The 77th annual meeting of Nintendo shareholders was held on June 29th. It was hosted by Shigeru Miyamoto, and Shinya Takahashi, and company’s president Tatsumi Kimishima. A few days later, the official English transcripts were released. During the meeting, Nintendo’s officials shed light on company’s future development plans.
Nintendo is finally attempting to conquer the smartphone gaming market with the Fire Emblem Heroes and the Super Mario Run apps. Expectations were that the company would adopt other approaches towards expanding its market coverage. One of the assumptions was that Nintendo would enter the PC gaming market. However, the announcement of Mr. Kimishima during the shareholders’ meeting put an end to all speculations.
During the meeting, shareholders had the chance to ask Nintendo board about company’s plans regarding smart devices, consoles and PCs. Shareholders wanted to know if Nintendo was going to take advantage of the growing popularity of PC gaming in the United States.
Nintendo president, Tatsumi Kimishima, responded to shareholders’ questions. He said that the Board was well aware of the fact that a great percentage of US gamers are PC players. Nevertheless, Nintendo had no intentions whatsoever of making a deviation from its current development plan. Company’s president said that sticking to the integrated hardware-software business was the best strategy for providing users with new gameplay experience.
Mr. Kimishima also added that Nintendo’s performance in the mobile gaming segment has been satisfactory so far and the company was going to follow that line of development.
Another interesting question put forward during the meeting was related to the number of titles released for Nintendo systems over the last few years. More precisely, the number of titles was insufficient as compared to the 1000+ titles released for NES and SNES consoles.
Nintendo president said that the company was going to ease the developers work as far as debugging was concerned. He also revealed that Nintendo was going to “lower the procedural and cost-related difficulties” that go along with the new software development.
Although Mr. Kimishima has ruled out the opportunity of developing PC products, Nintendo is no stranger to PC gaming. Mario Teaches Typing and Mario’s Time Machine were released for PC. Now, it seems Nintendo is reluctant to change the established path and take unnecessary risks.
