Q&A: Nintendo’s Fils-Aime Talks DSi, Wii and Everything in Between

Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime plays upcoming game Wii Sports Resort at E3 Expo in 2008. Nintendo will launch its DSi hardware Sunday in the United States.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

As Nintendo gets ready to launch its Wi-Fi-enabled DSi, the company is taking a cue from popular websites like Flickr and Facebook that offer flexible platforms for personalization and self-expression.

The handheld DSi, which hits U.S. stores Sunday, lets gamers download videogames and applications, take pictures and listen to music, all stored on an SD card. Like the iPhone, Nintendo’s new device puts all sorts of interactive amusement into a portable package.

"If Wii was about gaming for the masses, then think of DSi as creativity for the masses," said Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime in a phone interview with Wired.com.

"That’s what DSi is all about: Providing simple, quick-to-master experiences that everybody can pick up and enjoy."

The device has already proved a big hit in Japan, where it was introduced late last year. Nintendo has already sold more than 2 million of them, and Japanese gamers are snapping up casual games to play on DSi.

In a wide-ranging interview, Fils-Aime discussed how user-generated content will function in Nintendo’s locked-down online environments, the possibility of a portable Virtual Console for retrogames and much more.

Wired.com: In Japan, the idea behind introducing the DSi is to move from "one DS per household," which is where the DS Lite is now, to "one DS per person." Is this necessary in the United States at this point, where DS Lite penetration isn’t yet at its peak?

Reggie Fils-Aime: There are two different perspectives here. The DS Lite continues to have very strong momentum in the marketplace. In January and February combined, according to NPD, over a million units sold [in the U.S.]. But, again, our job is to look on the horizon and say, "What else can we offer consumers to take their personal experiences to the next level?" And for us, that’s what DSi is all about. The cameras, the ability to manipulate photos, the ability to manipulate sound, really now makes DSi your own personal gaming device. So for us, it really is a great way to throw fuel on the DS rocket and make it grow even faster.

Wired.com: It seems like a thin distinction to consumers, especially when the DSi sells for $170, making it significantly more expensive than the $130 DS Lite. Are consumers willing to pay the premium for those extra features?

Fils-Aime: What we’re seeing is that as soon as we explain the core concept, a consumer gets very excited. As soon as a consumer gets their hands on DSi, they want it immediately. We see this anecdotally from the fact that DSi from a pre-sale standpoint is trending at twice the level of DS Lite at a retailer like GameStop. It’s breaking all of the system pre-sale records at a retailer like Amazon. So certainly there is very strong pent-up demand. As we move forward, it really will continue to be about the communication, the marketing, helping the consumer understand why this is the next gotta-have-it product from Nintendo.

Wired.com: About the DSiWare apps. You’ve talked about WiiWare being a platform for indie developers, noting a 90/10 split in terms of third-party content versus applications made by Nintendo. But DSiWare seems made up of predominantly first-party games so far.

Fils-Aime: Let me first correct some facts. WiiWare, life to date, the split in number of units (sold) is 90/10, third-party to first-party. In looking at Top 20 titles, it’s 90/10 third-party. However, if you go back to the launch of WiiWare, it actually was very strongly led by first-party. The reason for that is, as we develop a new hardware system or a new capability, our developers always have a first look at the technology, they always have a first look as to how to bring it to life. So it’s expected that at the start, there will be more first-party products than third. However, we’ve had a number of technical conferences, we’ve shared with key developers all of the information they need to create fantastic content (on DSi), and it’s on the way. I’ve already seen it, and certainly here in the U.S., we’ll have a number of key third-party applications within the first six weeks of launch.

Wired.com: You’re releasing one or two WiiWare games per week. Is the same going to follow with DSi?

Fils-Aime: Our strategy with DSiWare is the same as with WiiWare in that we want to provide new experiences every week. Whether that’s one, two, three, it really is going to depend on how quickly the products pass all of their quality checks and what the pipeline is as far as Nintendo-produced (games) and third-party.

I’d like to touch on user-generated content. With DSi, what we will enable consumers to do is to take their pictures, manipulate them or with what we’re tentatively calling the Moving Memo Pad, to create animations, post them, see what other people create. We believe that that’s important because the consumers is moving to want to allow their own creativity to come to bear on these types of products in this type of technology. I guess it’s been said that maybe Nintendo has been slow to move into this area. But for us, it really is creating mechanisms that this creativity can be brought to bear, and that’s what really makes us so excited about the [DSi's] camera functionality, the sound functionality and the specific applications like Moving Memo that can bring this all to life.

