HOWZAT

“However, when we started to announce our basic strategy, a lot of people questioned it. ‘Games are for kids and young men. Not for women or senior citizens.’ If you accept that mindset, you will never see customers outside that customer base. So I said let’s do it without that mindset.

“I already had confidence that it was the right direction, but I had no idea whether we could achieve it or how long it might take. I also thought that if we hadn’t made any progress in five years people might start to see my appointment as president as a mistake.

“I should first say that I was lucky that in such a short period the result was shown and the market has responded.”

Yet such success brings pressures of its own. In May, despite its strong profits, Nintendo forecast a slowdown in Wii and DS sales for the coming year. The stock price fell sharply, a reflection of investors’ concern that the current generation of Nintendo hardware has run its course. How does Iwata respond to such pressure?

“Of course,” he says, “I cannot deny the existence of pressure after all these years when we were selling more and more of our products, because we were in effect raising a bar that we then have to keep clearing. But there are two types of pressure. One is desperate pressure, the other is a healthier pressure.

“This is a challenge. This is something I can enjoy. This pressure can’t bring me down, or make me unhappy to go to work every day.

“Compared with last year,” he points out, “we are actually expecting sales to increase in local currencies. But our forecast as a Japanese listed company is in yen, which will result in smaller sales than last year, which is entirely due to the currency exchange rate. The yen has become particularly strong against the UK pound and Korean won.

“We cannot control such fluctuations by ourselves, so it is becoming more difficult for us to make accurate forecasts.”

And what about his other forecasting talent? Iwata is seemingly blessed with an ability to predict what people will enjoy, breaking new ground with the likes of Brain Training, Walk with Me or Wii Fit. Do people still have the capacity to surprise him?

“There is not one day when I’m not surprised. For the most part, people do react as I anticipate, but they always surprise me by doing something unexpected. I do not think my analysis is perfect by any means. I make new discoveries every day.

“That’s why it’s very important for me to come face to face with real customers, so that I might learn from them.”

And what about the competition? At E3 this year, both Microsoft and Sony announced motion-control systems of their own, which will put their consoles into more direct competition with Nintendo’s technologically inferior Wii.

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