Satoru Iwata, the CEO of Nintendo, has been talking about the plan he's forming around rebuilding the company's fortunes. It's been a tricky time of late, with the Wii U underwhelming at retail and struggling to get a foothold in the face of recent console launches by Sony and Microsoft.
In a recent interview with Diamond.jp (and then translated by Siliconera), Iwata talked about carrying on the legacy of the company's late visionary president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and how the platform holder should be a company focused on entertainment, but not necessarily just gaming.
"Surely, a lot of people around the world must think ‘Nintendo is a company that is just for video games,' about us, and I believe that there are more and more of our own employees who've begun to think like that. Some employees that are in charge of making things, are often kept positions where they have to think of 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 think like that."
"So, even if the fact that our focus being video games won't be changing, I felt the need to take this occasion to say ‘Nintendo is a company that can do whatever they want'."
Iwata then opened up about Yamauchi's vision: "This subject came to light when Yamauchi passed away, but I felt that ‘our surroundings are greatly changing. We need to redefine what Nintendo must do, from this point on'. However, I felt that saying ‘Nintendo will do anything,' was also the wrong idea for the company."
"Yamauchi was one to always say ‘Nintendo is a company for entertainment, and it shouldn't be for anything else,' and he didn't necessarily think that ‘entertainment = video games'. I've been wondering how to express Yamauchi's feelings, and I've been thinking about it non-stop, even during the New Year's holiday break."
Then Nintendo's Quality of Life strategy came up: "Lately, the words ‘QOL' have come up. Entertainment is there to improve people's quality of life. After your basic needs, there's entertainment. However, when it comes 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 ‘improving people's quality of life with fun,' with emphasis to the ‘fun' would be perfect for Nintendo. And that's when I decided to use this as a focus during the financial results meeting in January and wrote the manuscript for the presentation."
When more details on the Quality of Life plan are available we'll make sure to share them with you. In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether this refocus will be enough to steer the good ship Nintendo back on course following some disappointing recent results.
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