This was on a portion of a VentureBeat interview with Mr. Iwata.
I cannot say that the recession has no effect on the sales of video games. My belief is we should not blame the bad economy for the cause of slow sales of video games. The slow sales must be due to the lack of great software that everyone wants to buy. We have not shown off the great attractions of whatever we are selling. This is not the problem of Nintendo alone, but the entire video game industry. After all, something that is really fresh can make our industry grow. The important thing we have to tackle is making attractive games and marketing them well toward the end of this year. I think the whole industry should be more cautious about how we act and how the general public perceives us. In the past, the formula was to make the computer graphics more gorgeous. It used to fit the taste of the majority of the gaming audience, but it doesn’t work so well in this day and age. It’s more difficult for us to come up with something new and different and show people how different we are. The whole industry has to recognize that. Looking at the product line-ups this year, these titles might have been big hits three years ago. But now this year, they are not selling that much. In other words, people get tired of games more quickly than they did before. When you look at our 3D games concept, we recognize it will not be eternally appealing. However, it’s not a shallow concept that can be forgotten as a momentary fad.
There's our president of Nintendo, standing up for originality like him and his company has always done. The way I see it if it weren't for the Wii and all those games that aren't based on shooting people's heads off, come the 09 recession the industry would have been done for. Every 1 in 3 games on the PS3 and X360 are shooter games. Don't people have anything else better to do? That's no longer creating new ideas.
You can read the full interview here.
