Chris Kohler interviews Cammie Dunaway
Wired.com: A friend of mine was asking: Now that Nintendo has expanded its sales and marketing team into San Francisco, when might we get a Nintendo World store in the city?
Cammie Dunaway: Interesting question. Certainly not something that we’re working on right now. New York has been a great flagship store for us, we do a lot of events there. So, no plans. But, good idea.
Wired.com: The DSi. Nintendo has traditionally not added things like cameras or music players to its consoles because it concentrates on game play. And where Sony went off the rails with PSP and opened the door for Nintendo, it put too much of that into PSP. How is the DSi not a red-ocean product?
Dunaway: It's very much centered in gaming experiences and interactive entertainment experiences. What we like to do is make things fun, and so when you start taking pictures and superimposing people’s faces onto someone else's body, and surrounding it with graffiti and sharing it with a friend, it’s just fun. I think we’ll see people do interesting things with it, incorporating the functionality into games. Gaming has to be at the heart of it.
Wired.com: Is Nintendo going to introduce retail cartridge software that's only playable on the DSi?
Dunaway: There are no plans, no announcements right now. But certainly, as we've historically done, you’ll see us do interesting things with software to take advantage of the hardware capabilities. As Mr. Iwata talked about last night, this new memo pad is one of the cool technologies. It's not necessarily a game, but it certainly enables people to act as an animator and use their photographs in an interesting and entertaining way.
Wired.com: So right now, the only DSi-only software is downloadable.
Dunaway: Right, the Brain Age games, etc.
Wired.com: Will that be region-locked? Can I buy a U.S. DSi and access the software that Japanese consumers can download?
Dunaway: I believe that just as you can currently buy a DS in Japan and use it here in the U.S., that you should be able to do that with DSi.
Wired.com: Travelers buy portable gaming systems overseas a lot.
Dunaway: Exactly, I carry around my Ice Blue DS because I like the color, and I could find it in Japan and couldn’t find it here.
Wired.com: The Nintendo DS Lite. I think the big question is: Is the DSi a product that’s going to sit on shelves next to the DS Lite, or is it a replacement for the DS Lite?
Dunaway: Right now we’re still working through what the strategy's going to be here. But we think that there's huge untapped potential for the DS Lite. Because when you’ve got only one in every five households in the U.S., compared to one in every two in Japan, it says there's potential.
You’ve seen some of the work we’ve done this year with celebrities, that we're bringing a lot of new consumers in to the DS. So I think there’s opportunity for both of them to coexist for some period of time.
Wired.com: The Nintendo DS Lite costs significantly less in the U.S. than it does in Japan. Do you see something similar happening with DSi?
Dunaway: I don't know what the pricing is going to be here, but certainly it is going to be a premium over what our current DS is priced at.
Wired.com: On the DS, one of the biggest selling games right now is Guitar Hero, which would not work on DSi. Is this something you’ve discussed with Activision?
Dunaway: Activision, and particularly the guys at Vicarious Visions, are great partners. And they have understood how to use the unique features of the DS. And so we expect that they’ll come up with ways to innovate on DSi too.
Wired.com: Having had a lot of time to think about E3, what would you say are the lessons learned?
Dunaway: Before E3, at E3, our strategy has always been to make games for everyone. But we recognize that people were disappointed because we didn’t show the full breadth of the portfolio at E3. In hindsight, we should have shown Wario, should have shown Rhythm Heaven. So we were excited to be able to show today, yes, there are games for everybody.
Wired.com: In Japan, Mr. Iwata announced a line of GameCube games that would be brought to the Wii and enhanced with Wii controls, like Metroid Prime and Pikmin. Nintendo didn’t have any announcements on that today. Is that something that you’d be considering for this market?
Dunaway: We did have no announcements today, but we were not trying to announce the full lineup of 2009’s first half. There will be more news to come.
Wired.com: In Japan, I feel like it’s easier to explain to people the nature of products like this — a GameCube port with Wii controls. In the U.S., it might be more difficult to sell that. Do you see that as being a challenge?
Dunaway: I think it would be particularly important here in the U.S. that hard-core gamers knew it was a port of a GameCube game. Whereas expanded audience members see it as an entirely new experience, something that's in the spirit of some of the other games that they’re coming to enjoy. You’d have to be sure that your messages were clear to both audiences, and a little bit different to both audiences.
