Miyamoto on the Sales Nintendo Needs

[A Black Falcon]

This is from a month ago, but it's interesting so why not make a thread about it?

So, in a Japanese interview Miyamoto said that basically Nintendo needs to have one game sell 30 million copies every three to five years, they will be fine as a company.  They are currently well over that marker.  Meanwhile, 1 million sales is now not a huge hit anymore.  Also, he says that nobody (in development) likes it if a game only breaks even financially; instead you want your game to be successful, not only financially neutral.  "Miyamoto: Is that so? But if there's no profit and we're just breaking even, then it's just tiring, right? I'm sure the people who worked with me would think that that's not what we worked for . So, the reason why I don't praise my co-workers half-heartedly along the way is because, anyway, the reason I think it was good to work with them is because "we sell a lot.""  How capitalist of him... I don't know, breaking even seems fine to me.  But sure, being successful is better, if a game is successful it gives you revenues to make up for other projects that are less successful for example.

His concluding message is quite good, too.  The idea is that Nintendo is a company that is always looking for the next big hit, and that he likes emphasizing to new employees that Nintendo's goal is to find that next hit game.  " Miyamoto: That's right. For me the most dangerous thing is to overlook something that could turn into something big. I think the good thing about our company is that we have been able to nurture these kinds of buds."  That makes sense.

It's interesting to see that this is how he and Nintendo think, but considering how successful Nintendo has been for a long time, obviously they are good at capitalism.  Nintendo's focus on profits and rarely losing and never borrowing money is infamous, after all.  30 million every three to five years?  The current Nintendo can easily cross that bar several times over.  What we don't know is if Nintendo will continue being able to do that in the future, after Miyamoto retires... I hope they do, that they've set up a company that can last, but we'll see.

Source and more: https://famiboards.com/threads/miyamoto-...toi.10155/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/miyamot...-125157876

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh trust me on this, EVERY gaming company has this attitude.

And frankly, you know me, you know my attitude towards an obsession with "runaway growth", so with my known bias well in play let me say right now that I think Miyamoto's attitude is remarkably measured and reasonable!  Yeah, you didn't expect that from me did you?

Of course a company wants to make profit off their game beyond just breaking even.  No company will last long chasing their own tails.  There was a point in my life where I was literally just eeking out enough money to pay for the costs to continue working a job I hated.  It was a cycle that made not working at all pretty much financially identical.  So, I get this.  This is basic business sense.

If he's saying having one 30 million sales game every three to five years makes then "fine as a company", that's not greed, that's steady reliable business.  MS, Sony, Ubisoft, EA?  None of them would ever utter the phrase "that's all we need".  No chance.  To them, every year's profits must be EXCEEDED the next year, and the next and the next, forever.  Runaway growth is the goal, and of course, that's an impossibility.  If Miyamoto actually means what he says here, this is a far more sane, rational attitude to take.  Make your business sustainable, yes, sure, that's perfectly healthy.  Like a mom & pop shop, all you really need is to make sure you're making a little extra for rainy days and some luxuries that make it all worth it.  Now, if your goal is to just grow and grow, eat up or kill the competition, and find new ways to exploit your customer base to stack on top of all the tricks you've already used, and THEN in that most profitable year of your business, you fire everyone that got you to that point?  Well, that's NOT sustainable.  Infinite growth has always been the big lie.

I say all this while still recognizing that Nintendo are guilty of a number of things themselves.  Their mobile phone games are very exploitative (with exceptions like Super Mario Run that use the old Apogee Shareware model which I love).  Their amiibo line has basically become their version of microtransactions, they ONLY make their classic games available to RENT now rather than providing a purchasing option (I think part of their reason for killing off the Wii U and 3DS store when they were still profitable was to increase the "value proposition" of their virtual console subscription service), and the way they treat fanart is potentially criminal.  They release some DIGITAL games on a "time limited" basis completely arbitrarily, and turn off services for very popular online games just to keep up that FOMO.  They're not completely innocent.  But, it has to be said that when it comes to their mainline games, they are MOSTLY very customer friendly.  Yes, Super Smash Bros is now filled with way too many costume packs, but outside that?  Their DLC is pretty much exactly how DLC should be handled.  Breath of the Wild got two "mini-expansions", Mario Kart 8 got entire cups worth of courses, and so on.  Indeed, they don't even do the thing other companies do and force a game to come out every single year in their big pillar franchises.  Pokemon is the one exception, and I think Nintendo are seeing how that's hurt the reputation of that series, as people are largely burnt out on it coming that fast and furious for so long, to the point that their latest entries are incomplete buggy messes of games unbefitting Nintendo's usually high standards.  I think they're going to course correct that series.

But, keep this in mind.  They're good at BUSINESS here, not "capitalism".  Capitalism isn't a skill set, it's an ideology.