Iwata heeft vandaag de nieuwe richting van Nintendo bekend gemaakt en een onderdeel van deze richting is dat ze meer met hun IP’s gaan doen. Iwata benadrukt in onderstaand bericht nogmaals hoe belangrijk hun IP’s voor hun zijn en dat ze van plan zijn deze IP’s meer te gaan gebruiken. Dit willen ze bereiken door goede partners te vinden die spellen met desbetreffende IP’s kunnen gaan maken. Opeens lijken nieuwe Metroid, Star Fox en F-Zero games een stuk dichterbij.
“Also, we are planning to utilize Nintendo’s abundance of character IP more actively. I think the reason that Nintendo is now considered to have this “abundance of character IP” is perhaps because of our passive approach toward the character IP licensing business, which tends to have a high risk of damaging the value of the character. In other words, we think that spending time to develop our approach of having our characters appear mainly in our carefully selected games has created our current fortunate circumstances. However, we are going to change our policy going forward.
To be more precise, we will actively expand our character licensing business, including proactively finding appropriate partners. In fact, we have been actively selling character merchandise for about a year in the U.S.
Also, we will be flexible about forming licensing relationships in areas we did not license in the past, such as digital fields, provided we are not in direct competition and we can form win-win relationships.”
By moving forward with such activities globally, we aim to increase consumer exposure to Nintendo characters by making them appear in places other than on video game platforms.
Nu begint Nintendo het te begrijpen. Goed nieuws dit. En een bewezen strategie, zie de Zelda games ontwikkeld door Capcom. En Luigi’s Mansion 2 door Next Level Games. Aankomende games als Hyrule Warriors van Tecmo-Koei. Goeie zet dit.