“Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun! Fun for everyone.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.”
― Satoru Iwata
“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a computer programmer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Trust your passion. Believe in your dream.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Entertainment is there to improve people’s quality of life. After your basic needs, there’s entertainment.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Needless to say, nobody is born an avid gamer.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don’t want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don’t want to leave that behind.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo’s mission is to try to make people happy, to try to make people smile.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The term ‘innovative’ or ‘innovation’ is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.”
― Satoru Iwata
“For me, I actually found that it would have been more frightening to take the conventional path.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The thing that concerns me most is that, in the digital age, if we fail to make efforts to maintain the value of our content, there is the high possibility for the value to be greatly reduced, as the history of the music industry has shown.”
― Satoru Iwata
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Having strong momentum is very important for game platform businesses. Once momentum is lost, great power is needed to change that trend.”
― Satoru Iwata
“It was very fortunate for Wii that a lot of households around the world decided to connect the Wii to the living room TV.”
― Satoru Iwata
“At Nintendo, we do not run from risk. We run to it.”
― Satoru Iwata
“When it came time to take a job, I had the distinction of joining the smallest company of any graduate in my class. I left to become only the fifth full-time employee of HAL, and when I told my father this, you can imagine, it was not the happiest moment in the history of my family.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In the case of the Nintendo 3DS, it’s supposed to be the successor to Nintendo DS. As soon as the development of the original Nintendo DS was over, we started working on the successor to it.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I believe that if we don’t make moves to get people who don’t play games to understand them, then the position of video games in society will never improve. Society’s image of games will remain largely negative, including that stuff about playing games all the time badly damaging you or rotting your brain or whatever.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Like any other entertainment medium, we must create an emotional response in order to succeed. Laughter, fear, joy, affection, surprise, and – most of all – accomplishment. In the end, triggering these feelings from our players is the true judgment of our work. This is the bottom line measurement of success.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The digital world is one that has sort of a unique characteristic, where it’s a place in which it’s very easy for the value of content to fall.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Games already pretty much have reached the point of photo-realism. Working on more intense graphics is not the only path we can take anymore. Simply relying on the sheer horsepower of the machine will not bring the industry a bright future.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We really must recover our financial performance and take Nintendo back into the position in the marketplace where it is well appreciated.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In the time period before Wii was called Wii and we still referred to it as Revolution, no one thought it was going to succeed.”
― Satoru Iwata
“One thing that we have found over the years is that video games themselves are a thing that have a tendency to be difficult for them to break out of a particular segment, or a particular group, or a particular group of people with particular interests.”
― Satoru Iwata
“What’s interesting about the ‘Smash Bros.’ games, is that the ‘Smash Bros.’ games do not represent the Nintendo characters fighting against one another: they actually represent toys of Nintendo characters getting into an imaginary battle amongst themselves.”
― Satoru Iwata
“It certainly makes a game better to have voice commands because it can alter how the game is played.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Third-party publishers, like everyone, face increasing risks associated with creating games, and you have to target your resources to the right places and the right platforms.”
― Satoru Iwata
“It’s important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I do not like to use the term ‘Free-to-play.’ I have come to realize that there is a degree of insincerity to consumers with this terminology, since so-called ‘Free-to-play’ should be referred to more accurately as ‘Free-to-start.’”
― Satoru Iwata
“When we considered what to do with the graphics capability of the Wii, we put more attention and focus on the ability to create new experiences rather than the quality of the graphics.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Of course, no single entertainment device can enjoy eternal popularity.”
― Satoru Iwata
“As soon as we showcased the Wii in 2006, people immediately understood. At that E3 show, I was up on the stage with other Nintendo staff playing Wii Tennis, and I could hear the excitement behind me.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In Europe, we packed in Wii Sports with the console, so one way or another, people processed the Wii by enjoying Wii Sports. The unique, interactive nature of the game was spread thanks to the excitement from the consumer.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I never think in terms of how we can compete against the other companies; rather, our primary focus is to make consumers feel the uniqueness and attractiveness of our products.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We think there is definitely a lot of use for online connectivity in creative games.”
