Iwata: "It’s not as simple as moving Mario onto smartphones"

Becoming a third party publisher is not the easy answer to reversing Nintendo’s ongoing problems, president Satoru Iwata has argued.

Iwata vowed not to resign earlier today after Nintendo cut its sales predictions for Wii U and 3DS, leading Michael Pachter to call for the platform holder to take its IP onto rival platforms.

Now Bloomberg reports that while Iwata concedes that a restructuring of sorts is needed at the Kyoto firm, he doesn’t believe that abandoning its hardware offer is the answer.

We are thinking about a new business structure,” Iwata stated. Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.

We cannot continue a business without winning. We must take a sceptical approach whether we can still simply make game players, offer them in the same way as in the past for 20,000 or 30,000, and sell titles for a couple of thousand yen each.”