Nintenblog The Super Gaming Blog for Nintendo News and Opinion

Shigeru Miyamoto spoke to Newsweek about third party developers and how they often find it difficult to compete against Nintendo's own in-house developed games.

Miyamoto:

I can see how it may seem like that's the case. People have said the same thing in Japan in terms of the sales of the third party games. Obviously one thing that Nintendo does, and we continue to try to do, is to create new interfaces. That's going to give third party developers the opportunity to come up with new ideas, and we think that there's going to be a great number of opportunities for people to do that with Wii. And with those new ideas, there's going to be the chance to really break out.

We're already seeing examples of this in Japan with Nintendo DS. One good example--it's obviously a very different style of interactive game--is a piece of kanji assessment software. You write kanji on the touchscreen, and it tests how much kanji you know. It was a very small developer that made this game, and they only spent a few months on it; I don't even think they spent even a year. I don't know the exact numbers, but that alone has sold nearly 600,000 copies, or somewhere thereabouts. So we're already seeing chances like this for people who have unique ideas that can only be achieved on that particular platform having great success.

Partially, I think that once third parties are able to look at these examples, take their great technical know-how, and combine that with some ideas that they have about how to achieve new ideas that can only be achieved on that particular piece of hardware, then I think they're going to have the chance to really see some great success. But ultimately, it depends not so much on trying to add new elements to existing games; it really depends on the posture of the creators and the managers of those third parties to encourage them to take some risks and come up with some new and unique ideas.

Sega put together a unique interface with the DS using a card reader for a product that they've been selling for some time in the game centers. It's called Love and Berry. There are these little dolls, and there's these cards for the dolls, and you pass them through the card reader to interact with them on the DS. This was a very unique system that they developed, and they've sold over a million copies of that. Then of course there's Dragon Quest Monsters, put out by Square Enix, which in Japan--it's a very simple touch screen-based RPG--I think that as well has sold over a million copies. So we're already seeing a lot of examples of Japanese third party developers who are coming up with unique ideas that really take advantage of the unique features of the hardware and turning those ideas into very successful products. Tamagotchi is another one.

If there's only one piece of advice that I could give to the managers of third party companies, it would be that a lot of times it seems that when they're putting games out on Nintendo hardware, those games are being developed by their third-string team or their fourth-string team. Maybe that's because they see those products as being unique projects or somewhat smaller-scale projects. But when Nintendo puts out a title that is designed to really support and sell its hardware, that title is always developed by one of our number one teams. And so I think that when it comes to the question of trying to compete with our software, I would really like to see the parties try to do that with their number one teams rather than with the third- or fourth-string teams. [Laughs.]

Source: Newsweek