― Satoru Iwata
“One thing about the entertainment industry – it’s not something that people need to survive.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I think that Nintendo puts a lot more emphasis and uses the controller more than any of the other companies.”
― Satoru Iwata
“It’s not part of our culture to even think about outright purchasing a third-party developer.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Our approach is not to look at the successes of other people and try to repeat those successes. We don’t look at the success of ‘Grand Theft Auto 3’ and think that maybe if we create games for older audiences will see a similar success.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We really want to change the structure of home entertainment.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The approach to make more gorgeous-looking graphics… to have the horsepower, to have much faster processing – they don’t do anything to ask nongamers to play with a video game.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We wanted people to remember the name as soon as they heard it. When people become so accustomed to the Wii name, nobody is going to say it’s a strange name, just like nobody is going to say that Google is a strange name or IKEA is a strange name today.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In the digital world, content has the tendency to lose value, especially on smart devices. We finally found solutions to the problem. We will not merely port games developed for our dedicated systems to smart devices just as they are – we will develop brand new software which perfectly matches the play style and control mechanisms of smart devices.”
― Satoru Iwata
“If we don’t take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we’re not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.”
― Satoru Iwata
“For us to create unique experiences that other companies cannot, the best possible option for us is to be able to develop hardware that can realize unique software experiences.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Even before the advent of smart devices, we employed touchscreens for our games with Nintendo DS, and we also adopted accelerometers for our Wii Remotes faster than smart devices did.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo is applying the benefits of advanced technology, but we’re using it to make our machines more power-efficient, quieter, and faster to start.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We are trying to capture the widest possible audience all around the world. In other words, we are trying to capture the people who are even beyond the gaming population.”
― Satoru Iwata
“If the first entrant always wins the market, the Dreamcast must have won the race against the PS2, for example. There are many precedents like that in the past. The first to market is not necessarily the winner in the race.”
― Satoru Iwata
“What Nintendo will do is simply try to do our best, believing that our strategy is right.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We really cannot forget about the existence of the avid game fans – the fans of Nintendo games.”
― Satoru Iwata
“First of all, I’ve never once been embarrassed that children have supported Nintendo. I’m proud of it. That’s because children judge products based on instinct.”
― Satoru Iwata
“For young players, classic games are brand new. For others, they are a way to feel young again.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Sometimes, ideas are like good wine in that they just need time.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We believe a truly new kind of game entertainment will not be realized unless there is a new way to connect a player to his game.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In 1978, I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would have loved to study videogame programming, but nobody was teaching it then. So I went to classes on engineering and early computer science.”
― Satoru Iwata
“People sometimes ask me what I did when I was hired at HAL. The answer is that I was a programmer. And an engineer. And a designer. And I marketed our games. I also ordered food. And I helped clean up. And, it was all great fun.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We’ve been thinking very carefully about how can we possibly communicate the real value and the attraction of Nintendo 3DS. The conclusion was that there is no other way than to let as many people as possible to actually see it.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Typical tech-driven companies or hardware-driven companies always lay out the so-called roadmaps when it comes to making the new hardware. So, in other words, availability of certain technologies dictates when the company is intending to make the new hardware.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Personally, I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Making games look more photorealistic is not the only means of improving the game experience. I know, on this point, I risk being misunderstood, so remember, I am a man who once programmed a baseball game with no baseball players. If anyone appreciates graphics, it’s me!”
― Satoru Iwata
“The DS was launched back in 2004, and sales of that machine hit a record in 2009 in the United States. That is totally different from the conventional sales pattern, in which game gear sales peak in the third year and take a downturn thereafter.”
― Satoru Iwata
“What I believe is that Nintendo is a very unique company because it does its business by designing and introducing people to hardware and software – by integrating them, we can be unique.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Many things we can’t do are simply because we think we can’t do them.”
