Miyamoto talks the future of Zelda and the entertainment industry
Jonathantold you howNintendo’s 74th annual general meeting of shareholders came across like a bad comments section. Now, here’s that meeting in-depth as translated by Nintendo itself.
Notably, CEO Satoru Iwata was absent due to his health (please understand), but Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda were present to field most of the questions. Some of them were prettyout there, like the one from a shareholder who proclaimed he was angry because he didn’t understand gaming and god forbid Nintendo talk about gaming at its meetings. Good stuff.
If you’d rather have the short (but not too short) version, I’ve summarized some of the best bits.
The 74th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders[Nintendo]
“I hope that Nintendo’s shareholders’ meeting will become an opportunity where the shareholders discuss the company’s business operations from the viewpoints of capital gain and dividends.”
“However, I do not believe that will completely control the future of video games. Of course, it is important to gain profit in effective ways, but Nintendo always has to take seriously, for example, network security for children. Taking into consideration that more and more children have a good command of these kinds of media, which help these media to spread, the most important task for Nintendo is how to provide new styles of entertainment by using these technologies, and how to make these new kinds of entertainment yield significant sales and profits.
“It goes without saying that Nintendo has been trying to improve its profitability at the same time. For example, at E3 this year, we were able to obtain more page views on our website while considerably reducing our E3-related costs.”
“The late Mr. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the former president of Nintendo, often used to say that in the entertainment business, only one can become strong and all of the others will become weak. With this remark, he was not referring to the arrogance of the winner. He mentioned this to describe the nature of the entertainment business, which tends to create just one winner because in the entertainment business everyone buys your offering if you create something unprecedented, and consumers do not think it is necessary to purchase products from others in the industry.
“To survive in the entertainment industry, it is often the case that everyone tries to follow suit with the strong one. My comment may be at risk of being misinterpreted, but in the digital content field, I think that our creativity is still immature. In the world of comic books and movies, there are people who are challenging themselves to be even more creative than before in creating their content.
“I believe that we (those who are creating digital content called video games) are still in a transitional period and will eventually step up into the phases where we expand and enrich the substance of our creativity. If we can manage Nintendo without losing sight of this challenge, I believe we might be able to create new entertainment that dominates the industry.
“Also, some may think it is fair to compete with others on the same hardware platform, but it is always challenging to become the one strong existence among so many companies, and to Nintendo, it is more advantageous to create and propose to consumers a brand new framework that includes hardware as part of the structure. We would like to continuously develop something unique by not abandoning this strength of our company. I ask for your continued support.”
