Iwata: Bad Software Sales Shouldn’t be Solely Attributed to Piracy

During a Nintendo Q&A conference last week, CEO Satoru Iwata when asked about the negative impact piracy has had on videogame sales suggested that it isn’t the sole cause for the “downward revisions in estimated shipments of software and hardware”.

The question posed to Iwata about piracy was in tandem with another, arguably bigger question about revisions made to financial forecasts and the effect this had on net sales, but the more interesting answers (and certainly the ones more people will be looking at) came in response to the piracy question.

After the General Manager of Corporate Analysis Yoshihiro Mori weighed in with a few fiscal statistics and just a little business sugar-coating, Iwata stepped up to give a seemingly very well-thought out answer.

Plenty of critically-slammed Nintendo games like these exist - hopefully Nintendo cottoning on to people wanting quality instead of quantity will stem the flow of games like Game Party being released...

Piracy is without question having at least some impact on the sales of videogame software and hardware in general and Iwata clarifies within his answer that this is not just a problem for Nintendo. He says that fighting piracy is like a “game of cat and mouse” with “no decisive conclusions… found yet” but states that even with piracy being prevalent a Nintendo-produced game can still top the sales charts.

Iwata goes on to imply heavily that Nintendo are aware of the fall in quality of their software; the growth in casual gaming has paved the way for many third-party developers to produce a string of games in quick succession, many of which lack both quality and mass appeal.

“[Nintendo] do not intend to think that slower sales are solely due to piracy.”

The suggestion there is that Nintendo have to look at ways of improving the quality of its products as well as combat piracy. Iwata acknowledges that Nintendo will have to fight piracy regardless of first and third-party software seeming to perform well in sales charts though, noting that it is a “responsibility of the platform holder” to “tackle piracy.”

To me, it sounds like Nintendo are reacting very sensibly to the ‘threat of piracy’. I’m hoping more than anything that this will lead to a curbing of third-party software, or at least some sort of in-house quality control to assure consumers that the Wii and DS aren’t going to continue to be breeding grounds for third-party developers…

If you have some time free, give the very in-depth but interesting Q&A session a read.