7. “Everyone’s Recommendations Selection”

Iwata - You know, on February 25th the “Everyone’s Recommendations Selection”（※9）will be going on sale, and this plan also has its beginnings in your “Sales Development Project”.

※9 “Everyone’s Recommendation Selection”＝New series of seven Wii software titles that were rated highly on the “Everyone’s Nintendo Channel”s “Everyone’s Recommendations”. Released February 25, 2010.

Takeuchi - Right.

Iwata - Would you mind giving a little explanation explaining this?

Takeuchi - We touched on this briefly earlier, but one of our ideas was to make games that received high evaluations on “Everyone’s Recommendations” more noticeable, so we combed through the cream of the crop of third-party titles and chose to release these seven simultaneously.

Iwata - Just as Hatano-san had mentioned, for some reason, regardless of how highly it’s regarded, software seems to rely heavily on “freshness”, meaning once time has passed following initial release, it’s almost like it becomes valueless. I always thought that didn’t make any sense, so we tried various things for long sellers. As a result, several Nintendo titles became long sellers, but the vast majority of titles basically sold well during their release period, and then eventually tapered off as if they were nothing.

Takeuchi - People who have actually played the games give them a lot of praise, but at retail it’s almost like they forget about them. From our point of view that’s really disappointing, so we started the “Everyone’s Recommendation Selection” plan with the idea that it would be an overall plus for everyone if we could create a way for players who are looking for interesting games to come into contact with these games.

Iwata - It’s just one form of output from the “Sales Development Project”, isn’t it?

Takeuchi - Right. It’s a project we started while getting advice from Sakai-san, who was the central figure of the “Everyone’s Nintendo Channel”.

Sakai - Actually, even if we were able to let players know that certain software was interesting over the “Everyone’s Nintendo Channel”, there are instances where retailers don’t have any stock left.

Iwata - From the retailer’s perspective, there’s no point in taking the risk of acquiring games that were released long ago, not really knowing how many they’d even sell.

Sakai - Correct. So we felt we could help contribute to a healthy market by being the “flag wavers”, collecting those kinds of interesting pieces of software for re-release and creating the kind of situation where customers who are looking for something could easily find it, leading to the long seller phenomenon we discussed previously, and helping to expand the sales of interesting software.

Iwata - What’s the difference, then, between the “Best-Seller” selections that you tend to see and this “Everyone’s Recommendation Selection”?

Takeuchi - They’re fundamentally different in that these titles were selected through objective voting by individuals who played the games and actually felt they were interesting enough to recommend. Of course, they are sold at a discount in the interest of making it easier to connect with customers and have them make a purchase, but we don’t particularly feel that these are necessarily “Best Sellers”.

Sakai - Because they’ve been recommended by so many people we want to have as many people as possible get the chance to play these titles.

Iwata - We plan on displaying a “Everyone’s Recommendation” list at retail as well, right?

Sakai - Right. We’ll also have an “Everyone’s Recommendations” POP. It’s designed so that you’ll be able to log at it and instantly tell what genders or age groups recommended the software, and whether these games are more for hardcore players, or whether they’re deep, long experiences, or easy to jump in and out of. We also intend to display the results of the multiple choice questions of the votes in “Everyone’s Recommendations”.

Iwata - It turns out that the “Everyone’s Recommendations Selection” and “Search Guide” are made from the same beginnings, because the idea to give customers more chances to come across good software, and ultimately sell as much of these pieces of software as possible comes from various goals of the “Sales Development Project”.

Takeuchi - Right.

Hatano - Those pieces of software are really well made, and as a result are highly regarded by those who actually bought and played them. Be that as it may, for whatever reason customers didn’t buy these pieces of software as much as we had hoped. But there’s nothing wrong with the software itself, and they’re really well regarded - by some as if there’s nothing else that’s as good! Regardless of why they didn’t sell, however, we felt that these deserved to be recommended. And so we felt that it was Nintendo’s duty or obligation to do so.

Iwata - It seems that you’ll be getting even busier moving forward, then, Hatano-san (laughs).

Hatano - Yes. It’s as you previously mentioned, “it’s an endless challenge” (laughs).