Nintendo recently held a Q&A session with their investors about the company's plans, and a transcript has been posted on their official website. The document is written entirely in Japanese but a member of the NeoGAF forums has translated a significant portion of it. Company president Satoru Iwata, legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and general manager of Nintendo's integrated research division Genyo Takeda had quite a few interesting comments. Here are some worth noting.
On games:
Iwata: We are not thinking about a long timeframe. We are thinking about Mid year up to End of the year 2013. We also have games that are slated for end of the year that we haven't mentioned yet.
Miyamoto: It takes time to understand the charm of Wii U. We are currently offering a few titles but we are aiming for games that sell steadily for the next 3 years not for games that stop selling after a few weeks. We have a lot of ideas for 2 screen play. We definitely need more employees internally and externally so we are strengthening our development teams.
Nintendo's view of cloud gaming:
Iwata: There are things you can do with cloud gaming and there are things you can't do. We don't agree that cloud gaming is the future and we are trying to work hard on a future where gaming only consoles are not gone. Unified platforms are for us not platforms that are one but rather platforms that have the same development architecture. This also means that there could be more platforms.
On creating "new development environments"
Miyamoto: We needed to create new development environments for Wii U and 3DS unlike Wii, which reused the GameCube architecture. We are unifying our development teams to accommodate this challenge and minimize the losses while preparing the shift. I think handhelds and consoles will coexist as the aim is different.
The final area to pick up on was a question of whether the Wii U architecture is too heavily focused on its GPU, picking up on comments in some development quarters that the CPU is comparatively weak. While defending the capabilities of the system, there was also an acknowledgement that Nintendo's own teams have needed re-education and external expertise to make the most of the console's architecture.
Questions about the Wii U's processing power:
Miyamoto: For High End graphics there is a hurdle, since we have to re-educate our people. The development itself hasn't changed but we are recruiting specialists that can become core members in each specialized area. External Developers are used to shader techniques and we are collaborating a lot with external companies nowadays so we have a very good development structure.
Iwata: Every gaming hardware has its specialities. There is a timing of hit and miss before the functions can be used fully. We were not able to provide development kits that get out all the power of Wii U until mid of last year. With other gaming consoles firms had 6 to 7 years to experiment but our console has a different balance so it is easy to see who has adapted and who hasn't. However this is something time will heal so we are not too worried.
Takeda: Wii U is a machine that has a lot of performance compared to its power consumption. The GPU is definitely more pronounced than the CPU. There are people saying that the CPU is weak but that is not true. It is a trend that the cache memory is what's getting bigger with CPUs, not the processing power. I do not think at the CPU is underpowered. Its just a design where the memory is more stressed.
On the NFC capabilities of the GamePad
Iwata: There are two trends. one is with figurines or cards. We are currently working with developers on this and we will see various games this year. The other one is E-money payment. we are also working on this.
Source: Nintendo via NeoGAF
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