No company can hope to meet all the tastes of such an immense audience, and that puts a premium on building relationships with outside development resources. We’ve made huge inroads with independent publishers and the result is seen in the expansion of our game libraries. Perhaps most noteworthy is our reconnection with Square of Japan, creators of the Final Fantasy series. You will soon see exclusive Final Fantasy games again playing on Nintendo systems.
By September, there were already 80 games available for Nintendo GameCube, and counting from Labor Day until New Year’s Eve, that number will grow by another 100. For comparison purposes, that total portfolio of 180 games is exactly four times the amount we generated in a similar period for Nintendo 64. And the same thing is happening in portable software. By year-end, the library of Game Boy Advance-specific titles will jump to 300.
While breadth is important, so is exclusivity. Every manufacturer, like every game publisher, is chasing a mega-hit to sell his system. Even better, if you capture one that is available only on your system, you’ve given yourself a huge competitive advantage.
For quite some time, our new president Satoru Iwata has been working to do exactly that. Many of the partnerships we’ve recently announced - many months in the making - are about to deliver exclusive payoffs. We’ve created a joint venture with both Sega and Namco called “Triforce” to migrate the Nintendo GameCube technology to arcades. Not only is Nintendo GameCube’s combination of high power and low cost ideal for cutting-edge, site-based applications but there’s a game payoff for Nintendo as well.
In the same time period that many of those new thrillers hit the arcades, Nintendo GameCube versions will be released for play at home. The first of such projects - the high-speed racer F-Zero - arrives in the front half of next year. Separately, we’ve come to an agreement with Capcom, so a series of its immensely popular Resident Evil games will be exclusive to Nintendo. And here in North America, our second-party equity positions with companies like Retro Studios and Silicon Knights assure that their work will also appear only on Nintendo.
The majority of these deals also indicate a second significant change for us: the aggressive targeting of the teen and 20-something market. We are rolling out substantially more high-profile games for that audience and implementing sharply focused marketing tactics to talk to them. The push begins in earnest over the next few weeks when we bring an explosive one-two punch to retail with two exclusives: Retro Studios’ Metroid Prime and Capcom’s Resident Evil Ø.