― Satoru Iwata
“When people saw how other people were playing Wii Sports, they could immediately understand how different the system was.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Here’s a hypothesis I seriously believe: If there hadn’t been a ‘Pokemon’ game, maybe the market for handheld game devices would have gone extinct.”
― Satoru Iwata
“If you want to make short-term profits from the stock price, then I am a very bad president. But I don’t think I’m so bad for maximizing the long-term value of Nintendo.”
― Satoru Iwata
“People will buy hardware just to buy a single game if the game is really compelling.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I always and strictly tell Nintendo employees never to use the term ‘success’ to describe our own performance.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The brand new user interfaces that Nintendo invented often faced skeptical views before a hardware launch but wound up becoming de facto industry standards.”
― Satoru Iwata
“It is challenging to communicate attractions which are hard to understand unless you actually touch and experience them yourself. This is especially so with Wii U because it has unprecedented entertainment potential.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo’s approach to our work is to greatly increase the population of gamers.”
― Satoru Iwata
“What I wanted to have happen was that people who didn’t know that Game Boy Advance and GBA are the same thing would remember Wii right away because it doesn’t need to be abbreviated.”
― Satoru Iwata
“A motion-sensing controller that you hold with both hands is completely different from one that you can use with either your right or left hand.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I read blogs quite a bit.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Our thinking has always been in trying to grab the limited amount of spare time people have and always try to offer some unprecedented attraction to the consumer.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo has been a very unique company because it’s not just hardware but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it’s given us a unique advantage.”
― Satoru Iwata
“If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it’s Nintendo’s mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I’m not interested in offering software for free of charge. That’s because I myself am one of the game developers who, in the future, wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.”
― Satoru Iwata
“When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wish list. But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list.”
― Satoru Iwata
“In general, no engineer hates higher performance.”
― Satoru Iwata
“There are many different regions around the world, and each region has its own cultural acceptance and legal restrictions as well as different age ratings. There are always things that we’re required to do in each different region, which may go counter to the idea that players around the world want the freedom to play whatever they want.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Regardless of age, gender, or game experience, anyone can understand Wii.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We are producing something people can live without. But we need to keep thinking what would make our products a priority purchase even if they are not a necessity. If we stop doing that, no matter how successful Nintendo is at the moment, things will start going wrong in no time.”
― Satoru Iwata
“When similar products are on store shelves, price competition is inevitable. Nintendo has been trying to steer clear of that direction and create a market of our own.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We always try to be a unique company.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The heart of the matter is that everybody starts video games as a beginner. Then, after going through a lot of experiences and becoming more and more fond of video games, they become the experts.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Some people will say Nintendo’s games are for children. But our goal is to boost the population of gamers by making games for all ages.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I personally am a user of iPhones and iPods.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We never try to think in terms of any competitive product or company. If you do that, you just focus on a certain narrow area. Rather, we should think much more broadly.”
― Satoru Iwata
“We have to think of what kinds of experiences we can create that only Nintendo can create and what no other companies can create. So the result is the Nintendo 3DS.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Nintendo is an entertainment company, but I think we need to broaden the definition of entertainment.”
― Satoru Iwata
“What Nintendo has to do is make software that takes advantage of the Wii MotionPlus and make efforts to make the public understand the benefits of the Wii MotionPlus controls.”
― Satoru Iwata
“The advantage for Nintendo is that we always try to do things that other companies don’t try to do. That is something that the general public appreciates.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Sometimes you are physically tired at night, but your brain is functioning too much to go to sleep. If you can have software that helps you understand how you can shift from such a tense situation to being more relaxed, then that would help.”
― Satoru Iwata
“I don’t think that free games are something new. On the PC, there have always been free games. But finding them was not always easy. With the popular products like the iPhone, now it is easier.”
― Satoru Iwata
“Price point is always important for mass market commodities. Look at the iPhone. It’s expensive. But I think it is going to sell. It does something that people really want to do. People want to share it. It’s an emotional thing that goes beyond the price point. It has emotional power. You are connected to it.”
― Satoru Iwata
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