Yoshida ‘shocked’ by 3DS circle pad design

The president of SCEA Worldwide Studios has admitted that he found Nintendo’s controversial decision to release a second circle pad add-on for 3DS shocking”.

The peripheral was first revealed earlier this month, with Nintendo announcing an official release date and price last week.

Well it’s not like they looked at PS Vita and said ‘we need to do that as well’,” Shu Yoshida told GameInformer when asked if the accessory was a response to the upcoming launch of PlayStation Vita.

It’s clear that they didn’t believe a second analogue was necessary when they designed the 3DS, so I can only guess it was requested by Capcom’s side. Maybe a Capcom producer told Nintendo that to play Monster Hunter we need [two] analogue sticks.

That I don’t know, so I can only guesstimate. It was a bit shocking to see what they came up with.”

Yoshida also dismissed the notion that Nintendo’s recent 3DS price cut was a pre-emptive move against the PlayStation Vita.

I don’t personally believe that they dropped the price of the 3DS to respond to our pricing,” he insisted. We didn’t price PS Vita to their price, either. We had that plan since the last couple years.

My personal guesstimate is that they have their business plan and goals to sell a certain amount of 3DS units, and they realized post-launch was that the pricing was not helping them to achieve the goal that they set. That’s my estimate.”