Competitors fib about Nintendo - Fils-Aime

By Tom Bramwell Published 1 April, 2009

Third parties succeed on DS/Wii, he says.

Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has said that competing companies are guilty of misleading people about third-party success on Wii and DS.

Picking up where Nintendo president Satoru Iwata left off in his GDC keynote address, Fils-Aime reeled off a bunch of statistics for VentureBeat.

He reiterated that Wii sales were at 50 million in record time, while DS sales had surpassed 100 million. He added that the DS installed base in the US had reached its current level faster than the PlayStation 2, the previous record-setter.

"Fact: In the US, third-party publishers sold more Wii games than any other home console. In fact, third-party publishers sold more DS games than on any other console," he said.

"What Mr. Iwata was trying to do was to share facts to dispel what some of our competitors like to frame as an inability for others to succeed on Nintendo platforms. The fact is that is just not true."

Interviewer Dean Takahashi then pointed out that sales of third party games may be strong, but the titles in the US top ten month after month were largely the same - a situation we can see reflected in the UK with games like Mario & Sonic and Carnival: Funfair Games.

"I wouldn't quite frame it the same way," Fils-Aime responded. "What I want to see is long-term successful franchises as well as new content coming from third-party publishers. I want them to succeed on our platforms. That's different from saying we want to see different titles in the top ten."

Elsewhere in the interview, Fils-Aime also distanced WiiWare and DSiWare from Apple's iPhone App Store. "We believe this community of 18,000 developers can create much more compelling content than something home-brewed," he said.

Nintendo DSi launches in the UK on Friday, 3rd April, for GBP 149.

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About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • menage #1 3 years ago

    I'll bet 3rd party are successful, since the dev cost is lower than on other machines. But I wouldn't expect to get rich either.
    Edited by 1 at 01/04/09 @ 08:37

  • Gaol #2 3 years ago

    Problem for third parties is that this machine is a dust collector and not a games console, and the buyers rarely purchase third party titles.

    While the Playstation brand brought grown-up gaming to the mainstream a decade ago, software like Wii Music, Wii Play and Wii Sports has simply reinforced the notion with many that videogames are a toy. Good for a giggle once in a while but not to be taken seriously unless you're under 12.

  • Wastelander #3 3 years ago

    Yeah, those lying bastards! Especially that Reggie Fils-Aime that has said Wii games don't even start making money for their publishers until a million copies have been shifted.

    ...wait a minute

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #4 3 years ago

    "Problem for third parties is that this machine is a dust collector and not a games console, and the buyers rarely purchase third party titles."

    Got a source for that? Or is is just, in fact, totally made-up bollocks?

  • conchis #5 3 years ago

    Yesterday's article stated that out of the 485 published games only 16 sold over a million. That's a terrible ratio for platform that shifted more hardware than the competition put together. There are probably more cross platform releases hit million copies for PS3/X360.

    Wii might be on it's way to break PS2's install base record, but it already broke the shovelware record.

  • kangarootoo #6 3 years ago

    @Gaol

    I hate to pop a bubble here, but video games ARE toys. You seem to assume that toys are just for kids - I would disagree.

    I would also say that the Wii is probably the platform "taken seriously" by the mainstream more than any other. The population at large likely dismiss the 360 and PS3 more readily than they do the Wii.

  • Ignatius_Cheese #7 3 years ago

    Hehe, nice dig at the App Store, Reggie!

    Apps = Homebrew...!? o_O

  • CallousB #8 3 years ago

    @Wastelander -"Yeah, those lying bastards! Especially that Reggie Fils-Aime that has said Wii games don't even start making money for their publishers until a million copies have been shifted"

    He says he was misquoted-

    "The fact is, there's no single magic number that defines profitability for a game," Fils-Aime said. "It's all based on the level of investment, based on the price point, and so it's unfortunate that I was misquoted in that article."

    http://bl og.wired.com/games/2009/03/nint...

  • Zomeguy #9 3 years ago

    Games are srs bizns, lol. Get out more IMHO.
    They should be toys.

  • Smoped #10 3 years ago

    Yesterday's article stated that out of the 485 published games only 16 sold over a million. That's a terrible ratio for platform that shifted more hardware than the competition put together. There are probably more cross platform releases hit million copies for PS3/X360.

    Those numbers were of course complete bollocks, the writer didn't seem to have a clue. A quick peek at Vgchartz tells us that the 360 seems to have slightly more (61) million sellers than the Wii (47), which is only natural, the 360 having been around longer. And the PS3 has considerably less million sellers (29), which again is no big surprise. There are 603 published 360 games on the Wikipedia page, so that would give us pretty much the same ratio of published games/million sellers. With its 443 games the PS3 seems to be the worst proposition for a game publisher, especially considering the apparently higher development costs.

  • Smoped #11 3 years ago

    Well, I wouldn't look to them for exact numbers or anything like that, but I would assume the numbers are mostly in the correct ballpark, at least when compared to other numbers on the smae site. And like I said in that other thread, the 7 non-Nintendo million sellers can't be right (it must have been a US domestic sales figure or something) since there are way more confirmed million sellers for the Wii out there.

  • Smoped #12 3 years ago

    Okay, so we know that Vgchartz just guess, and we know that the numbers in the NY Times article were also bullshit. Where does that leave us?

  • Dan234 #13 3 years ago

    Back at the start.