Nintendo President: “We Still Think Retailers are Important”

Digital distribution and cloud gaming has been a subject in the spotlight of late, and while Nintendo echo the sentiments of industry players about the want or need for some sort of a digital distributed future, the Nintendo president has stressed that Nintendo still value the ‘high-street retailer’.

Talking to The Independant [as cited by GIBiz] Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata explained that Nintendo are “not looking to digital distribution as a means to skip someone [high street retailers] and therefore increase our margin.”

“I think it’s more that with traditional packaged productswe need to produce them, ship them, there’s the stock keeping loss risk, and loss associated with products being sold out or you can have certain items overstocked,” he said.

“I think in general digital distribution will allow us to be more efficient in distributing content.

“I think the games that we make with this improved efficiency we can use to maintain our profitability or, even if software development costs improve for some reason, we balance it out that way; that’s what I’m hoping for from digital distribution,” Iwata continued.

Iwata used Apple as an example, explaining how digital distribution can be very successful by skipping the intermediates and therefore increasing profitability or lowering prices, but assured that Nintendo still value the retailer.

“Our way is quite different, we still think retailers are important,??” Iwata explained.