users would disagree with Iwata's statement."

Comments

Hmm Mhmm

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi may be retired (and frozen in a cryogenic coffin), but he would be proud of new company head Satoru Iwata for his May, 2004 assertion that, 'Customers do not want online games.' "

Oh brother. I love how these out-of-context quotes keep coming up again and again despite how laughable they are. I mean, seriously, he said this in 2004 AFTER Wifi was announced for the DS.

Anyway, here's the rest of that quote:

"most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet, and for some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy."

He wasn't talking about people playing on-line, he was talking about the subscription model that Sony and Microsoft were using. He also backed that up with numbers that showed a small percentage of PS2 and/or XBOX owners were actually playing their consoles on line.

Shame on IGN and Slashdot for perpetuating this quote.