Wired.com: Speaking of user-generated content, you’ve said: "I’ve been very intrigued with Little Big Planet (from Sony). I don’t know that it belongs on their platform." Wii and DS, with their friend code systems, stop users from getting access to this broad array of user-generated content if they can only see the content that their small list of friends create. Is that something Nintendo is trying to fix?

Fils-Aime: Friend codes are about making sure, in a connected experience, that a consumer has a great experience. What we mean by that is that when you’re playing with a friend, you are provided full functionality with the WiiSpeak microphone, you can talk to your friend, or in a game like Animal Crossing you can invite friends into your town — but there’s a recognition that for players that you don’t know, what we don’t want is a situation where either consumer is having a negative experience. The trash-talking that happens now online is a prime example. For us, friend codes are about making sure that the consumer has a great, positive, connected experience.

User-generated content, in my view, is something very different, where we have always been about allowing the consumer to create some content and post it for the world to see. The "Check Mii Out" channel is a prime example of that. So I really view friend codes and what we’re trying to do with user-generated content as being very different, and going against very different objectives.

Wired.com: What sort of content do you want developers to produce for DSiWare?

Fils-Aime: The strategy is the same strategy that we’ve applied to WiiWare, meaning innovative, involving, unique to the platform or uniquely taking advantage of the capability of the system. That’s really what we want to see on DSiWare just as we want to see it on WiiWare. What we don’t want to see is a game that is available on a number of other platforms, either mobile or home, nor do we want to see games that don’t take advantage of the unique capabilities of the DS.

Wired.com: So bringing back classic Game Boy games, for example, would not be something you’d want to see.

Fils-Aime: The concept of Virtual Console on DSi is not something that we’ve talked about, nothing that we’ve commented on. I know it’s something many of your readers would like to see, but it’s not something that we’ve talked about.

Wired.com: It seems like it might get a bit difficult to manage all of that downloadable content on the DS hardware itself — with my iPhone, I find and download content on my PC where it’s much more convenient for me, and then I sync it to the iPhone. With the DS, you have to do it all through the DS.

Fils-Aime: One of the things that … I’ve seen Nintendo do so well is provide a user interface that is intuitive, easy to navigate, easy to execute against — and in our view that’s exactly what we’ve done on DSi. I don’t anticipate that the consumer will have any difficulty in managing the content. Part of it is that what you’ve described with an iPhone is very different than what we envision with DSiWare, and that is, we want a more limited number of breakthrough applications and games, not a litany of thousands upon thousands of applications that really don’t excite the consumer very much.

Wired.com: With DSiWare you’ve made it clear that you want a different sort of content than what’s at retail. But in the future, will we have the ability to download the same games we can buy at retail?

Fils-Aime: Our downloadable content is meant to be content that otherwise wouldn’t exist in the marketplace. So we, for example, don’t envision a world where you can buy exactly the same game through a download experience as well as at retail. Why? Because we want the downloadable content to be much more exploratory, frankly much more risky, in providing the consumer with a unique, compelling experience. So that’s our view. We don’t want and we don’t see a world where products and titles live in a virtual world as well as a physical world. We see them filling very different needs for the consumer as well as for the business overall.

Wired.com: In the music industry, when people decided they wanted to personalize their MP3 players, they didn’t buy CDs and rip them, they just downloaded them.

Fils-Aime: We’re providing the consumer the opportunity to personalize their DSi with pictures they take, with music they manipulate. We’re not asking the consumer to do anything unusual, and to try to make a comparison to the music industry, I don’t think is nearly on point.

Wired.com: Where do we stand with WiiWare following the introduction of the SD Card Menu? Does this massive increase in storage space herald an increase in new content? Larger games?

Fils-Aime: We’ve made it clear that we introduce new digital content for the Wii every week, as you’ve highlighted, and that will continue. I’ve already heard from a number of consumers, "I’ve already downloaded the new system menu." The ease of application with the SD card is just phenomenal.

