Square Enix President Talks Why He Said The Wii Was A Toy
In a recent interview with CNET Japan, you said that consumers are purchasing the Wii as a toy…
That particular article interpreted what I said in a rather coarse way. To fill in the context, with this generation of consoles, people take it for granted that all of them should be and are multi-functional. So it is each manufacturer’s responsibility to communicate with potential customers, and let them know which of them would make the best use of which function in each console.
In that context, Nintendo seems to place a great emphasis on Wii Sports and Fit rather than Zelda, a role-playing game. In my opinion, if they expose the functions in this way, they are making the Wii look like a toy. With PlayStation 3, Sony are not appealing to consumers with strong messages that say this kind of user can make use of PS3 in this particular way for this particular kind of fun. That, they are quite weak at.
You did however note that software attach rates are lower for Wii than for other consoles. So does that make it a less appealing platform for Square Enix to develop and publish games on?
No, that’s not the case. What we have to do to start with is ask what kind of consumers are buying Wii for what purpose. When we’ve finished that analysis, then we have to work out what kind of games we should create for Wii. For DS, Square Enix publishes both traditional games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and also more casual software. The DS is managing to get through to a really broad range of people at the moment, and I think the Wii can follow in its footsteps.
