Iwata Talks About The Power Of The Internet

We all know that the internet is a powerful medium for publishing news and getting content out there. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata agrees with this statement and points towards the announcement of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D during the recent Nintendo Direct as evidence of this. As soon as it was announced Nintendo of America tweeted the announcement and had over 16,000 retweets within one day. That’s the power of the internet.

Iwata: The internet makes a variety of things transparent and allows information to be shared quickly. Therefore, in a way, you can no longer hand-wave stuff as you once could, but on the other hand it’s created a platform for a variety of interesting things.
I don’t think it’s more difficult now [to do business] with the internet around. In fact, for certain genres and demographics, the internet is better at spreading information for us than, say, TV is.
For example, we posted a Tweet [on the NCL account] saying that we were remaking The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and we had over 16,000 retweets within one day. Looking at those numbers, it’s hard to feel that the market is becoming more segmented.

Iwata: Indeed, we see the trend of, as the middle of the market disappears, the big hits only become bigger. For example, there’s been four 2 million sellers released on the 3DS [in Japan] in the last five months.
We checked and that’s never happened before in the Japanese game market. So, in the middle of people saying ‘packaged software doesn’t sell anymore’ and ‘dedicated game consoles are dead’, we have this happening.

Kawakami: Just this year, we had Frozen released in Japan and be a huge hit. People are saying no one goes to movie theaters any more and then we have one of the highest grossing movies ever recorded in Japan.

Iwata: It’s segmentation and over-concentration. This bipolarity is just a feature of the market in recent years.
The mega hits get bigger, so to speak.