Competitors fib about Nintendo - Fils-Aime

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.