So what I expect is that the consumer who has had to manipulate their way through all of the content that they’ve bought or that they want to buy now is going to have a very elegant solution, and I expect we will see increased access to the Wii Shop Channel and more downloading of content that we’ve already released. We’ve already put out over 250 of the Virtual Console titles, about 100 WiiWare titles, we’ve just announced the Virtual Console Arcade, so certainly there’s going to be more and more content for the consumer to enjoy.

Wired.com: You don’t see a change, though, in terms of volume or size of content because of the fact that the SD Card Menu is there.

Fils-Aime: What I had heard from consumers is that the volume and pace of content was pretty good, but that the biggest challenge was, as a consumer, how do you make sure you’ve got access to all the great games you want? And that’s what we’ve solved with the SD Card.

Wired.com: What about expanding what you can do on the Wii? There’s been a lot of talk about Nintendo getting into video downloads, or streaming, or things like that.

Fils-Aime: Those are all neat ideas, but we haven’t commented on any of those potential applications.

Wired.com: Does Nintendo want to leverage this 50 million user install base and do broader services and content, or do you want to stick to games?

Fils-Aime: We’ve always said that Nintendo is an entertainment company, and that our view into that broader category is through games. And that’s going to continue to be our strategy. Any other application for Wii or DSi, right now, it’s all rumor, it’s all speculation, and it’s not something we’re going to comment on.

Wired.com: The New York Times just reported that you said Wii games need to sell 1 million units to turn a profit. Would you characterize that as accurate?

Fils-Aime: It’s unfortunate. There are a couple inaccuracies in that article. What I would say is that we have created the Wii business plan, if you will, to make it very effective for publishers and developers, because their development costs are low and they have an extremely large install base to sell into. The fact is, there’s no single magic number that defines profitability for a game. It’s all based on the level of investment, it’s all based on the price point. And so it’s unfortunate that I was misquoted in that article.

Wired.com: It seems that third-parties are doing a good job figuring out how to sell software on Wii — Iwata mentioned that third-party games sold more on Wii in 2008 than on other platforms — but it seems to center on casual games like Game Party or Carnival Games, or big licenses. What doesn’t seem to sell are hard-core games. If these aren’t selling, what do you do to inspire more of them? Is it even necessary anymore to go after traditional hard-core gamers when different types of games are selling well on Wii?

Fils-Aime: What we’ve said all along is that for any Nintendo platform, what we want are the best ideas and the best content from all third-party publishers. Our job has been to create the install base that makes that desirable, and to create the tools and the mechanism for developers to create that great content and to take advantage of this opportunity.

Personally, I love that we are seeing a broad range of titles like Conduit, like MadWorld, and have that alongside Carnival Games. Because with an installed base of 50 million across the world, there’s a broad range of consumers with a broad range of tastes. The analogy is, you don’t want a library where all you have is encyclopedias. You want to have a broad range of content to satisfy every type of consumer. In the end, the developer needs to create the content, make it world-class. They need to market it and make it available, make it known to as many consumers as possible, to take advantage of the opportunity. And we hope that that continues not only on E- and E 10-rated content, but on T- and M-rated content.

Wired.com: Going back to DSiWare and how it relates to iPhone, and how Nintendo doesn’t want that explosion of all kinds of content from all kinds of people: What are the benefits of doing that? Can you make more money doing that?

Fils-Aime: The benefit is this. From the consumer lens, what we want them to see is great content across a variety of genres that provides entertaining experiences to them, in the case of DSi, on the go. The analogy I’ve used in the past is that we are taking a film festival approach — high-class content done by knowledgeable developers in creating fantastic experiences for the consumer — instead of the YouTube approach of everything under the sun that is difficult for the consumer to navigate through. That’s the strategy that we took with WiiWare and found quite effective, and that quite frankly developers have found quite effective. And so we believe that’s the right strategy for DSiWare as well.

Wired.com: When you get a WiiWare development contract, you are generally allowed to create whatever sort of content you want, as long as it passes Nintendo’s bug-check process and gets an ESRB rating. Is this the same with DSiWare?

Fils-Aime: That is true.

