[Nieuws] Geschreven door Theun op 2007-05-30 19:38:04
Interview met George Harrison
George Harrison heeft een aantal vragen beantwoord! Wired News heeft een interview gehouden met Nintendo's vice president van marketing: George Harrison. De beste man heeft behoorlijk wat vragen beantwoordt, hieronder kun je er een paar lezen. [QUOTE]Wired News: Recently, when Mr. Iwata did a financial Q&A, he came down kind of hard on Nintendo of America, and said that Brain Age sales weren't as on the level of what he was seeing in Europe and Japan, and really thought that 2007 was the year he needed to push NOA. So what do you think is holding America back from achieving parity with Europe and Japan, and what do you think you need to do this year? George Harrison: Let me take the second part of that first. We're continuing to support the original Brain Age game, it's more than a year old now. And you heard Reggie say this morning: these things do not have the typical lifecycle of a video game product where in twelve, sixteen weeks you've pretty much got all the business you're going to have and then you're done, where it's more like a movie model. These things have a long, long life to them. We're going to continue to support that, we're going to roll out Brain Age 2 in August. And for us it's not just a chance to sell a new title, but to take all those titles, Big Brain Academy and the original Brain Age and put them all back together. So that's really part of our plan. I think if we look back at what the real difference was, they launched Brain Age in Japan, followed within about six months by Brain Age 2. So they had a nice sort of sequencing going. We tried to sustain the Game Boy business here and did a very good job of it. As a result, I think Mr. Iwata feels like we delayed the future. We delayed the sense of urgency about selling DS and moving up to DS and those kinds of things. So this year, his challenge to us was basically: Game Boy will take its own course, so put all of your energy and muscle behind the Nintendo DS, and let's get on track where we need to be. WN: It always seemed like the DS' biggest competitor in the US was the Game Boy. That that was what was holding it back. GH: Right. And I think there are great expanded audience titles and I think we supported them all individually. We probably didn't sustain the pressure against that audience as much as we could. So, great support for Nintendogs, went away for a while, came back with Brain Age: it just wasn't a full-court press all of the time. And so that's what we've been really trying to do this year. WN: Square Enix has been hesitant to put its content on Virtual Console, and has actually said that in Japan, they feel like the market requires games to be on physical media. What would you say to convince them that Virtual Console is the way to go? GH: Well, I'm not sure what I would say to convince them, but certainly there is probably no other way to monetize their legacy games. They can only go so far in re-launching those older games at retail. They have an opportunity with these assets sitting in the vault, so that consumers who are of an age where they weren't really around when those games were launched, to go back and enjoy them. That's why the Virtual Console is to me a perfect form for that. There's no real hard cost involved in terms of physical media or retail distribution, and you have the opportunity to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't have access to your product. WN: When do you think that the Wii supply situation is going to stablize? GH: Well, the supply situation is improving. What we don't know is when the demand is going to be reached. So we've actually shipped quite a bit more product in the first five or six months of our launch than any other console did in the last couple of generations. But it's still shocking to us that we've gone from being out of stock after one day a week, to now we're out of stock after three days a week. It's not clear yet when we'll be in stock on a regular basis every day of the week; all we can do is slowly increase production and find out. WN: Do you see the actual supply increasing month on month? What can we really expect in the next few months as far as an uptick in the number of... GH: It's begun to increase, starting in the month of April. So it takes about four months from the time we want to increase it to line up the parts and the production capacity and things of that nature. So it's already begun to increase slowly, but to be honest we don't know what to expect for the fall. So we're going to make our best guess as to what we believe we should produce and try to ramp up as much as we can for the fall. But it doesn't mean we won't -- even if we're back in stock in August/September, it doesn't mean there won't be shortages for the holidays. It's a good situation to be in, although we don't want to discourage consumers too much. [/QUOTE] Een interview met bijna geen nieuwe feitjes, maar wel een hoop uitleg over verschillende zaken. Klik voor het volledige interview op de onderstaande link.