Wired.com: There are quite a few games that are out in Japan or Europe that we're not hearing about for the U.S. — Disaster: Day of Crisis, Fatal Frame, Captain Rainbow (which I don’t think is coming out here).... Is Disaster off the table for the United States? Is this going to happen?
Dunaway: We just haven’t been talking about Disaster right now. But you’ve seen with Sin and Punishment, which hadn't come to the U.S. before, that we’re definitely looking at what people are responding to in Japan and seeing if there’s a way to bring it over here.
Wired.com: So on the new storage solution for Wii, let me see if I understand this correctly. You’re downloading games to an SD card.
Dunaway: So basically what we’re trying to do is make it easier for people. We know that there have been a lot of workarounds and a lot of steps to save to an SD card. So it’s a combination of making it an easier interface, not having to go through as many menus to do the saving and then enabling people to save a game that they want to buy from WiiWare directly to an SD card.
Wired.com: Do you think Wii supply is going to catch up to demand in 2009? Are we going to see Wii in an in-stock situation next year?
Dunaway: You know, it’s anybody’s guess. None of us know what the ceiling of the demand is. When we look at how we’re doing in an equivalent period to, say, PS2, we’re still outselling that at 22 months. We’re going to have a lot of product in the marketplace this holiday — 50% more Wii consoles than last holiday.
Wired.com: Tell me about Club Nintendo. You made a small announcement about this — can you share any more details?
Dunaway: No more details. We’re still working out what all the prizes are going to be. We’d love to hear ideas from the fanbase about what kind of things they’d like to see included in Club Nintendo. You will be able to take over some of the points that you have in your current My Nintendo account. It won’t necessarily be all titles, but some Wii and DS titles. We want people to be able to start off with some points. And it’s going to work similar to the way it works in Japan and Europe. Where you get credit for purchasing games and filling out surveys, credit for indicating advance interest in titles ... those same features.
Wired.com: Yeah, because in Japan if you pre-order a game and buy it, you get extra points for pre-ordering, you get extra points for buying it sooner rather than later, and you get extra points on the back end for filling out a survey about it. So if you’re really dedicated you can get a whole lot of points.
But the issue is: We’ve got Club Nintendo in Europe and Japan, but in Europe it’s about virtual prizes like wallpapers. In Japan it’s physical goods. Is that what we’re looking at for America, the prizes?
Dunaway: It’s going to be a blend of both. Over the first year you’ll see more physical prizes. We’d like to figure out ways to get interesting digital prizes as well, but that’s more for phase two. If you have good ideas, shoot 'em to me.
Wired.com: The internet wants me to ask about a Nintendo DS game called Soma Bringer, and whether that’s coming to the United States.
Dunaway: Okay, I’ve got to write these down. I’m not familiar with it.
Wired.com: It’s an RPG made by Monolith Soft, which is a company that Nintendo owns in Japan. It’s a role-playing game for Nintendo DS with participation by some relatively well-known RPG designers, and it’s not announced for U.S. at this point.
Dunaway: It’s not on my radar right now, but I will make sure that we put it on the radar.
Wired.com: They want to know about Mother 3. Another very popular role-playing game that Nintendo did, on the Game Boy Advance, that never came out.
Dunaway: It sounds like there’s an overall theme here about people being interested in these games that have not come to the United States.
Wired.com: Oh, and someone’s asking about Professor Layton 2. Now, you’re in the Professor Layton club with me, so why is this not announced yet?
Dunaway: I am in the Professor Layton club. Hopefully, we’ll see that one.
Wired.com: I certainly hope so. Okay, apparently they’re all just asking about Soma Bringer.
Dunaway: Tell them I’m putting stars by that one in my notebook. Are people excited about Fire Emblem?
Wired.com: I think so. I think that there’s plenty of stuff in the pipeline, but people are just hoping that a lot of the games that are in Japan are coming over here.
Last question. Tell me what you know about Punch-Out.
Dunaway: I know that it was really popular 15 years ago, and that it’s been sitting there with latent demand. So we’re bringing it out in the first part of the year and we’re really excited about that.
Wired.com: It looks like a pretty straightforward remake of the classic game, with a lot of the same boxers. Is that your understanding of it?
Dunaway: Yeah, that is my understanding. It’s got the ... who’s the big character ... Big Eddie.
Wired.com: King Hippo.
Dunaway: King Hippo!
Topic: Nintendo Retailer Conference (OP updated with stuffs, more when I feel like it) (Read 67098 times)