Wired.com: So is Nintendo courting applications, productivity apps, or just games? I know in Japan there are calculators, guides to the train station …

Fils-Aime: We expect that there will be both games and applications. Just in product that we’ve talked about from a first-party standpoint, there are applications like Moving Memo, there are games like WarioWare Snapped. So we expect there will be similar content coming from third parties. Our goal and what we will be encouraging developers to focus on is, "How do you do these applications in a way that has some entertainment value back for the consumer?"

Wired.com: Where is the potential for growth, demographically speaking, with DSi? We see a lot more kids now with DS Lite. Is this for them, or soccer moms, or …

Fils-Aime: The candid answer is "both." As we showed during GDC, last year almost 50 percent of new DS buyers were women. Like you, as I travel I see a lot of kids with their DSes as well. My expectation with DSi is that certainly at the start it’s going to be a lot of traditional Nintendo fans picking up the system. But in the end, for us to achieve our goal, which is to have the DS be the No. 1 console of all time, we have to appeal to everybody in order to sell that number of units on a global basis.

Wired.com: How many units would that be?

Fils-Aime: The last numbers I’ve seen are somewhere around, from a current DS perspective, we’ve sold 100 million units.

Wired.com: I’m sorry, I mean, what’s the finish line? When will DS be the best-selling console ever?

Fils-Aime: The best that’s ever been done so far is (PlayStation 2), and I believe the global install on that is somewhere around 110 million units.

Wired.com: So this is something you could accomplish this year.

Fils-Aime: You know, now you’re speculating. We haven’t announced what our fiscal 2010 targets will be. We’re certainly on a pace to break through the previous high-water mark of PlayStation 2. Let me give you a quick factoid. Here in the U.S., based on NPD data, after 52 months in the marketplace, so this is through February of 2009, comparing to the first 52 months of the PS2 launch, we are ahead of PS2 here in the U.S.

Wired.com: What about Virtual Console Arcade? Is Nintendo going to support this service with first-party games or is it entirely for third parties?

Fils-Aime: We’ve shown a range of the titles that will be coming out over the next few weeks. When we have any first-party titles to announce, we’ll do that, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Wired.com: Will first-party games be there at any point?

Fils-Aime: We haven’t announced if we’re going to bring back any of the great Nintendo arcade classics, but, you know, that’s what other announcement dates are for.

Wired.com: Something else that I think is very pertinent in all of this is the announcement of OnLive at GDC. What do you think?

Fils-Aime: It’s awfully tough to evaluate the OnLive idea. There hasn’t been a business plan articulated, there hasn’t been a consumer proposition articulated. Anything that brings interest into the videogame category, fundamentally is good for Nintendo since this is the only business we compete in.

From our view, what has made DS so effective, what has made Wii so effective, is broad applicability from a consumer standpoint, a fantastically immersive experience, a tactile experience from a DS perspective, an active play experience from a Wii perspective, and in my view, OnLive hasn’t shown an ability to deliver any of that. And certainly they won’t have an ability to deliver any of Nintendo’s proprietary content. And so right now, all it is is a nice announcement and a nice line of "cloud gaming," but there really isn’t much detail beyond that.

Wired.com: Lightning round questions. MotionPlus: Still coming out in the spring?

Fils-Aime: We have nothing to announce on MotionPlus. When we have an announcement for that product, we’ll let you know.

Wired.com: E3. Is Nintendo going to have the largest booth again?

Fils-Aime: Actually, Nintendo will not have the largest booth. There will be a number of industry entities that will all have similar-sized booths, Nintendo being one of them.

Wired.com: Are you going to have a wide-open gameplay area this time, so you don’t have to wait in line?

Fils-Aime: We’re certainly going to have our best content on display. Whether or not there are any lines is going to depend on how many people are there and how good our content is.

Wired.com: Finally, when is Mother 3 coming out?

Fils-Aime: Mother 3. OK, Chris. So I have seen all the hate mail and all of the stories that say that Reggie is deliberately holding back Mother 3. Nothing is further from the truth. I would love to see Mother 3 here in the U.S. market. But it’s not a title that we’re working on, not a title that we’ve announced. Personally, that disappoints me, but as we look at what’s important for DS or for Wii, we’ve got other priorities right now.

See Also:

• Product Review: Nintendo DSi
• Unboxing the Nintendo DSi
• DSiWare Launch Titles: Which Ones to Buy
• GDC Live Blog: Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s Keynote
• Q&A: Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway Talks DSi, Club Nintendo